Bruno Mars: The Private Anxiety of a Pop Perfectionist

Tasked with matching megahit “Uptown Funk,” lifelong showman searches for a deeper groove on new
LP
“I’ve been living in this damn box for 18 months!”
It’s late July at Glenwood Place, a recording studio in Burbank, California. Bruno Mars is in the courtyard –
white T-shirt, Versace cap over curls, white slip-on sneakers, no socks – smoking his umpteenth cigarette of the
day and trying with every bone in his roughly five-foot-five body to will his third album to completion.
“It’s right there, man,” says Mars, 31. “I’ve got to finish one song and tighten up the bridge on another, and I’m
pretty much done. I want to be finished by the middle of next month. I do have a deadline. And this shit ain’t
cheap!”
The song he needs to finish is one he’s been working on with Skrillex, whom he brought in to add some pizazz to
a track he’s been struggling with for months. “[Skrillex] is a sonic genius, and his version is amazing,” Mars says.
“There’s just something that’s still not happening for me. The groove ain’t right, or we’re not doing something on
the chorus – I don’t know the exact math. I’m just trying to figure out why I’m tuning out in certain parts.”

The last time Mars dropped an album was December 2012 – four years ago, an eternity for a pop star. He’s
surfed the intervening years like a pro, with two Super Bowl halftime performances (headlining in 2014, and a
cameo last February with Coldplay and Beyoncé), not to mention the biggest-selling song of the past few years,
his collaboration with Mark Ronson, “Uptown Funk.” But it’s been so long since Mars made an actual album that
he kind of forgot how it all works: the doubts; the endless tweaking and re-tweaking; the cigarettes. “We’re at
the point now where we’re losing our fucking minds,” he says. “My engineer’s going crazy; he wants to kill me.
This process is just such a weird process. Sitting in this freezing-ass-cold box trying to come up with songs.”
“Uptown Funk” cemented Mars’ superstar status, spending 14 weeks at Number One – tying for the second-
longest run in chart history – and winning the Grammy for Record of the Year. To date, it’s sold more than 12
million copies, been streamed nearly 2 billion times and made several dragons want to retire. But if you thought
the song’s runaway success would be a confidence-booster, Mars maintains the opposite: It was actually kind of
paralyzing.
“Coming off the biggest song of my career, it was super-daunting to come in here,” he says. His insecurity has
him second-guessing everything. “I don’t know if people are going to love this shit,” he says. “I don’t know if
radio is going to play it. But what I don’t want to have happen is I put it out and say, ‘Damn it, if I’d just done
this and this, maybe it would have had a shot.'”
But on the other hand … this is Bruno Mars. Six Number One singles. Thirty combined weeks at the top of the
chart (44 if you count “Uptown”). Two albums, 26 million in sales worldwide, four Grammys and counting. So
when you ask him if he’s usually right when it comes to these things – if he has pretty good instincts for what
makes a song a hit or not – he can’t help but swag out.
“I don’t know,” Mars says, flashing a smile. “Google me. Do I?”

That night, Mars stays at the studio until late. Around 3 a.m., he climbs into his 2010 Cadillac (“It might be time
for an upgrade. I look like an Uber driver”) and makes the 20-minute trek to his home in the Hollywood Hills. His
girlfriend, model Jessica Caban, is already long asleep, so Mars sits in the driveway by himself for another half-
hour, listening and re-listening to today’s mix. The driveway is where he does some of his best work: “We’ve
worked on songs till 3 or 4 in the morning, like, ‘This is gonna be the first single!’ – and the minute I take it to
the car, it’s so obvious we were tripping,” he says. “Something happens when you roll down your window and
you can hear the traffic and real noise – the way people are actually going to hear it.” There’s something about
his car’s speakers in particular. “Even if I do get a new car one day,” he says, “that thing’s gonna be parked on
the side of the house.”
Mars’ new album, due out this month, is called 24K Magic. He says he wanted to re-create the feeling of the R&B
he fell in love with as a kid, growing up in Hawaii in the early Nineties: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, New Edition
and Bobby Brown, Jodeci, Boyz II Men, Teddy Riley, Babyface. “There’s nothing more joyous for me than those
school dances,” Mars says. “Slow-dancing at the Valentine’s Day banquet with the girl you have a crush on, and
the DJ spins ‘Before I Let You Go,’ by Blackstreet. And the shit is magical, and you think about it for the next
eight months.”
