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Album Review

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak Revisit Vintage Luxury as Silk Sonic

The duo gleefully reverse-engineers the analog-era sophistication of 1970s R&B on a new album, “An Evening With Silk Sonic.”

By Jon Pareles

Anderson .Paak was born in 1986. Bruno Mars was born in 1985. The sound of their new collaborative album, “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” comes from a decade earlier, the 1970s, when the grit and funk of 1960s soul made way for a new embrace of sophisticated luxury.

Singers promised sensual pleasures, sharing ardent come-ons and velvety harmonies in opulent tracks, backed by bountiful strings and horns. Working together as Silk Sonic, Mars and Paak revisit that bygone analog era in a hybrid of homage, parody, throwback and meticulous reverse engineering, tossing in some cheerfully knowing anachronisms. They flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time.

Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak. Mars is a multi-instrumentalist with a strong retro streak. His voice and his verse-chorus-verse songwriting have harked back directly to Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, the Police and others, as he concentrates on thoughts of seduction, romance and, occasionally, winning someone back.

Paak ’s catalog has delved into more complicated matters. On his albums, named after places where he has lived, he switches between singing and rapping, and his lyrics take on contemporary conditions; he’s also a musician steeped in live-band soul and R&B, and a hard-hitting drummer . His songs, like “Lockdown” from 2020, confront the tensions of identity, desire, success, politics, self-expression and repression; Silk Sonic gives him a vacation from those weighty topics. On “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” Paak’s specificity merges with Mars’s pop generalities, while both of them double down on craftsmanship and cleverness.

For an album like this, Silk Sonic can use a co-sign from the elder generation, and the duo gets one from none other than Bootsy Collins, 70, the bassist of Parliament-Funkadelic — the band Mars simulated on the title track of his 2016 album “24K Magic” — and the possessor of the most liquid, self-satisfied speaking voice in the funk cosmogony. He arrives as “ Bootzilla himself” on the album’s “Intro to Silk Sonic” and shows up elsewhere as “Uncle Bootsy,” certifying Silk Sonic’s 1970s bona fides by his sheer presence.

Most of “An Evening with Silk Sonic” revives the sound of 1970s groups like Earth, Wind & Fire , the Spinners , the Manhattans , the Chi-Lites and the Delfonics . Mars and Paak take turns delivering gritty, acrobatic lead vocals and layering on elaborate backups: creamy supportive harmonies, eager call-and-response, perky falsetto oohs.

The production, by Mars and D’Mile (who has lately worked with H.E.R. and Lucky Daye), brings back all the instrumental flourishes of the analog era: wind-chime glissandos, wah-wah guitars, electric sitar. Only one song has a credit for “programming”; the rest of the album, presumably, was played by hand, in vintage style. “Put on a Smile” caps its confession of desperate heartache with the sounds of a thunderstorm, a nod to the “quiet storm” radio formats of the 1970s. And the song structures revel in thick chromatic chords and rising, uplifting key changes — especially “Blast Off,” the album’s finale, which dreamily, repeatedly ascends as Mars asks, “Can we take it higher?”

Between the ballads, Silk Sonic switches to funk. Driven by Paak’s assertive drumming, “Fly as Me” and “777” invoke James Brown by way of Parliament. They span eras by including some rapping — though Paak announces, in “Fly as Me,” that he’s “hollering from a 1977 Monte Carlo.”

The distance between the 1970s and the 2010s also shows up in slightly rougher language and more openly materialistic lyrics. “Smokin Out the Window” is a bitter but still lovelorn song about a gold-digger ex — the lyrics use a stronger word — that has the singer “smokin’ out the window of my Benz.” And in “Put on a Smile,” Paak blends his tearful nostalgia with a designer-brand boast: “If I could turn back the hands of my Rollie, you know I would,” he sings, referring to his Rolex.

All in all, “An Evening with Silk Sonic” is a Fabergé egg of an album: a lavish, impeccable bauble, a purely ornamental not-quite-period piece. Mars and Paak don’t pretend to be making any grand statement, but there’s delight in every detail.

Silk Sonic “An Evening With Silk Sonic” (Atlantic)

Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. More about Jon Pareles

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“What song you wanna hear?” Bruno Mars asks, his question doubling as both a flex — any song I name, he most definitely can play — and a friendly challenge. “I need to know you heard this album,” he adds with a grin.

Mars, the smooth and versatile pop superstar, is hanging out in a Burbank rehearsal studio, smoking American Spirit cigarettes and sipping an iced brown-sugar, oat-milk shaken espresso — “It’s a fancy milkshake,” he says — before starting up a recent practice with the 10-man live edition of Silk Sonic, the 1970s-style soul duo he shares with Oxnard-born singer and rapper Anderson .Paak.

Actually, the musicians are in the studio next door. Mars, 36, rented this second space just to go over wardrobe options for the months-long residency Silk Sonic will open Friday night at Las Vegas’ Park MGM. Dozens of brightly patterned shirts hang on racks; a long folding table is arrayed with fedoras and bedazzled eyewear. In the middle of the room, a small mountain of shoes awaits careful inspection: Gucci loafers, Florsheim boots, Vans slip-ons the color of banana Laffy Taffy.

Mars is famously attentive to detail, which partly explains how he’s topped Billboard’s Hot 100 eight times, played the Super Bowl halftime show twice and won 11 Grammy Awards. With .Paak, who’s also 36 and turned up during this month’s halftime , playing drums for Eminem and Dr. Dre, he’s up for another four Grammys, including record of the year and song of the year, for Silk Sonic’s sumptuous “Leave the Door Open,” the lead single from the duo’s debut LP “An Evening With Silk Sonic.”

Should Mars and .Paak take the record prize at April’s 64th Grammys, Mars will tie Paul Simon’s three wins in that category, following earlier awards for “24K Magic” and “Uptown Funk.”

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Just as crucial as that rigor, though, is the instinctive showman’s flair, which he exhibits after he and .Paak strut over to the other studio, where Mars straps on an electric guitar to lead their expert players through a scorching take on my request, “ After Last Night .” Eyeing himself in a giant mirror set up along one wall, a lit cigarette poking out from his guitar’s headstock, Mars croons, belts and finally wails the slinky sex jam, which sounds harder and funkier in here than on the album; .Paak, stationed behind a kit, blends vocal harmonies with his partner before taking a wild drum solo that pushes the music toward psychedelic rock.

