Sparks shares their approach to making music after 28 albums

They’ve spent more than half a century together as bandmates, putting out dozens of records. But brothers Ron and Russell Mael — the duo behind the art-pop band Sparks — have no intention of retiring anytime soon. The band’s sound has been ever-evolving since its inception.

Ron, 79, and Russell, 76, view resisting any impulse to remain the same or rest on a previous record’s success as a central priority. Ahead of the release of “Mad!,” their 28th studio album, as well as an upcoming tour, the pair spoke about why they keep working, not waiting for inspiration to strike and why it’s been so meaningful for younger generations to find their music.

Talk about how you approach making new music after all of these years.

RUSSELL: After 28 albums, the challenge is just trying to find new ways to kind of retain the universe that Sparks has created, but to obviously try to make it fresh for people that have been following the band for a long time. And the other thing is also just to try to make an album that maybe doesn’t sound like it’s from a band with a 28-album-long history, so that if someone were to pick up the new “Mad!” album, and this was the first exposure they had to Sparks, that it would be as poignant and provocative in all sorts of ways as anything we’ve done in our past.

You both grew up in Los Angeles during a pivotal time for rock music but moved to the UK early on in your careers for a bit.

Do you feel like your surroundings inform your creative process?

RON: When we first started out, we had never even been to Europe or anywhere. But we kind of pretended like we were a British band because that was the music that we really responded to. And we always kind of liked bands that had an image. LA bands, in general — at the time we were starting — an image was something that ran counter to musical integrity. And we always thought that was ridiculous. So, we kind of were in general just really attracted to British bands. Other than a few things like The Beach Boys and that sort of thing, in general, we weren’t influenced by LA bands at all.

Have you given much thought to why you make so much music?

RON: Other people tell us we’re prolific and we don’t really sense that. I mean, the one thing we do do is not wait for inspiration. We kind of have to pursue it. When you wait for that lightning bolt, it kind of can take more time than you really want to take waiting. We work a lot knowing that not everything is going to pan out. But in order to kind of give the appearance of being prolific, we have to actually sit down and pursue those things rather than waiting for some kind of divine inspiration.

Have you guys ever thought about retiring?

RUSSELL: Retiring? What’s that? If your whole thing in life kind of is creating stuff, there’s no, you know, there is no such thing as doing something else, so, you know, it hasn’t crossed our minds. Maybe we’re blind or something to that, but no, we’re really happy.

I read that you guys grew up in Pacific Palisades. How have you been processing the fire?

RUSSELL: To even kind of even comprehend that all of the Palisades is just ... you know, it was really sad. The elementary school that I went to got completely destroyed so it’s just hard to comprehend. It’s pretty staggering.

Associated Press