Mars says he wanted to make a soundtrack for a movie in his head. He sets the scene: “We’re in New York.
Summer night. The baddest rooftop house party. 2:30 in the morning, the band comes out, fucking dipped in
Versace. The girls are screaming. And then the flyest lead singer the world has ever seen comes on and starts
singing some shit.”
The next day, Mars is back in the studio to fix some of the mistakes he heard last night. First on the agenda is a
song called “Finesse.” “There’s just some things fucking the groove up,” he says. “Anytime you see us, on tour,
on TV, I want to be moving … I was very conscious on this album of the bounce.”
Mars opens his laptop and pulls up the latest version – the 20th or so, he guesses. He threw out one where he
sang about gold chains and cognac over a silky beat (too corny), and another for sounding too much “like a
Seventies cop show – like I should be on roller skates.” This version he’s finally happy with; he just needs to fix
the bridge. There’s something bugging him about the harmonies, or maybe the chord progression. “I don’t know
what’s not hitting home. There’s just something weird that I ain’t fucking with yet.” He jabs at his Korg keyboard
in frustration. “I just have to open it up.”
If Mars is obsessive about songcraft, it’s probably because that’s how he first broke into the business. He moved
to L.A. from Hawaii when he was 18, with dreams of becoming a star. (“I was a kid, man. I thought I’d go to
Hollywood, sing for someone and that’s it, I’m playing Madison Square Garden.”) He briefly got signed to Motown
Records, but then got dropped. “That’s when the hustle changed,” he says. He started working the song-hawker
circuit, co-writing and producing tracks for Brandy, the Sugababes and the reconstituted Menudo.
James Fauntleroy, who worked on 24K Magic, is a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer who’s known Mars
since the early days. “The first day I met him I was doing a song, and this little guy with an Afro walks in like,
‘This is tight, let me sing on this!'” Fauntleroy recalls. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ He hadn’t done shit!
He was a star from Day One.
“Some artists are purely entertainers,” he says. “But [Bruno] is a real musician. He cares about how the bass and
the high hat sound. He literally could do it alone, like Prince.”
This doesn’t make songwriting any easier for him. “Bro, it’s the hardest,” Mars says. “Every beat has already been
made, every rhyme has already been said, every chord progression has already been done. I’m competing with
billions of other songs … It’s like winning the lottery – you just gotta get lucky.”
To illustrate his process, Mars cues up another new track, a seductive slow-jam called “Versace on the Floor.” “I
could play you six different versions of this song,” he says. He starts with the original demo, which he calls the
“poolside version.” (It does have a strong piña colada vibe.) The lyrics feature Mars telling his girl that they can
“fly through a storm on a unicorn … Make love on a mountain, bathe in a fountain.” He laughs as he listens back:
“I’m really promising!”
“So I’m smiling at these lines,” Mars says. “I play it for people and they’re smiling; it’s awesome. But what’s the
beat doing? We’re lounging. I don’t want to make poolside music. Let’s make it feel like these unicorns we’re
talking about.”
So they remixed the beat. Mars plays the next version, which features the same lyrics but a more epic musical
track. “So we get there with it,” he says, “and it’s good, it’s about to be on the album. And then it’s like … are
you sure?” There was still something bothering him. “We’re painting this picture – both in silk, I’m promising the
world. But I’m not singing. This is supposed to be a big ballad on the album, but I’m not giving it to ’em! If we’re
gonna really, dramatically slow things down, I’ve got to be singing some shit.”
So they started from scratch and wrote a whole melody. But that meant they had to compose all-new lyrics as
well. He plays the most recent iteration, a Boyz II Men–ish anthem that climaxes with an indelible hook: “Let’s
just kiss till we’re naked/Versace on the floor.” “At a certain point,” says Mars, “I needed to stop telling you we’re
gonna get down, and just get down.”