The song goes on for six or seven minutes until the band stops on a dime at Mars’ command and he looks over at me from behind a pair of aviator shades. “That’s no warm-up,” he says. “Coming in cold.” Eager to keep the rest of his show under wraps, he smiles again, then adds, “Now scram.”

For Mars, Silk Sonic’s Las Vegas engagement represents something of a return to his childhood. He was born in Honolulu and grew up performing for tourists in a family band with his parents and siblings. “Like Vegas, it was a melting pot,” he says of their regular gig at the Sheraton Waikiki. “That curtain opens up and you have people from all over the world that it’s your responsibility to entertain.”

But the new production is also a happy embrace of a future that Mars and .Paak weren’t always certain they’d see. The duo, who met six years ago on the road yet joke around like they’ve been pals for decades, started work on the Silk Sonic album in 2020 as a way to keep busy during the early days of the pandemic.

“Andy had been performing and I’d been performing, and then it all went away,” Mars recalls. “It felt like the world was gonna end — like, man, I don’t know if we’re ever gonna play again. So we said, ‘Let’s put together an imaginary show — this set list of doom.’” The circumstances were bleak but the music was joyous: plush falsetto ballads and sophisticated dance cuts with echoes of the Spinners, the Chi-Lites and Earth, Wind & Fire . They played live instruments and took turns singing, aiming for “crazy notes,” as Mars puts it, without concern for whether they’d be able to hit them onstage night after night.

“We were like, ‘We’re never gonna play this live, so don’t worry about it!’” .Paak says.

As usual, both men brought an impeccable sense of history to the project. Asked what they think distinguished soul music in the ’60s from soul music in the ’70s, .Paak replies, “Different drugs. And the racism was a little different.” He laughs. “In the ’70s, people were breaking free of the suit-and-tie Motown thing, tripping out and trying to expand Black music.”

“The grit was different,” Mars chimes in. “You had the David Ruffin/Temptations grit in the ’60s and then you get the O’Jays grit in the ’70s. Both insane, but the chord progressions are getting a little —”

“Greasier,” .Paak says, finishing his bandmate’s sentence.

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Don’t mistake greasiness for a lack of precision; every groove and texture on the album is arranged just so . “If you really listen to what Andy’s playing in ‘Leave the Door Open,’ that s— is not easy,” Mars says. “He’s not just playing the drums — he’s playing the microphones.” For extra verisimilitude, the duo brought in Bootsy Collins of Parliament-Funkadelic to lend his one-of-a-kind voice to several tracks; other guests in the studio included Thundercat and the veteran R&B artist and producer Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, who says he’s “never seen anyone put more time than Bruno into making sure a song feels as good as it can possibly feel.”

“Sometimes he maybe overworks it,” Edmonds adds. “But it’s that dedication to getting it right that makes him Bruno.”

.Paak says he’s had fellow musicians — “people like us who play” — reach out to thank him for getting handmade sounds back on the radio at a time when nearly all R&B and hip-hop is programmed. Yet Mars is uncomfortable with the idea of Silk Sonic being viewed strictly as a retro act — one reason, perhaps, the duo recently lent their likenesses to the online video game “Fortnite.”

“Is this good or not? That’s the meter,” Mars says. “‘Leave the Door Open’ could have electronic drums on it. The only goal is that the song is great.”

Even so, there’s no denying that Silk Sonic’s live approach — the horn section, the light choreography, the matching suits — evokes a bygone era.

“We’re really out there performing, really out there singing,” .Paak says of the Vegas show, which combines the duo’s songs with material from each man’s solo career. “We’re not relying on lasers and smoke.”

Lowering his voice, Mars puts his phone to his ear. “Cancel the lasers and smoke,” he says, cracking both of them up.

The idea, Mars says after he recovers, is to put the audience “inside a world that we created and that we want you to be a part of.” To that end, they’re requiring audience members to put their phones in locked pouches for the duration of the concert — a means of getting folks to live in the moment and of allowing Silk Sonic to feel free to try things, Mars says.

When everyone’s pointing a camera toward the stage, he continues, “you’re like, I don’t know if I want to try out this dance move tonight. Or you’re afraid this joke might go on the internet.” Minus phones, “There’s no fear involved. There’s no second-guessing.”

.Paak says the dancing has been a learning curve for him in particular. “It’s not some 19-year-old kid trying to teach us how to do a TikTok dance,” he clarifies of the moves in the show. “But compared to Bruno — he’s so little and slick, with all his feets moving around — I’m like, OK, do it slow so I can wrap my head around it.”

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Who are Mars’ dancing inspirations? “Anybody that was natural,” he replies. “I love watching Tina Turner. She was just: ‘This is what I feel right now, so this is what I’m gonna do.’ Obviously Michael Jackson was such a killer. Prince. Jackie Wilson. With all of them, it’s like they understood their shape. There was a confidence born of the assurance of knowing what they look like onstage.”

As those names make clear, the legacy Silk Sonic is tending is an old one. “We’re trying to make Earth, Wind & Fire proud,” Mars admits. Yet .Paak sees value — aesthetic, emotional, financial — in offering something that can’t be accessed in the cloud.

“What we’re doing, it’s becoming rare, but I think it’s something everybody wants to see,” he says. “They might not pay to stream your music, but they’ll pay to go see a good show.”

And does Silk Sonic plan to gamble with its earnings while in Las Vegas?

“Absolutely,” Mars says. “We gamble with each other. The whole time we were recording we were going back and forth on basketball games. One night it got so bad we were betting on rock, paper, scissors.”

“That’s the thing with him,” .Paak adds. “I’m ready to walk away — ‘Cool, I won’ — and he’s like, ‘Roshambo, let’s go.’”

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The Soothing Sounds of Silk Sonic

By Jonah Weiner

Jonah Weiner

B runo Mars and Anderson .Paak are enjoying the sun-dappled courtyard of a recording studio — lighting up American Spirits with a Gucci-monogrammed lighter, appreciating the gentle birdsong wafting down from the trees overhead, admiring some orange hibiscus flowers growing up a nearby wall — when a studio assistant named Alex walks over with a surprise to complete the laid-back scene: “Rumritas!” he announces, setting down three frothing salt-rimmed glasses.

