Ryan Paris and Mac DeMarco: the story of a beautiful, bizarre collaboration 40 years in the making
It’s the spring of 2016, and Mac DeMarco is looking for inspiration. He chokes down a cigarette and gazes forlornly at the lo-fi equipment scattered around his home studio. It refuses to stir, a sleeping dog of sorry soundlessness. He looks to external sources, syncing his computer to a neighbouring speaker. As he coolly searches for that mythical impetus, something magical appears in his YouTube algorithm: ‘Dolce Vita’ by Ryan Paris, a lost gem from 1983.
Its daringly simple bassline chugs as pleasingly as a jetski on la Riviera. It has, as DeMarco puts it, “very confusing lyrics” that he isn’t sure that Paris “really even understands”. It seems to have a layer of grease, a certain Brylcreem quality. There’s a poetry to it, too. Mac DeMarco is hooked. It’s a hit. And it might just inspire DeMarco’s next effort. He makes a video in tribute to this forgotten slice of 1980s perfection.
Ryan Paris, or Fabio Roscioli as the Italian musician is known to his friends, is sat in his own home studio, on the coast, a safe distance away from the “perfect” but “impossibly hot” city of Roma. Like DeMarco, he is awaiting a zap of inspiration, as he has often been since his big hit, ‘Dolce Vita’, first landed and took Europe by storm. His journey since then has been rather wavering.
Thankfully, music has always been in his blood. “My grandfather’s brother was an opera singer” is how his story begins. “My grandfather told me I knew all this good opera when I was just four or five. Then I started to listen to James Taylor and this kind of American folk, and I saw that the girls were very attracted when you started playing the guitar”. So, he started learning with an intensity that only youth and hopes of sexual conquests can harness. After three years and perhaps a few hard-earned romances, he was able to take up a job as a guitar teacher.
In the meantime, he was always making his own music, melding his passion for Italian pop, American rock ‘n’ roll, and the likes of Caetano Veloso bubbling up in Brazil. He formed a band, teaching private lessons by day and playing sets in the nightclubs of Rome by night. “I tried other work,” he explains, “But the music always came easy.” However, although he might have been a notable name on the Roman nightclub scene, his music hadn’t yet threatened to make a global mark.
All of that changed one fateful day. “I was 30,” he says. “No, I was 29. I was in a band called The Gigolos, and we actually organised the first Italian rock festival.” This proved to be a great networking move. It was during this time that he was handed the number of a budding producer who Paris was lining up to be the next keyboard player in his band. “He said a fantastic thing,” Paris recalled of their early encounters, “he said my voice was a little bit like Stevie Winwood, y’know.” From that compliment, a creative partnership began to blossom.
Paris quickly wrote a song to workshop in his new friend Pierluigi Giombini’s studio. As he played it to him, he soon realised Giombini seemed to have little interest in the song but almost excessive interest in his voice. As it turns out, unbeknownst to Paris, this was his audition to see whether he was worthy of singing the ace up Giombini’s sleeve: ‘Dolce Vita’. He passed. Paris had his hands on the bonafide hit that would launch him. But the rigours of the music industry also lay ahead.
Giombini was a “genius” composer, Paris explains, but a “shitty businessman”. Record labels were now involved, and they weren’t happy with Giombini’s casual handling of such a hit, as he had seemingly just passed it over to an unknown pal. Haphazard deals were struck, and suddenly, Paris was under intense pressure to supply a hit-filled LP. This was easier said than done for a guitar teacher who suddenly went from a dinghy rehearsal room to playing “Top of the Pops twice!”.
“After ‘Dolce Vita’, I went very down. I fight. I was fighting,” he asserts, but the lofty heights of number five in the UK singles charts remained beyond his grasp. His single releases became more staggered, and the guitar lessons more frequent. He squirrelled away in his studio with other musicians and relaxed into a life that the lavishes of ‘Dolce Vita’ had afforded him. A few remixes revived the hit, and a string of other creditable tracks kept him near enough to be a household name in Italy. However, he muses on these years without a great deal of reverence or enthusiasm.
