Sparks Talk New Album ‘Mad!’, Making a Movie Musical With John Woo & Noticing ‘Fewer’ Visionaries in the Music Biz

So does Mad!, the title of Sparks’ new and 26th studio album, refer to brothers Ron and Russell Mael’s current temperament? Or is it simply a reference to their legendarily idiosyncratic creative comportment that’s made the pair a cult darling for the past 54 years?

“Maybe a little of each,” Russell Mael tells Billboard as he travels from Philadelphia, where Sparks performed at NON-COMMvention the previous evening, to New York. “There’s the two general meanings of mad, being either angry or being crazy,” he says. “Just the overall ambience of the whole album seemed to lend itself to that title. But then you can exact from it, too, that it also is reflective of the general zeitgeist now, with what’s going on everywhere — in particular here (in the United States).”

The 12-song set, produced by the Maels and recorded with their regular touring band, comes as part of a particularly prolific period in Sparks’ career. It’s the group’s ninth studio album since the turn of the century and its third of the decade, directly following 2023’s The Girl is Crying in Her Latte. It also comes in the wake of Edgar Wright’s acclaimed 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers and the 2021 release of the Maels’ long-gestating film musical Annette, which produced not only a soundtrack album but also last year’s Annette — An Opera by Sparks (The Original 2013 Recordings).

All of that, along with touring, has kept Sparks’ profile high, and there’s an undeniably triumphant — as well as defiant — message conveyed as Sparks kicks into Mad! with the forceful opening track “Do Things My Own Way.”

“You don’t like to be heavy-handed with a message like that,” Russell explains, “but it is kind of that statement, in a way. It kind of applies to how we think — from day one, even when we did our first album [1971’s Halfnelson, also the band’s name at the time] with Todd Rundgren (producing). He always encouraged us to keep the eccentricities that we just naturally had and to not smooth over the edges, don’t lose your character and personality. Even on that first album, he thought we’d created our own universe he’d never heard before. He said it was something from somewhere else, which is a nice thing to say, especially with a band that was just a new group.”

Sparks was celebrated last year with an outstanding contribution to music honor at the AIM Independent Music Awards. And though the group has only intersected with the pop mainstream on rare occasions — “Cool Places” with Jane Wiedlin hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, and “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” went top 10 on the Dance Club Songs chart in 1995 — the fact Sparks is still with us is proof that being a bit “weird” is not a bad thing.

“Things are on the upswing for Sparks,” Mael says. “I think there’s been this — especially in the last few years, since the Edgar Wright documentary, and since the Annette movie — whole new audience, some of whom didn’t even know the band at all but became aware of it through different channels than just us having our own album out. It’s not the typical career trajectory.”

Mad! was created in standard Sparks methodology, according to Mael, without a great deal of forethought — and, according to the vocalist, nothing held over from previous projects.

“Everything was done specifically for this album,” Mael says. “It’s a process where we’re pretty free to work however we want. Sometimes we’ll have a complete song that’s fully formed…or we come in with nothing at all planned and just sit down and see if something can come up from nothing. Having our own studio, you’re free to experiment in that way. We’ve been working together for so long now that we’re able to read what each other’s thoughts are regarding the songs or the recording process. That certainly makes it easier. It’s not starting off with any questions marks.”

The result on Mad! is unapologetically diverse — to its benefit. Musical and lyrical quirks about; “JanSport Backpack” is about just that, for instance, while “Running Up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab” is a good-humored “mini-movie,” and “I-405 Rules” and “A Long Red Light” show the Maels are well attuned to traffic patterns in their native Los Angeles. The range of sounds, meanwhile, runs from the aggressive attack of “Hit Me, Baby” to the theatrical drama of “Don’t Dog It” to the string-fueled “I-405 Rules,” while a great deal of melodic pop floats through “A Little Bit of Light Banter,” “My Devotion,” “Drowned in a Sea of Tears” and the Mersey-meets-Bacharach majesty of “Lord Have Mercy.”

“I think we both have the same goal in mind… to try to come up with fresh approaches to the universe that Sparks has and has had since the very beginning and try to stretch that, or try to find new angles to be able to do in three-and-a-half-minute songs,” Mael says. “We both really like pop music, and we still feel there are ways to come up with stuff that will hopefully surprise a listener in this day and age. Pop music has been there a long time, so the trick is to see how you can take that form and still come up with something fresh — but not be weird just to be weird, or odd.”

Mad! also finds Sparks with a new label, Transgressive Records, after working with Island on The Girl is Crying in Her Latte. “Sometimes you just have to make moves,” Mael notes. “Transgressive heard the album; even referring back to ‘Do Things My Own Way,’ they told us they thought that was really a kind of manifesto of their label. They’ve all been huge Sparks fans for a long time. They really wanted to be involved not only ’cause they like us as a group, but they responded to this album and really felt a kinship to it. We’ve been lucky enough to work with people like Chris Blackwell at Island in the ‘70s, even Richard Branson at Virgin and of course Albert Grossman with Bearsville Records when we first started. It seems like in today’s musical climate there’s fewer and fewer of those visionary types. Transgressive shares that same kind of spirit, so it’s a good fit.”

Mad! will send Sparks back on the road, beginning June 8 in Japan and followed by an early summer trek through Europe before returning to North America starting Sept. 5 in Atlanta, with dates booked through Sept. 30 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Maels are also working on another movie musical that John Woo (Face/Off, Mission: Impossible 2, Silent Night) is on board to direct.

“We wanted to do another narrative project, ‘cause we really liked the whole process with Annette so much, really working and channeling our music in other ways,” says Mael, who describes the new piece as “really different in its approach than Annette.” The brothers read in an interview with Woo that he’s long wanted to make a musical and invited him to their studio to hear what they had.

“He said, ‘This is amazing, and I want to direct it,’ so we’ve been working with him to refine the story elements. He’s completely sold on the whole approach and all of the music. We have three really great producers now on the project; they’re out there trying to get all the financing together so we can start the production. We think it’s going to be something really amazing.”

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