“We hide the stress well,” .Paak says, sitting back, taking a sip. It’s late June in Los Angeles, and work is nearly done on An Evening With Silk Sonic , the debut LP from Mars and .Paak’s superduo of the same name, which began life five years ago as a joke the two friends hatched on the road, then got real enough to spawn a Number One hit in the Seventies-soul-indebted ballad “Leave the Door Open.” About 20 seconds into that track, .Paak (with Mars serving background ad-libs) coos that he’s “sippin’ wine (sip sip) in a robe (drip drip),” and those nine words crystallize the song’s appeal: It’s extravagant, soft, slightly woozy, and just the right amount of winningly, winkingly ridiculous. “That song was like our mission statement,” .Paak says. “It’s the intro to the book, to set the tone and let you know the sound. There’s different kinds of waves, but the whole album is wrapped around that.” 

An Evening With Silk Sonic was originally slated for the fall, but the band pushed it to January 2022. Mars and .Paak decided they’d rather put out more songs, Mars explains, letting each one breathe a bit, before dropping the LP in full: “I don’t want to be binge-watched.”

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To hear these guys tell it as they knock back the rumritas, things are going great. “We’re really in touch-up mode now,” Mars says. “We’ve got the bones of most of the album, so it’s really about touching up parts that need a little more.… ” He thinks for the right word: “Grease.” 

“Which could mean redoing the song from scratch!” .Paak says. Mars laughs and nods his head: “Being here for another three years!” he says. A decade into his career as a hitmaker, Mars has built a reputation for reworking and then re-re-re-reworking infinitesimal musical details that most listeners probably couldn’t detect (not consciously anyway). “But no,” he goes on. “We’re not there. We were there. We had some moments in the danger zone! I think we put the pressure on ourselves by putting out ‘Leave the Door Open’ — but a deadline is important, because at some point, you gotta say, ‘This is it.’ Otherwise you’re gonna work it till you hate it.” He mulls this. “But there’s a beauty in that — you do have to get sick of it, because that means you put the love and the time and the passion in it, and it’s taxing.” Of “Leave the Door Open,” he adds, “That bridge almost broke the band up. But it wasn’t right, and we all felt it.”  

Spend any amount of time with Mars — in conversation, or listening to his chasm-deep catalog of hits, from the 12-times-platinum 2010 breakthrough “Just the Way You Are” to the 11-times-platinum 2014 smash “Uptown Funk” (with Mark Ronson) to “Leave the Door Open” — and it’s clear he approaches pop like a technician. .Paak calls him “the math professor. He’s thinking about every aspect of the song, the math of it all. It’s deeper than just talking slick, or good drums, or anything like that — it’s ‘What are we talking about, what are we trying to say, what does this look like, and how are we gonna kill ’em on the hook?’ ” 

.Paak, by contrast, says his process involves “none of those things.” Like Mars, he’s a multi-hyphenate talent (he sings, raps, writes, and has been drumming since he was a teenager in a church band in his native Oxnard, California). Like Mars, he came up in show business as an L.A. bar-band performer, eventually putting out genre-jumbling records on indie labels like the prestige alt-rap imprint Stones Throw. And all that work paid off when Dr. Dre caught wind of .Paak and put him all over 2015’s Compton, soon signing him to Aftermath. But unlike Mars, .Paak says, he approaches tracks in a more fluid, intuitive, worm’s-eye-view kind of way: “I’m more free-form — ‘What’s the vibe?’ — so I was dying to get in with Bruno and study how he does things.” Mars breaks in, smiling — “He stole from me!” — and the two crack up. 

Mars and .Paak have an easygoing chemistry, lapsing into in-jokes, building on each other’s bits, affectionately mocking each other and themselves — not to mention magazine writers who show up for interviews wearing vests with lots of pockets, prompting a playful barrage of fisherman-themed jokes over the next several hours. One of the results of their chemistry is that, whether you’re listening to a Silk Sonic track about walking around your mansion in a robe with a glass of wine or sitting with Mars and .Paak in a courtyard enjoying cocktails, you can almost forget that the album was born during the pandemic, in all its despair and chaos. 

That was by design. “I hope you don’t flip the shit I’m about to say around and say, ‘These dudes are deep as a puddle,’ ” Mars says. “It’s not that. It’s just that we feel our purpose is this. We need to light up a stage, put the fear of God in anyone performing before us or after us, and bring so much joy to the people we’re in front of and the people listening. Especially in times like the time we’re in right now. For me? I know I wasn’t listening to any depressing music. We’re already in a weird spot — so to try to get in there? No!” He shakes his head. “I want the escape!”   

There’s a decade-plus-old Cadillac CTS parked in an alley next to the studio. “I got it washed four days ago,” Mars says proudly. In a way, it’s become one of his closest musical confidants — he’s mixed every album he’s put out since 2010’s Doo-Wops & Hooligans by listening to it inside the Caddy, getting a sense for it in the sort of real-world scenario he deems optimal: A pimped-out American luxury sedan so old it has a CD player. 

For Silk Sonic, one of the things the Caddy helped reveal, .Paak says, was “Oh, we’re playing too hard.” In order to re-create the Sixties and Seventies soul and funk atmosphere they were aiming for, Mars explains, they and Mars’ longtime engineer, Charles Moniz, “did the research” to “get the right things, down to the skins on Andy’s drums. I’ve never realized till this album how much the right guitar pick matters. The right gauged strings. All this science kinda stuff.” 

After figuring out what gear to amass (by consulting old session guys and reading old drumming magazines), they focused on emulating old-school playing styles and then recording them in a period-accurate way — just one or two mics on a bunch of musicians playing at once in the same room. .Paak says, “Those players back then were playing with such patience. The music we grew up with is heavy drums, bass smacking, so we got all the instruments but were still like, ‘Why doesn’t it sound right?’ Because we were fucking bashing!” 

When it came to the bridge on “Leave the Door Open,” Mars says, “Andy played this thing, and he knew where the groove had to go, but for some reason I kept screaming, ‘Man it sounds like books falling!’ I was like, ‘We gotta turn it down,’ and it was the math where all those old guys were jazz players.” “They were tiptoeing,” .Paak says. 

Mars and .Paak trace Silk Sonic’s origins to a lark back in 2016, when they met while touring in Europe. “I was opening for the 24K Magic tour,” .Paak recalls, “and a week in, we were in the studio.” “Real quick!” Mars says. They went in with no specific reason beyond their admiration and fondness for each other. One of their main MO’s when it came to collaborating was to take cherished backstage in-jokes — as they call it, “jibb talk” — and see if they could turn those jokes into songs. Jibb talk, .Paak explains, is “bullshit with a smile — we just talk all day and do bits. But it’s all from the heart, because we’re writing from our experiences, from our relationships — it’s rare that two men can come together and talk about love.” 

