“Honesty, heartbreak, love, lust, elation: Those concepts are in a lot of music that I love, but it's just never been something I've attempted on my own records,” DJ-turned-superproducer Mark Ronson tells Apple Music about the genesis of his fifth album. “When I dip into other people's worlds—whether it's Queens of the Stone Age or Gaga, whoever—that's when I get to work on deep s**t, but my own records should just be either record collector-y or for the dance floor.” But on the heels of a breakup, Ronson rallied a typically star-studded cast of collaborators, including Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li, and Alicia Keys, for sessions in New York and Los Angeles that plumbed personal topics previous albums would have danced right past. “It was the first time I couldn't really hide behind a concept,” he says. “It was like, 'No, no, you have to put yourself into the music this time.'” Here Ronson puts himself into telling the stories behind each track on Late Night Feelings.
Originally appearing on LP from the Bam Caruso label in the 1980s, and then on CD on the Past & Present imprint in 2003, these first ten volumes (boxed) in the Rubble Collection were conceived and collected by Phil Smee. For fans of the Nuggets series, both the two American volumes and the British Nuggets, you won't find a lot of overlap. The Nuggets comps were and are for people who want what was at least the stuff of legend, if not readily available. The collection here digs deep and are, for the most part, flawless in what they present. This set, and its companion volumes 11-20 (a separate box), are very different creatures. For starters, they dig a lot deeper into the hopelessly obscure 45s and tapes of Brit psychedelia, freakbeat, Mod, and pop.