Mark Ronson’s Latest High Note

Mark Ronson built up one of the most impressive music careers over the past two decades, from producing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black and releasing one of the best-selling songs of all time with “Uptown Funk” to soundtracking one of the biggest cultural moments of the decade with Barbie. This year the superstar producer notched yet another feather in his cap as an executive producer of SNL 50: The Homecoming Concert alongside Lorne Michaels, curating a once-in-a-lifetime star-studded concert in which major artists covered landmark performances on the show. Ronson secured his first-ever primetime Emmy nomination in the process.

Michaels offered Ronson the gig in October 2023, giving them just under a year and a half to corral their dream lineup, which would include artists from Miley Cyrus to Lady Gaga, Cher to Post Malone, the surviving members of Nirvana, and SNL legends like Will Ferrell and Andy Samberg.

“I had that split-second flash that was like, ‘This is going to be the most wonderful thing of all time and a crazy amount of work,’ ” Ronson says. “And of course I’m going to do it because it’s Lorne and it’s Saturday Night Live.”

Ronson, who calls his own SNL performance in 2014 “the absolute highlight” of his career, says he watched every musical act the show has ever hosted to prepare, a time-consuming task. He narrowed it down to approximately 120 songs, writing ideas on sticky notes and posting them up, similar to SNL‘s bulletin board where the show announces its weekly lineup.

“I’d be in a hotel somewhere DJing for an F1 event or something, and the entire hotel room would be just littered with yellow Post-its that’d say ‘Karma Chameleon’ or ’50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ or ‘Bad Guy,’ ” Ronson says with a chuckle.

Ronson huddled frequently with Michaels and producer Erin David as a sort of “brain trust” and they’d go over ideas for the lineup. Ronson would send five or six songs to the artists to consider covering, some of whom “completely ignored my decisions or were completely offended by them,” he jokes, adding that artists brought their own great ideas as well. Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, for example, came up with playing Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” a particularly noteworthy song in SNL‘s history as Paul Simon played it on the show just after Sept. 11, 2001.

Ronson says producing the concert special was intense even by his own standards, recalling “waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats” as he juggled the show, working on his memoir (slated for publication later this year), and managing time with his family as his wife was pregnant with their second child.

“I remember being on these conference calls like, ‘I know you guys are used to this, but I’m losing my mind here,’ ” Ronson jokes. ” ‘Does this position come with a prescription of Xanax?’ ”

This story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.