“We’re not gonna pretend we’re something we’re not,” Mars adds, “and we come from a background of talking shit.” 

For instance: Early on in that European tour, either .Paak or Mars started saying the phrase “Smoking out the window,” as part of a comical picture of some imaginary stressed-out dude blasting cigs while trying to escape anxious circumstances. The four words became a recurring bit, and when they got to the studio, it became a hook. “That was the first thing we ever wrote together,” Mars says. 

They re-create the process for me: 

Mars [ singing ]: “Musta spent 35, 45,000 up in Tiffanyyyy’s. ” 

[ Both in unison ]: “Oh! No!”

Mars: “Got her badass kids running ’round my whole crib like it’s Chuck E. Cheese.”

[ Both in unison ]: “Oh! No!” 

Mars: “Put me in a jam with her ex-man in the UFC — I can’t believe it.”

.Paak: “Damn!”

“I’m in disbelief!” Mars says. “And the hook goes, ‘Smoking out the window,’ saying, ‘How could you do this to me? I thought that girl belonged to only meeee .… ”

When the tour ended, life moved on, and those sessions went on ice — until last February, that is, right before the pandemic hit the U.S., when Mars was listening back through the files. “It hit the right chord, so I called Andy and said, ‘Come to the studio’ — he said, ‘I’m drunk!’ ” “It was my birthday!” .Paak explains. “But I’m there.” “He shows up, and he was on fire!” Mars continues. “We start writing a song, right here, just going back and forth.” There was “a competitive spirit, and a camaraderie,” he explains, “where he’d drop a bomb, and I’d say, ‘Oh shit, I gotta step it up!’ ” 

They both laugh. “We had so much fun in that session,” Mars says. “It turned into, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ ”

Silk Sonic became a quarantine passion project. “I’m not sure we would have done it if it wasn’t for the pandemic,” .Paak says. “It was tragic for so many people, but Bruno would have probably been on the road, me too — but we had to be here.” (They allude to “strict” studio safety protocols, and tell me neither of them got infected.) To hash out a sound, they turned to what .Paak calls their “foundation — the Sixties, Seventies, the old school.” Mars tells me, “I don’t know what year it is. I’m not looking at the charts. So we’d just come here every night, have a drink, and we play what we love.”

I ask them to name some touchstone influences, and .Paak lifts up his T-shirt, revealing a wildly detailed tattoo across his chest depicting Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. “This is the Avengers,” he says. “I got this over quarantine, bored as hell.” “That’s James Brown?” Mars asks, pointing at .Paak’s chest and frowning. “Stevie Wonder must have done that tattoo.”

As the year progressed, they bonded over their love of classic soul, playing each other deep cuts they’d grown up loving. .Paak would tell Mars things about the drum tracks that he didn’t know. “And even beyond percussion,” Mars says, “Andy was just blessed with this God-given tone, this natural stank and funk in his voice, where as a songwriter, it’s like an instrument you hear and start to imagine different things: ‘If I had that super-power, this is the kind of song I’d make.’ ” 

Outside of the studio, the world was in tumult. .Paak is a more explicitly political artist than Mars, and he released a track in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests called “Lockdown,” tapping the frenetic and unsettled energy of the moment. Politics and pain are inextricable, of course, from the history of soul, so I ask whether they felt tempted to address police killings, or the pandemic, as Silk Sonic. .Paak drops into a comically hushed voice: “I got in here, and Bruno said, ‘Look, Andy, I know you’ve done a lot of things, a lot of songs — it’s all cute, but we’re gonna do this my way and I need you to rock with me and trust me. I need you to bring your A game every night, and we’re making music to make women feel good and make people dance, and that’s it. It’s not gonna make people sad.’ ”  

Mars says, “A good song can bring people together — you don’t have to actually sing the words ‘Everybody come together.’ Sometimes the hard thing is to actually do it. You don’t have to say, ‘Everybody raise your hands’ — sometimes you just hit the right chord and it happens. So that was our mindset with the whole album. If it makes us feel good, and resonates with us, that’s gonna be infectious and make other people feel good — and that’s our jobs as entertainers.” 

No one close to Mars or .Paak died from Covid-19. But they’ve both lived lives marked by profound sadness and turmoil. Both have been homeless for stretches, and both lost a parent young: .Paak’s father died while in prison, after assaulting his mother, and Mars’ mother died unexpectedly in 2013, while he was preparing for a tour — he rushed back to his native Hawaii to be with her, but she died before he could see her. 

“We both make feel-good music,” .Paak explains, “and I think it’s because we’ve been through pain and tragedy.” “It all stems from pain and survival,” Mars agrees. “Never wanting to go back. Move forward, knowing how bad it can get.” A project like Silk Sonic, .Paak says, “is our way to cope with it, that’s why we put so much in it. We know it’s life or death for us, and we know what life and death means — we know what it’s like to be broke and to lose parents and to have parents that supported us and that battled addiction. We know what we’re up against, and this is all we have.”

Mars tells me a story: “We had a record that was, I guess the word is ‘heavier’ content, as far as subject matter,” he says. “Me and him were harmonizing and singing the shit out of it, but I remember having a conversation, saying, ‘Man, I don’t know if we want to take this turn on this album.’ We’re producing a feeling, and an emotion, so let’s sleep on this. After the session, Andy went to his house, and I’m playing the record, and I go to this song and I say, ‘I gotta stop by Andy’s.’ I drive over there and tell him, ‘Come outside.’ He gets in the car, I press play, and immediately he says, ‘Turn. That. Shit. Off’.” The track went in the trash that night. “We’ve been working on this song for weeks, but hearing it outside the walls of the studio, it was that quick,” Mars says. ” ‘I don’t wanna feel like this! Why are you guys making me feel like this?’ ” 

When the rumritas are done, it’s time for some detective work. “There’s this song that’s not completely done yet — we still gotta put it through the car wash,” Mars says. “But the biggest problem is, before we go to the chorus, we punched in a part that feels like a punch” — a performance sutured in after the fact — “so that’s basically what I wanna fix: It feels robotic, right when I start singing, ’cause we locked in the drums and bass and piano a little too much, and it’s not floating.” 

