VH1: You recently produced records for Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, and now your solo record is out. So far it seems like 2007 is your year.
Mark Ronson: It's the best year I've had musically, but Timbaland's having a good year, too.

VH1: Timbaland didn't produce Amy Winehouse.
MR: You know, Hot 97 has added "Rehab." Now Amy's not just on urban-crossover radio, she's on black radio. Probably the last white girl to get played on that station was Lisa Stansfield in like '86 or something. Now Hot 97 is thinking of adding "Stop Me" [the first single off Ronson's new record]. It seems so far-fetched that a song of mine would get played on Hot 97, but people are sensing that there's something afoot. Audiences seem to be interested in something new.

VH1: You released your record in Britain earlier this year. Do you find that the English are early adopters?
MR: Cooler things . . . well, not cooler things, but a lot less mainstream things can get out there. England doesn't have the same drop off in record sales that we have here. There's still a culture of excitement over there. You feel it when you walk into a record store [in London] and the person behind the counter's like [breathlessly] "Did you hear this? Did you hear this? Oh my god, you have to hear this!" There's one main radio station that runs through the whole country. So if a song is good it gets played and everybody hears it, from Portsmouth to Newcastle. And also . . . I don't know exactly what it is, but there's no genre-specific divisions and all that sh*t. I don't know if it's the social impact of slavery on America's radio -- that's an entire book that needs to be written right there. But in the U.K. someone like Lily [Allen] can take elements of ska, hip-hop, grime and '60s pop music and do whatever she wants with it, kind of like what The Clash did in the late '70s. Britain is a place where things are bit more quirky, and records like that can break the mainstream, whereas here everyone's trying to break a record that will work from New York to L.A. and everywhere in between, and it just ends up watering [music] down to the lowest common denominator. Pop music is a national pastime over there. People bet on what the number one record at Christmas will be. Pop isn't a dirty word there. Pop just means popular music. Britain is a country where the popular music is actually quite good. It's a place where artists like the Arctic Monkeys, the Kaiser Chiefs, Dizzee Rascal and myself all can have huge radio hits.

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VH1: Versions has done well over there, right?
MR: It's done amazingly well. It went gold in three weeks. It came in at No. 2 and sold 50,000 records its first week. If I had sold equivalent numbers in the United States, a country that's 25 times the size, that would have put me above Mims or whoever for the week. I was completely shocked. I hate to use f*cking Malcolm Gladwell terms, but you could feel it hit the tipping point. I realized it was much different than my first album [Here Comes the Fuzz]. I also just got lucky that it didn't suck, I guess.

VH1: Did working with Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse hone your studio skills?
MR: With Lily and Amy, long story short, I was just making music I wanted to make. There was no pressure from the labels or anything, so we were just making the music we wanted to make, for that reason and that reason only. Working with British artists, it's a little easier to do cooler and cleverer things. Especially when you don't have an A&R guy breathing down your neck for a hit single.

VH1: Hit-making is such a nebulous occupation.
MR: To tell you the truth, about a year-and-a-half ago, just before I started working on Versions and met Lily and Amy, I was kind of like, "F*ck, maybe I'm not as good at this as I am supposed to be." I was looking at the people around me -- the world's Kanyes, Pharrells and Chads -- going, "Maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was." I was also thinking that maybe I was just good and exciting at 24, but now everyone's caught up. But I needed to figure something out so I wouldn't have to be DJing in nightclubs when I was 40. Around that time I was focusing on the business side of the label [Allido Records]. That's not really what I enjoy and it's not what I'm good at. Nobody can be Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons at the same time. I was trying to do that -- work in the office all day, take a break and then go into the studio 15 minutes later. I just said, "F*ck it. I'm just going to make the music that I like for the next year or whatever." Then I met Lily in a nightclub and I started work on Versions. I didn't have a deal yet but I was making covers because I was bored of all the music that was out and I didn't really have that much fun stuff to DJ. Some people make mash-ups, but me being an overly geeky type, I was like, "Let's make whole covers from scratch." That's how it came out. When I did the first one, "Just," I'd been unfulfilled musically for awhile, and it was an amazing experience, covering that song, breaking down that arrangement and building it up over a different kind of beat and then adding the horns to flesh it out. It was exciting again.

VH1: Alex Greenwald [from Phantom Planet, the song's vocalist] really sounds like Thom Yorke on that track.
MR: It was a big deal for Alex, for someone who's quite inspired by Radiohead, to take on one of their songs. I know he probably had to think about it for a minute. But I love the way it came out because you have a quote-unquote white indie-style vocal over a quote-unquote black funk track. Instead of going all the way super-soulful and turning it into a novelty, I like the way it came out. And Alex has a little similarity between his voice and Thom Yorke's anyway, so some people hear it for the first time and think, "Is this a remix? A cover? What is it?"

VH1: That's a good description of your style. You don't like to be pegged to any one genre, do you?
MR: I enjoy making music that's a bit genre-less, because that's pop music, and pop music is kind of a good thing.