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Bookworm

Sparks (Part II)

Bookworm

KCRW

Arts

4.5606 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2017

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The second conversation with brothers Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks, along with stripped-down versions of two songs from their new album Hippopotamus.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

0:05.0

Books!

0:07.0

Where would we be without books?

0:11.0

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

0:14.0

Even the thought of it so absurd.

0:18.0

Where would we be without books? Where would we be without books? Where would we be without

0:26.3

Gutenberg? It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

0:33.6

From KCRW and KCRW.com. I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm, but you may not recognize that because our theme song is different today. The theme song is being sung and played by the people who actually wrote the theme song, Ron and Russell Mail of Sparks.

0:55.6

It's a great honor for me to have them with me performing in the studio

1:01.1

in stripped down versions throughout of the songs that you will hear on their new and fantastic

1:08.9

album, Hippopotamus.

1:11.8

It comes to us from the first major label that Sparks have had in a long time.

1:21.7

It's from the international label, BMG.

1:24.8

It's been amazing because, you know, having the support in that sort of way, we have now

1:30.7

four videos off of the hippopotamus album that in the past, when we were self-producing some

1:36.8

of our albums, you know, we'd have one video. So having their support and just having them support

1:42.0

things like the, you know, the visual side of things

1:45.4

where we can kind of convey that certain images visually like the cover of the album where it is

1:51.9

the hippopotamus in this swimming pool with Ron and I on one end.

1:55.9

That's Russell Mayle and his brother, Ron Mail, is the writer of the songs in the lyrics,

2:03.9

and they are really smart and moving and funny songs. A really good song is complex, and that the music

2:16.5

comments on the lyrics, that the lyric comments on the singer,

...

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