We head inside. There’s a large open space cluttered with instruments arrayed on overlapping rugs, among them Ludwig vintage drums with Remo Ambassador heads and the Silk Sonic logo on the kick (“This is just a practice kit,” Bruno notes); Giovanni Hidalgo congas; a Hohner Clavinet D6 keyboard; a Danelectro sitar; and a Trophy Music mini-Glockenspiel that Mars says provided “a little bit of candy” on every song. There’s a large poster on a far wall depicting a mushroom cloud below the words “Operation World Domination.” “That’s the sound you hear in your brain when they play your song on the radio,” Mars says. “That’s the mood board to get your mind right,” .Paak adds. “This ain’t for Soundcloud, jack!” 

They enter a control room, where Moniz, the engineer, is manning a 72-channel Solid State Logic mixing board and wearing a steel-and-gold Rolex Submariner that Mars bought him as a thank-you gift after they finished work on 24K Magic . Mars has hung up more posters in here, all with an Eighties theme — “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”-era Whitney Houston, Diamonds and Pearls -era Prince; Captain EO, K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider . Seated beside Moniz is producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Dernst “D’Mile” Emile, one of .Paak and Mars’ core collaborators. Others in the Silk Sonic universe included Bootsy Collins, who gave the duo their name and who they regard as the project’s spiritual godfather; Dr. Dre, who listened and gave feedback along the way; and Homer Steinweiss of the Dap-Kings, who contributed drums to one song.

Moniz plays the little stretch that’s bugging Mars. The track is an opulent homage to Philly soul, with dramatic lyrics about trying to hold it together after a devastating heartbreak, set to a string section and a sampled rainstorm. “Let’s mute the vocals and just hear what happens,” Mars says to Moniz. 

“Maybe we need the bass to be laid-back — move it back a little bit,” D’Mile says, listening. “It might be too on.” 

Mars instructs Moniz to isolate each instrument, hunting for the offending performance throwing things off. “Is the guitar too stiff?” he asks. “Ay, Chuck, solo the rhythm guitar.” He listens. “Now play the bass with that.… Now the piano.… Now the drums — let me find out it was Andy!” 

“It might be those accents on the snare,” D’Mile says. “And I would nudge the piano and the bass back. The guitar wasn’t an issue for me.” 

A few minutes later, they’ve realized the drums aren’t landing the way they want them to. “Maybe with those ghost notes I’m doing in-between the backbeat — I’m hitting them too hard,” .Paak offers. 

“Is it a replay?” Mars asks him. 

“Yeah, probably,” .Paak says, standing up and walking out toward the kit to give the passage another go. Learning to drum “in the gospel church,” he tells me, “the fundamentals are ‘being in the pocket’ — it has to be about the feel, the groove, not rushing, not slowing down, and that’s really what this is, too. You want the drums to be singing, too.”

For 20 minutes, .Paak replays the same nine-second stretch over and over and over, fielding minutely detailed notes from Mars and D’Mile. “That sounds like a punch — another one,” Mars says. I’ve been able to detect only the slightest differences between the recording and where we’ve wound up, but it finally seems like Mars has gotten things where he wants them. “Shit, that one was great, but I think you missed the last brrrrp! ” He listens again. “Oh, my bad, you had it — I fucked up! That’s it! We got it.” 

Mars waits a beat, brow furrowed, then turns to D’Mile: “What about the piano?” 

Ten minutes and a bunch of piano replays later, the nine seconds are finally floating to everyone’s satisfaction. I ask Mars if, this many years and this many smash hits into his career, he still feels pressure — if that’s why he’s just worked so hard tweaking such a tiny transition. “The pressure’s always there,” he says. “But it’s pressure from within. For me, it’s not even public perception — I just don’t wanna do it anymore if it’s no longer fun. If it no longer excites me.” Working with .Paak, he says, “it’s like, ‘Man, I’m in the garage with my buddy!’ It’s finding the joy in that, and why you fell in love with music in the first place.”

Spending day after day in the studio, though, blessed and cursed with such finicky ears, Mars concedes, there are times when you flirt with something resembling madness: “How many times can you hear the same song? How many times can you say, ‘Andy, the hi-hat ain’t right?’ — ’cause that can get deeper, to the point where you say, ‘Maybe the song sucks. Maybe we suck. Maybe that was it.’ ” 

“The domino effect,” .Paak says. 

“One little thing can spiral,” Mars continues. “But you gotta shake that shit off and just say, ‘Yo, get behind the drums.’ ” He smiles. “And let’s figure this shit out.”

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Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s ‘Evening With Silk Sonic’ Is a Luscious Blast of ’70s Soul: Album Review

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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It might have a core of ultra-rich high-calorie cheese, but the throwback song is a very specific and carefully calibrated art form.

It must evoke and transcend the era it’s reviving in an affectionate or hilarious fashion (or both); it has to be a great song as well as a nostalgia trip for those who remember, and a vicarious saunter through a previous decade for those who don’t. Equally, the timing has to be right: You don’t want to bring back something that doesn’t feel particularly fresh or relevant at that moment (the standard 20-year nostalgia cycle is a reliable benchmark, if not necessarily a rule). Songs ranging from Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” and Lenny Kravitz’s “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” (both nods to early ’70s R&B) to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” (early aughts pop-punk) and Billy Joel’s ’50s-inspired “Uptown Girl” and “The Longest Time” (sorry!) are all stellar examples of the art.

The throwback album is a monumentally more difficult thing to pull off: The artist has to follow the above guidelines for a standard album’s length without the conceit — which is hard enough to get away with for the length of a song — growing, well, old.

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All of which is a long-winded way of leading up to the fact that Silk Sonic — aka multiplatinum pop-R&B singer Bruno Mars and rapper Anderson .Paak — have taken the concept to a whole new realm with “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” a wink-laden blast of early ’70s soul that they’ve launched like a contemporary project, complete with a smash debut single, “Leave the Door Open” (performed at the Grammy Awards earlier this year, it went on to top the Billboard Hot 100 in April).

Anyone who knows or loves early 1970s R&B will have a goofy grin on their face throughout this entire album, which plays out like an awesome game of spot-the-reference: You’ll find nods to songs like “Jungle Boogie,” “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster”; groups like the O’Jays, the Chi-Lites, the Sty- listics, the Ohio Players, the Gap Band and Kool & the Gang; angelic backing vocals, ludicrously lush strings and horns, baby-I’m-down-on-my-knees testifying; wacka-wacka guitars and tinkling glockenspiels. There are even a few cameos from one of the era’s originators, P-Funk bassist and iconic solo artist Bootsy Collins.

