Summary: Maybe you don't know Sparks, but you've definitely heard its influence. Over four decades, the enigmatic brothers Ron and Russell Mael have transformed and shape-shifted through a wide variety of pop styles, from glam rock, operatic rock (Queen was once their opener) and New Wave, to helping pioneer disco alongside Giorgio Moroder. The band's electro pop songs are equally catchy and challenging, weird and hilarious, but with genre-smashing sounds always ahead of their time. The L.A. group recently curated Sparks: New Music For Amnesiacs, The Ultimate Collection, a comprehensive book and box set pulling together Sparks' best and most significant music, along with some oddities, photographs and memorabilia that spans the band's career. In an interview with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Ron and Russell Mael reflect on 40 years of making funny and cutting edge music, reinventing themselves as a duo with the "Two Hands, One Mouth" tour, and the future of their musical The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman which is being turned into a film. Interview Highlights On Sparks' popularity and new fans discovering the band: Russell Mael: It's a pretty schizophrenic. It's a pretty unique situation. Because our earlier roots in England in the '70s…there was a big impact there, and there a lot of people in the states at the time weren't aware of what we were doing. You know, a song like "Cool Places" was not as successful in Europe and so it's less known there. And then in the 90s we've had really big commercial success in places like Germany and France. And then things move on into the 2000s. So it's a really odd situation to have people coming to our shows from different eras and different generations. Ron Mael: We've been really fortunate because we detest nostalgia so a lot of the people coming now to the shows are people that have just discovered us online with old YouTube clips and that sort of thing. So it's inspiring to see that. Ron Mael, on Sparks' consistent musical evolution: We're trying to slow down so we can capitalize on things for once (laughs). But generally, we get shoved into different areas with different kinds of music, but we always feel like a little apart from whatever the direction of music that's going on. And then we don't like to stay with a particular direction for very long. We get easily bored and we think that the audience does too.