It’s Mars’ MO to tear songs apart like this. His “Grenade,” which was Number One for four weeks, was originally
British Invasion–style Sixties jangle pop, until Mars realized at the last minute that “it sucked” and revamped it
just before its release. (He plays me the original, and he is not incorrect. “And this was going to be my second
single!” he says, incredulously. “Thank God, right?”) Meanwhile, his hit “Locked Out of Heaven” started as a cha-
cha-style duet, à la Santana’s “Smooth.” Mars keeps that version on his laptop to remind himself that it’s a
process, and not to freak out. Even “Uptown Funk” was almost thrown out several times. “That shit was in the
trash can,” Mars says. He turns to his laptop and plays a messy early version, featuring an inexplicable hard-rock
breakdown and a chorus with Mars shouting, “Burn this motherfucker down!” “We spent months on that chorus,”
he says. “And then one day it was like, ‘Maybe we don’t have a chorus.’ ”
And sometimes it’s a single word that can make or break a song. Last year Mars collaborated with Adele for a
track on her newest album, 25, called “All I Ask.” They got on like gangbusters, knocked the whole thing out in
just two sessions. But they fought over one line in the second verse, where Adele sings, “Take me by the hand
while we do what lovers do.”
“We were aiming for that big, diva, ballad thing – that’s what I envisioned,” Mars says. “But ‘lovers’? I don’t know
if anybody really says ‘lovers.’ ‘Yeah, we’re lovers.’ ‘This is my lover.’ I was like, ‘Should we rethink that?’
“But [Adele] was so gangster about it,” he says. “She was like, ‘Nope. That’s what it has to be.’ And she was
right. It’s this grand word that makes the song bigger because no one says it. Because nobody talks like that, it
pops out. It’s not ‘what boyfriends-and-girlfriends do’ – it’s this over-the-top ‘lovers.’ Sometimes I play it on the
piano, and I look forward to singing that part. It’s fucking perfect.” The lesson: “Don’t try to be cool. Let it be
what it wants to be.”
In the end, Mars was sad to see the unicorn lyrics go. “Some of the slickest shit we ever wrote,” he says. “But I
will use that line one day,” he vows. “You’re gonna hear that on the fourth album.” 
“I just came from this school: patent-leather shoes, pinky ring, processed hair – showtime.”
Six weeks later, Mars arrives for lunch at an Italian restaurant down the hill from his house. The album is finally
in the mixing stage, and he’s eminently more relaxed. It also doesn’t hurt that he just got back from Lake Como,
in Italy, where he performed at the wedding of Spotify founder Daniel Ek. “But you weren’t supposed to know
about that,” Mars says, grinning. (The news got out when a guest Instagrammed it.) I ask him if he’s getting
prime placement on the Spotify home page in return. “They’re going to help with promotion,” he says sheepishly.
“And I got a nice little check.”
How nice?  Mars smiles. “It was beautiful there, near Lake Como.”
Mars can’t remember the last wedding he played. (“I think there was one in China?”) But it happens more
frequently than you might think. “I’ve been doing weddings since I was eight,” he says. “It’s 101. It’s back to
basics. What are you going to do at this bar mitzvah? Can you rip up a talent show at the high school
auditorium? It’s healthy to go back to that.”
In fact, he says, he and his band, the Hooligans, played a birthday party just last night. “In some sick Malibu
house,” he says. “There wasn’t anybody under 50 there. I looked back at my band, and I swear I got emotional.
These guys are dripping like we’re at Madison Square Garden!”
Mars comes by his showman hustle naturally. His dad, Peter Gene Hernandez Sr., was a percussionist from
Brooklyn who packed his congas and moved to Hawaii in the Seventies. He got a job playing drums in a
Polynesian revue at the Hilton in Waikiki, where he met Mars’ mom, Bernadette, a hula dancer and singer who’d
moved from the Philippines with her family as a girl. By the time Bruno came along a few years later, they’d
morphed into a family act: His dad led the band (“all these doo-wop guys from Brooklyn, these killers”); his mom
sang with some of his uncles; and his older sister and brother also made appearances. Mars, as is well known by
now, impersonated Elvis.