The songs span jams like the rollerena anthem “Skate” (released last summer with a very summery roller-skating-themed video) and several slow-burners, including “Leave the Door Open” and the closing “Blast Off,” which includes lyrics as period-specific as the music: “Let’s tiptoe to a magical place / Blast off and kiss the moon tonight / And watch the world go crazy from outer space.” Other priceless one-liners include “In a room full of dimes, you’d be a hundred dollars” and “You smell better than a barbecue” (both from “Skate”). Inevitably, there’s a bedroom ballad with some heavy female breathing and pillow talk (the steamy “After Last Night”).

The only song that doesn’t sound like a blast from a Rhino Records compilation or some obsessive British crate-digger’s playlist is the .Paak-powered “777” — naturally, the album’s seventh track — largely because he raps most of the way through it; the music is a straight Gap Band funk. Similarly, the groove veers into the ’80s on occasion — there are a couple of funky or flute-y dashes of vintage Michael Jackson.

Even though both Mars and .Paak were born a decade after this music was dominating FM radio, it’s clearly in their blood: Mars, who created a vin- tage-sounding classic with Mark Ronson in 2014 with “Uptown Funk,” probably played a lot of songs from the period as a kid in his family’s band, and .Paak — a blazing drummer as well as a strong rapper and singer — recorded an imaginative all-covers EP in 2013 called “Cover Art.” A ’70s soul shake is also due to Dernst Emile II (aka D’Mile), who co-produced the album with Mars, co-wrote every song and plays multiple instruments.

Wisely, at just a half hour in length, the album doesn’t outstay its welcome, and although not every song is great, the vibe carries through from end to end — and once it’s over there’s no way you’re not playing it again. Whether you want to rock the boat or rock your baby, ride the love train or the love roller coaster, or boogie with love Jones or me and Mrs. Jones, “An Evening With Silk Sonic” will take you there.

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An Evening With Silk Sonic review: Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak ride a retro soul train

Beep beep, ladies.

The present is a mess; the future is an apocalyptic question mark. Can you blame Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak for looking backwards? As Silk Sonic, the duo style themselves as 21st-century ambassadors of the kind of retro-soul swagger whose mirror-ball heart belongs to transistor radios and roller discos, not streaming services. (Even their name, with its implied visions of slip-and-slide bedsheets and private jets, feels like onomatopoeia.) And the frazzled citizens of 2021 embraced it: Silk's first single, the sinuous hey-girl invitation "Leave the Door Open," held the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 twice this spring, and lingered in the top 10 for months.

Those are impressive stats for any act, particularly one that began as a goofy time-filler on the road between two tourmates. As if to offer his blessing, Bootsy Collins — part hype man, part fairy godfather — drops in to introduce their debut, An Evening With Silk Sonic , sprinkling his Funkadelic pixie dust and promising "to lock this groove in tight." Leading with "Door Open," a bedroom jam that sounds like it was beamed in from some lost Chi-Lites catalog and then passed through a Rick James lyric generator on the way, makes sense. With its falsettoed la-la-la s and cascading couplets about fresh filets and rose petals in the bathtub, the song sets the tone for what's to come: a clutch of plush ballads and indecent proposals so persistently, unabashedly horny (in both senses of the word), they should probably come with their own birth control.

"Fly As Me" makes a blithe boogie-down case for game recognizing game, while "After Last Night" celebrates a girl so "sweet-sticky/thick and pretty" she might even make a dedicated player try on monogamy. "777" takes flight from a fuzzy funked-up bassline, a high-roller trip to a Las Vegas where the champagne buffet always flows and nobody loses at the baccarat table. Even Casanovas get the blues, though; "Smoking Out the Window" pines prettily for a girl who can't stop stepping out, and the shimmery, slow-rolling "Put on a Smile" traces tears-of-a-clown heartbreak.

But their mojo returns on the breezily old-school second single, "Skate": "In a room full of dimes, you would be a hundred dollars/If being fine was a crime, girl, they'd lock your lil' fine ass up in a tower," .Paak coos, booty-struck. He's an agile, elastic rapper and singer, though Mars' creative imprint looms large; the architect of a thousand radio hits, the Honolulu native is a songwriter so pristine and tuneful it almost feels bionic: Even on first listen his compositions tend to sound familiar, as if they were already hits in 1972 (or 1989, or last year).

The pair are clearly having fun with their loverman shtick here — a knowing throwback to a more-cowbell era when all the cars were Monte Carlos, the lamps were lava, and #MeToo was but a distant, joy-killing dream. Mostly that comes through with an obvious wink; other times it lands somewhere between Pepé Le Pew and Ron Burgundy on the self-awareness scale. But Silk didn't come to talk politics. They just want to take you out for a superfly Evening , and send you home basking in the afterglow. Grade: B+

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Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak Know What ‘We Need’: To See Silk Sonic Live Onstage

Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars revealed that they've been sitting on the music for their Silk Sonic collaboration for more than four years.

By Gil Kaufman

Gil Kaufman

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Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak have been waiting for years to unleash Silk Sonic on the world. And you can tell they’re in the mood to party now that their finger-snapping, slinky debut R&B jam “ Leave the Door Open ” is out.

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on Friday (March 5), the mimosa-sipping pals broke down the group’s origins, what it felt like to work together in-person and how they roped bass-slapping funk legend Bootsy Collins into the mix.

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Anderson .Paak

Mars said one of the songs on the album dates back to a phrase he came up with on tour in 2017, that quickly morphed into a hook that “snowballed” into seriously intense studio sessions. “It was like, ‘Well, want to come back tomorrow?'” Mars told Lowe. “And we kept coming up with music. It felt like why you fall in love with music in the first place. And jamming with your buddy… There’s no plan, just working out the parts and trying to excite each other… that’s why this wouldn’t happen if it didn’t make sense and it didn’t feel natural and organic. This was a series of events that led us to ‘Man, why don’t we just do it?'”

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak Share First Silk Sonic Single ‘Leave the Door Open&rsquo…

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That initial idea turned into a friendship, which morphed into a realization that they loved a lot of the same music and then, hitting the studio. The pandemic, of course, threw a wrench into their plans, but instead of trying to make music long-distance, .Paak said they decided to get in the studio face-to-face.

“When you get in and you can jam with someone and other artists that could hold it down and you’re bouncing, that’s different,” AP said. “That’s the difference and you’re really creating a groove from scratch. You guys are trying to figure out what’s going to work. What’s the math behind this that’s going to get everybody feeling good? What is it? Is it too heavy? Is it not heavy enough? And especially with this song, it’s a song that requires so much patience and delicate…” Mars jumps in: “Delicatessen,” with .Paak adding, “Delicatessens. A lot of meat went into this song.”