So, in 2016, inspiration was also in short supply for Paris. He reclined in his home studio, lamenting the heat of an Italian mid-summer. But if you look on the bright side of life, you often see strange serendipitous circles. Paris was no stranger to such cosmic oddities, and just as he was supplying Mac DeMarco with inspiration thanks to the algorithmically served ‘Dolce Vita’, the Canadian indie star’s vlog on the track would soon do the same for him. Paris’ manager came blaring over the phone a few weeks later and told him one of the biggest names in modern alternative music was heaping praise upon his work.
“There is a big, big star in America,” his manager explains, “who made a video on ‘Dolce Vita’ and you also.” Paris continued, “I saw the video, and I was really flattered because he said some fantastic things. ‘We must answer to him’, I told my manager.” A request to do a collaboration was sent Mac DeMarco’s way. The universe, in its infinite, mysterious ways, had, for some reason, decreed that Ryan Paris and Mac DeMarco, two romantic slackers in their own bohemian way, would come together for a collaboration. Only god knows why.
In a manner fitting of the two stars, things moved rather slowly from there. But at one point in the interim years, DeMarco reached out with a track and requested backing vocals. Paris sent it back with a completely reimagined refrain and instrumental. “Wow, this is fantastic, this is beautiful, this is really my bread,” he asserts that Mac inexplicably exclaimed. They decided to do the song together, “like John Lennon and Paul McCartney,” Paris says with a wink. So, last year, DeMarco made a trip to Italy with his partner, Kiera McNally. He arrived at Paris’ coastal studio, broke bread and announced, “Okay, tomorrow, we do a song”.
“I didn’t sleep in the night,” Paris explained after years of waiting. “I’d heard the music of Mac and it’s very nice, very minimalistic, and very to the point. So, I slumped down and said, ‘What fucking can I do for him’.” As it turns out, he could do fucking quite a lot. ‘Simply Paradise and ‘Still What I’m Looking For’ are stunning songs, firmly ranking among the sweetest little efforts of recent years. And they came together as seamlessly as you might expect.
In his sleepless fugue of pre-revival nerves, Paris mused to himself, “The title can be ‘Paradise’. But because he was an indie guy, I wanted it to be more… I thought, maybe ‘Juicy Paradise’.” This was set to be the title he would serve Mac over breakfast. Paris waited in the kitchen. “He was up with his wife making gymnastics upstairs,” he recalled—it’s hard to be sure what this means, but perhaps intercourse.
After DeMarco emerged and sipped his coffee, the pair jammed away, and Paris steadily grew less and less fond of his title. At one point, DeMarco quipped that there was a hint of Mick Hucknell in his singing and melody. With that, the track was suddenly crowned ‘Simply Paradise‘, and the first hit of many to come was born, a beautifully odd baby between Paris and DeMarco—the new Hall & Oates in a world gone weird.
Buoyed by the success of the visit, Paris suggested further collaborations, and DeMarco agreed, “But this time, you come to me.” The best lay ahead. The second time out in Los Angeles, the Italian was more composed, prepared and assured. He arrived with the bones of ‘Still What I’m Looking For’, a ballad to beat the best of them. The beautiful song has been a lifetime in the making.
“It’s a story of someone that I love, but we cannot be together because she is married,” he explains of the song. “I didn’t send her the song because I’ve never said it to her that I love her. But this is the feeling I have for her. That’s one side of the song. The other side is that is the story of an old girlfriend who is not anymore there, because she died when she was very young. All of this in combination. It’s a sad song, but I think… I like very much the song, what more can I say?” In precisely a fashion fitting of two idols star-crossed no longer, what more is there than that?
Will a full album await? “With Mac, you cannot say… but this is the beginning of a beautiful long friendship in music and personally.”