Growing up singing the King at hotel-dinner theater six nights a week is obviously boot camp for molding a
certain kind of entertainer. “I just came from this school: patent-leather shoes, pinky ring, processed hair –
showtime,” Mars says. As a result, he’s one of the few and-dance men around today, as comfortable serenading
stay-at-home moms on Ellen as trading verses with Mystikal or Big Sean. “This is something I never thought
about until recently,” he says. “But because of my upbringing performing for tourists, I had to entertain
everyone. Not just black people, not just white people, not just Asian people, not just Latin people. I had to
perform for anybody that came to Hawaii.”
When Mars was 11 or 12, his parents got divorced, and the show came to an end. His little sisters went to live
with his mom, and Bruno stayed with his dad. Things got a little rough.
“It was a family show,” he says. “So when that went away, the dynamic changed. They got divorced, sold the
house, my dad lost all his businesses. And we basically went from living in a good neighborhood to being fucking
homeless. That was a funky time. We were sleeping in a limo, but my dad, with his passion, would still go out
and try to push these shows on hotels, and he put it together.”
Mars never wanted to do anything but sing. “There was no Plan B,” he says. “You might have caught me at some
restaurant with a guitar – but no matter where I ended up, this is what it was going to be.” His unshakable faith
in his own talent has served him well, especially when it comes to dealing with people like the NFL. “God bless
the Super Bowl,” he says. “They hooked me up, they took a chance on me. But I had to keep reminding them
why they took a chance on me. You put that camera on my band and me, and I got you.”
He recounts a disagreement over the broadcast before his first Super Bowl gig. “They wanted to show a shot of
the audience wearing these light-up bracelets,” he says. “I told them, ‘If you take that camera off me, you’re
doing yourself a disservice.’ And what happened? They spent all this money on these things, and it didn’t work.”
Naturally, he was prepared for just such a mishap. “I’ve rehearsed the shit out of my band, so even if you put
cafeteria lighting on us, we’re still going to be doing it as if we had $5 million in production,” he says. “That’s the
school I was brought up in. It’s bar-band shit. Every smoke machine and laser light is just a bonus.”
Somewhat surprisingly, when Chris Martin first called Mars to ask if he’d perform with Coldplay at the 2016
halftime, he passed. “I told him I don’t think so,” Mars says. “I just felt like I’d just done it.” Martin persisted,
asking Mars to swing by the Malibu studio where he was working. “So I drove out there and he pitched it,” Mars
says. “‘You and Beyoncé, doing “Uptown Funk” – I want to be responsible for giving that gift to the world.’ That’s
what he said, in his sweet, charming, English way.”
Mars was still skeptical. “You’ve got to be careful with those [multi-artist] performances,” he says. “They do it a
lot on award shows, where you’ve got so many cameos but nothing solid.” He told Martin to talk to Beyoncé and
see what she thought. Martin’s response: “‘Let’s talk to her right now!'” He took out his phone and shot a video
of himself and Mars, then texted it to Beyoncé. To Mars’ surprise, she was in.
Mars says he got an education watching Beyoncé prepare. “She’s not fucking joking around,” he says. “She’s
going to get onstage and show everybody why she’s the best every single time. She’s got that monster in her.”
But the memory that stands out is more relatable. “Me and Beyoncé were both working on our diets, stressing
out,” he says. “Then the day before, we’re watching playback backstage, and she’s eating a bag of Cheetos. I’m
like, ‘That’s what you’re doing?'”
He mimes Beyoncé popping a Cheeto in her mouth. “She’s like, ‘There’s nothing more we can do these last two
days. It’s gonna be what it’s gonna be. So I’m gonna enjoy this bag of Cheetos.'”
One of the first songs Mars ever recorded came when he was four. It’s called “I Love You, Mom”; his dad
helped write it. It’s worth finding on YouTube, if you like cute things, or life. Here’s the first verse:
My name is Bruno, I’m only four years old
And at that age I have to do what I’m told …
I play guitar, but my fingers are too small
I try to play piano, but my feet can’t reach the floor
My mommy helps me with my voice
‘Cause a superstar singer is my first choice.
“I think it was for her birthday or Mother’s Day,” Mars says, smiling at the memory. “I gave it to her on cassette.
I don’t remember her reaction, but she probably bit my face off.” He smiles again. “She played that song
forever.”