Because both men are allergic to being regular, they knew they needed to get Parliament/Funkadelic thumper Collins — who Mars referred to as “the definition of a superstar” — into the mix. “There’s so many artists that you could see that grew up on him. And me and Andy being a couple of guys that just grew up loving that,” he said of the pair’s mutual admiration of Bootzilla. “And we thought it’d be incredible if we could dream up a dream set list and we, that was our model in the studio, ‘Alright, well, let’s create the set list of doom, who would be the ultimate host that could thread all these songs together?’ And thank God for Bootsy.”

As for Mars’ legendary perfectionist streak, .Paak said the last person he collabed who worked him to death so hard was his original mentor, Dr. Dre . “This dude doesn’t listen to music like regular people, you know, people get lost? And he can’t, he can’t,” .Paak said of Mars. “A lot of people do collabs these days, but I don’t think they understand what it’s like to go in and get work with someone that’s challenging everything. Like, ‘Did we do this right? Did we do this right? Should we try this right?’ You know for me, a lot of it is about having fun, but he was really the first person, the first period of bringing it to my attention that sometimes you got to go through hell to get heaven.”

Bruno Mars and Anderson. Paak Are Teaming on a New Band Silk Sonic

Mars and .Paak see the project as the next evolution of their careers, even if the collaboration kind of just fell in their laps as a happy accident. And now that it’s done, the pair, who have a mutual love for ripping it up live, are anxious to get out there and perform the tracks for an audience, whenever that’s possible.

“We were in a situation right now for guys that grew up playing live. That’s another thing. That’s heartbreaking for it to be in the studio and trying to write songs, but the live element is gone,” said Mars about COVID-19 putting a crimp in any plans to do a joint tour. “While I’m writing songs, that’s a part of my whole thing. It goes to like, ‘I can’t wait till people hear this.’ And it’s also, ‘I can’t wait to play this for people. I can’t wait to be with my band.'”

But when things open up again, .Paak said they will definitely be ready to hit it, hard. “I’d love to present it,” he said. “And soon as the world gets to the point where it’s saying…,” with Mars adding, “We need it, man. We need it. I mean, if the terms are right. Yeah. The terms got to be locked, though.”

Check out Mars and .Paak talking Silk Sonic below.

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An Evening With Silk Sonic

By Ross Scarano

Pop/R&B

Atlantic / Aftermath

November 16, 2021

After fiddling with the R&B of the 1980s and ’90s to great commercial success on 2016’s 24K Magic , Bruno Mars has assigned himself a more challenging project: Silk Sonic , a fidelity-obsessed act in which he and onetime tourmate Anderson .Paak recreate the rhythm and blues of the ’70s. The duo sought out particular drum skins to better replicate the sounds of the studio during the heyday of Gamble and Huff, when those songwriter-producers polished soul music to an extravagant sheen. With period-specific instrumentation in place, the exuberant pop hitmaker and the acclaimed rapper-singer-drummer with underground cachet recorded as their ancestors did, with just one or two mics for the entire room of musicians. As a gesture of commitment, Paak got his chest tattooed with portraits of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. They even enlisted Bootsy Collins to host their lean game of musical I Spy: “Fellas, I hope you got something in your cup,” the beloved bassist from Parliament-Funkadelic announces on the intro. Trap drums freshened up 24K Magic but there’s nothing comparable on An Evening With Silk Sonic , a loving yet slight act of nerd-dom.

After one listen, my scorecard noted the crystalline guitar glissando best associated with Motown session musician Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin (see: Marvin Gaye’s “ I Want You ” or Ragin’s own “ Goo Goo Wah Wah ”), the siren-like ARP synth from Kool and the Gang’s “ Summer Madness ,” a whiff of the chorus from the Ohio Players’ “ Fire ,” and the title of Rick James and Teena Marie’s magisterial “ Fire and Desire ” (released in 1981, but close enough). Other critics will surely pin down allusions of their own. For a certain listener, this is half the fun: An Evening With Silk Sonic is an opportunity to prove your adoration and knowledge. For some younger listeners, this may be their first full-length engagement with one of the richest chapters in music history. Others will process this as simply a good time. But any significant level of investment poses the question: When artists invoke music as beloved as Motown and Philly soul, how can anything they create measure up?

One way to dodge the smack of the yardstick is with a joke, and An Evening With Silk Sonic does not want for winking silliness. If anything, Mars and Paak are hamming it up harder on this collaboration than on past records. The internet received the clip of Mars belting out “this bitch,” from the heartbroken lament “Smokin Out the Window,” and did the work of a crackjack marketing team by turning it into a meme . (For my money, that song’s funniest line reading is Paak’s despondent yet fluttering “I wanna die.”) The videos are pure burlesque. This is a cartoon revival of a well-worn aesthetic, and when so many of the creative decisions resist being taken seriously, any criticism makes you sound like a killjoy.

As many have pointed out, the classic means of Motown production as laid out by founder Berry Gordy were as regimented as the assembly lines in nearby Detroit auto plants. In his classic genre study The Death of Rhythm and Blues , Nelson George wrote that “Motown promoted Gordy as an affirmative, unthreatening symbol of black capitalism…Gordy clearly stated that his goal was to buy into mainstream standards.” To ensure the label’s artists passed inspection, Motown instructed its stars to cut a smooth figure. As quoted in Kelefa Sanneh’s recent book Major Labels , Maxine Powell, the head instructor at the label’s charm school, told her pupils to “be natural, be poised, and be positive.” There’s no chance Ms. Powell would have condoned Silk Sonic dropping the b-word, but it’s still possible to draw a line from Motown’s artifice to the contrived jokes and slickness of An Evening With Silk Sonic . These songs are more “explicit,” but they’re fundamentally safe. Motown’s artists worked hard to cross over; for years now Mars has operated from the epicenter of pop music, not the margins.

Still, some of the slicker numbers on the project work well: “Leave the Door Open,” “After Last Night,” and “Smokin Out the Window” are among the highlights, slathering elevated technique—all those key changes—with satisfying molten cheese. In the first verse of “After Last Night,” after Thundercat ’s tender ooos place the sonic equivalent of a rose-colored scarf over a bedside lamp, Paak explains that one especially zesty sexual encounter has him throwing out his phone and deading his player tendencies. He opens the second verse singing, “If I still had my phone I’d call every girl I know/And tell them goodbye.” It’s an amusing detail made sweeter by Mars’ harmonies on the last syllable. This splashy interplay between male vocalists is perhaps the record’s strongest selling point: There are virtually no male R&B vocal groups of note these days, though the power of layered harmonies is the catalyst for much of the genre’s finest records, most notably the entire body of work of Marvin Gaye.