Mars thinks he got a lot of his stage presence from his mom. “I would watch people just fall in love with her,” he
says. “She just had this gift. And she was such a ham – a comedian, almost.” Some of which presumably got
passed down to him? “Are you kidding? I’m a full pork chop!”
In May 2013, Mars was performing on a German TV show. He’d bought his mom an iPad, and she used it to
follow Bruno fan accounts so she could see photos and videos of him from around the world. “So I’m doing this
performance in Germany, and she texts me, like, ‘You need rest,'” he says, laughing. “‘Look at you. You got bags
under your eyes.'”
Mars flew home to Los Angeles. “And when I landed,” he says, “that’s when I got the call.” His mother had
suffered a sudden brain aneurysm; she was unconscious in a hospital in Honolulu. Mars didn’t even leave the
airport: He got back on a plane and flew straight to Hawaii. But his mother never woke up. She died a day later.
She was 55.
Mars pauses for a moment. “To this day, I don’t know how to handle it,” he says. “That piece of your heart is just
gone forever. I don’t even know how to talk about it with you. It’s a nightmare. It’s literally a nightmare.”
He says no one was worried about her health. “If anything, she was getting younger,” he says. “I’d just bought
her this house in Hawaii, and she would call me almost every day to tell me how much fun she’s having, she and
the grandkids are in the pool, running around in the yard. …” That made it even more incomprehensible. On one
hand, “I didn’t have to go through my mother suffering in the hospital for years,” he says. “But it’s like – she was
just bugging me about something. … That was the hardest part. That was the spike in the heart.”
In the weeks that followed, “I was in shambles,” Mars says. “I didn’t know what to do. There’s nothing you can
do. You just ball up and bawl your eyes out every day.” He had a world tour starting in three weeks, months of
concerts already booked. “I’d pray and ask, ‘What do you want me to do?'” he says. “And I felt like what she
wanted me to do was keep going. She wouldn’t want me to stop.”
I wanna jump rope, I wanna play Nintendo
But I just choose to write a new single
I sing it to my mom, sing it to my dad
I just hope I don’t sing bad …
I love you, Mom
You are my favorite girl
I love you, Mom
You’ll always be my favorite girl.
Mars thinks for a moment. “I’m confident that she’s looking down and smiling, you know?” he says. “And every
time I mess up onstage, I hear her. ‘You’re flat!’ ‘You missed that move!’ ‘Tell your brother to shave his
mustache!’ It’s all there.”
These days, Mars lives with Caban and their Rottweiler, Geronimo, in a reported $6.5 million mansion, which he
bought in 2014. Caban designs a swimwear line called J. Marie; she and Mars have been together for six years,
since before his first album dropped. I ask if he’s ever going to make it official. “Jesus!” he says, laughing. “She’s
my best friend. My rock. What’s wrong with that? We’re just happy.” A pause. “Until she reads this.” Mars doesn’t
go out much, and when he does, he keeps a low profile. “You’re never going to see me Instagramming at a
party,” he says. “I don’t take my phone, because I’m going to lose my shit.” Mostly he prefers to keep to himself,
avoiding the drama some stars seem to thrive on. “Drama?” he says. “I thought when we made it, that means
we’re drama-free. I don’t play that game. I don’t want to say something stupid and mess this all up.”
Still, sometimes he can’t help but get dragged into it. Like a few years ago, when he won Best Male Video at the
MTV Video Music Awards for his song “Locked Out of Heaven.” Afterward, Kanye West went off about it at a
show in Brooklyn. “I’m sitting there. … I’m watching Drake perform, I see Bruno Mars perform,” West recalled.
“And then they start giving out awards and shit, and Bruno Mars won all the motherfucking awards! Can’t no
motherfucking networks try to gas everybody up so they can sell some product with the prettiest motherfucker
out?”
True to form, Mars doesn’t want to talk about it at first. (“That guy has so much press around him. I need my
own damn press!”) But eventually he caves. “I won one award!” he says, laughing. (Actually, it was two that
night.) He adds, “But he was right about the pretty part. It’s Kanye – bottom line, at the end of the day, we need
Kanye. But what he said wasn’t a sting. You can come at me all you want – I’ve set myself up for that. But I am
my own biggest critic. Whatever anyone says to me, they don’t know shit.