The best song, “Put on a Smile,” is also the cause of the most frustration. Co-written by the singularly talented Babyface , the album’s big ballad digs as deep emotionally as Mars and Paak are willing to go on a project that keeps the stakes low by choosing humor over sincerity at just about every turn. Collins’ rhyming intro mentions “begging in the rain,” and the subject matter doesn’t stray far from the Temptations’ “ I Wish It Would Rain ” or the Miracles’ “ The Tracks of My Tears ,” perfect songs about trying to mask your busted heart. Structurally, “Put on a Smile” teases massive catharsis with its first chorus that it smartly holds back until the second refrain, when the drums finally crescendo and Mars leaps to the top of his falsetto. The song is played entirely straight, as the level of emotion calls for. And it is immediately followed by an empty ode to partying in Vegas called “777.” Blow the dice, papa needs a new foreign, etc. It’s soulless.

Both artists are capable of more. Listen to Mars’ version of Adele’s “All I Ask”—don’t watch it, because he and his band are dressed like Halloween versions of hypebeasts and I don’t want you distracted—he has grit in his voice, total sincerity that doesn’t let up. It’s his most emotional, unvarnished recording. And “Wngs,” from Anderson .Paak’s collab album with Knxwledge , not only anticipates but nails the Silk Sonic concept, despite Paak singing over a simple beat. “Baby, get your shit together, we hittin’ the town/It’s been a long time since we drank all night and I wanna see that ass move around,” Paak sings, as rude and romantic and funny a lyric as he’s ever written. The sense of familiarity baked into the invitation is exactly the mood of Silk Sonic; what is this supposed to be if not the album of lovable carousing uncles? Depth doesn’t have to mean sad—on “Wngs,” it means lived-in, novelistic detail.

But An Evening With Silk Sonic was only meant to be a hyper-detailed costume party. As Paak explained to Rolling Stone , Mars told him, “​​We’re making music to make women feel good and make people dance, and that’s it.” He didn’t lie. At eight songs plus an intro, it’s the shortest full-length project either artist has released. Teased since March of this year, leading to a promotional cycle that’s lasted nearly nine months, it arrives burdened with more hype and attention than its songs should have been asked to bear. Could they have made a weirder, more surprising version of this record? Absolutely. But as they’ve insisted from the start, it’s not that deep.

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Why Bruno Mars Is "Gracefully" and "Sexually" Withdrawing Silk Sonic From 2023 Grammys Consideration

Bruno mars announced that he and his silk sonic bandmate anderson .paak have withdrawn their debut album from grammys consideration. see the singer’s full statement below..

Silk Sonic is closing the door on the 2023 Grammys .

Bruno Mars announced that he and bandmate Anderson .Paak  are withdrawing their debut album,  An Evening With Silk Sonic , from consideration for music's biggest night.

"We truly put our all on this record, but Silk Sonic would like to gracefully, humbly and most importantly, sexually, bow out of submitting our album this year," the singer, 37, said in a statement to E! News Oct. 12. "We hope we can celebrate with everyone on a great year of music and partake in the party. Thank you for letting Silk Sonic thrive."

Silk Sonic is already a Grammy-winning duo four times over, with the project's lead single, "Leave the Door Open," racking up awards in every category it was nominated for during the 2022 Grammys in April—including Record and Song of the year. As Bruno noted in his statement, it would "be crazy to ask for anything more."

"Andy and I, and everyone that worked on this project, won the moment the world responded to ‘Leave the Door Open,'" the "24K Magic" singer noted. "Everything else was just icing on the cake. We thank the Grammys for allowing us to perform on their platform — not once but twice — and awarding us at last year's ceremony."

He added, "Thank you to everyone that supported this project and championed it."

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Aside from winning four Grammys during the April 3 ceremony, Silk Sonic also took the stage to give an electrifying performance of "777."

Grammy nominations will be announced Nov. 15 and the 65th annual Grammy Awards will take place in Los Angeles on Feb. 5, 2023.

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Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak Talk Silk Sonic Debut, Bootzilla, and More

The funky R&B duo Silk Sonic's debut single, 'Leave the Door Open,' has earned them a #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and a slot at the 2021 Grammy Awards.

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, two halves of Silk Sonic, recently sat down with Apple Music's Zane Lowe to discuss the making of their hit debut track, Silk Sonic's origins, and how they roped in funk legend Bootsy Collins. 

Silk Sonic Origins

Mars and .Paak had been sitting on the idea of Silk Sonic for years now. Actually, one of the songs in their upcoming album is the manifestation of the journey that went on to become Silk Sonic. 

Mars explained that the song 'Leave the Door Open' came from a phrase that he randomly came up with while on tour in 2017. The phrase turned into a hook, and the hook gave way to studio sessions. 

Admittedly, there was not a set plan per se. The duo was just jamming, writing, and it instinctively came about. 

Building Up To 'Leave the Door Open'

Mars and .Paak came to the realization that they loved a lot of the same music, and by that time, they had become good friends.

Even amid the pandemic, while other artists made music long-distance, they decided to get in the studio. They wanted the magic to happen face to face. 

They spent time in the studio trying to figure out what works and what would make everyone just feel good. Their song 'Leave the Door Open' is the brainchild of that idea. 

In .Paak's words , "it's a song that requires so much patience and delicate..." To which, Mars added, "Delicatessens. A lot of meat went into this song."

Silk Sonic Meets Bootzilla

Now that they had an idea to build upon, Silk Sonic needed a host to tie their whole album with a neat little bow, and they unanimously choose the legendary Bootzilla for the job. 

According to the two, Collins was the ultimate host that could thread all these songs together since both of them grew up loving him. Mars has even gone on record to state that Collins is "the definition of a superstar." 

As for .Paak, he was still getting over his awe over Mars' legendary perfectionist streak. The 'Make It Better' singer admitted that only one other person made him work as hard as Mars did. That was his original mentor and Hip Hop veteran Dr. Dre.

The duo further confessed that they see this project as the next evolution of their careers, and they could not wait to perform their tracks for a live audience. 

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