“But me and him, we’re cool,” Mars says. “He called me and apologized.” (A representative for West had no
comment.) “Kanye loves me, man. You know that. Who doesn’t? I’m Bruno Mars!”
In the first week of October, Mars is back at the studio again for what he hopes will be the last time. The album
is finally, officially done, and now he’s just worrying about the fonts. Tomorrow he flies to the East Coast, where
he’s performing on Saturday Night Live. He’s also dropping his first single, “24K Magic”; he wanted to put it out a
day later – on his 31st birthday – but he says Apple needed him to do it on a Friday.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m in the music business 10 years too late,” Mars says. “How many platforms do we have?
Whose money are we giving to who? It’s this weird game. You don’t even buy songs anymore – it’s just a
subscription, it’s Netflix. And while we’re in the process of figuring it all out, I’m here trying to make albums.”
And don’t even get him started on artists doing big streaming exclusives. “Everybody who wants to come to the
party should be able to come to the party,” he says. “Don’t you want your music to be for everybody? But this is
the way it goes. Apparently this is how it was when records turned into cassettes, and cassettes turned into CDs,
and CDs turned into MP3s. And you don’t want to be that old man going, ‘Vinyl!’ … But the other day I was doing
my packaging – putting the paper in the sleeve, taking the CD out – and I got a little sad. Because this is
probably the last time I’ll be doing this. It’s dying. Three years from now, this is done.”
And when the next thing comes, he’ll probably be the guy whose VR hologram gets beamed into the Singularity,
or whatever. Because that’s just the kind of professional he is.
It’s times like these when Mars likes to remember some of the best advice he ever got. It came courtesy of Lionel
Richie of all people, backstage after a concert in Germany. Richie was playing at the same place the next day,
and invited Mars to come to his show.
“He walked in, so cool, hair whipped,” Mars recalls. “And he goes, ‘Hey, Bruno – you like going to the front of the
line, right? You like not waiting in line at a restaurant? I know you do. I love that shit, too. Don’t stop. Don’t
stop.'”
As Mars understood it, Richie was telling him: I’ve been in your position, top of the world. And I’ve also seen
what comes after. “I’m sure that’s what he was trying to say,” Mars says. “He knows the ups and downs of this
business. He was saying, ‘The moment you stop, you’ll see. You’ll see. So don’t stop.'” Mars smiles. “‘Keep going.
Keep going.'” 

Bruno Mars: The Golden Child

The secret origin of a natural-born pop star
It’s almost too perfect, this moment – but for him, there’s really no such thing. He’s gliding west on Sunset
Boulevard in his big black late-model Cadillac with tinted windows, straight toward an actual sunset blooming
pink at the horizon. It’s a glorious Saturday evening in West Hollywood, and why wouldn’t it be? Bruno
Mars has yet another song on its way to Number One, an arena tour all booked up, a girl he loves and
absolutely no worries, nothing weighing on his mind. Except the idea of getting sick and canceling a show. He
never could stand missing a show.
He bought the Cadillac – Bessie, he calls it – immediately after getting his first big check from his label. It’s an old
man’s idea of a pop star’s ride, but it suits him. Mars is an old-fashioned kind of pop star, a dimpled, sharp-
dressed, elastic-voiced, lady-charming showman who would’ve been just as successful circa 1960 (though he’d
have probably sung the word “motherfucker” less frequently). “I’m old-school,” a random middle-aged dude told
him at a bowling alley yesterday, “but you’ve got it.”
Mars flips on the radio, tuned to a retro-R&B station playing Janet Jackson‘s “Nasty.” He blasts it, singing along
with the synth riff. “Jimmy Jam, right?” he says, correctly naming one of its producers. Mars’ window is rolled
down, and we hear a faint, feminine Bruuuno! from a passing car. “Run!” Mars says, flashing very white teeth.
Unlike fellow stratospheric-pitch purveyor Geddy Lee, Mars doesn’t speak like an ordinary guy: His voice is high,
reedy and sufficiently euphonious that people have assumed he’s a singer just from hearing him talk.
Over natty brown slacks, Mars is wearing a short-sleeve aloha shirt with flowers and birds on it – since he’s from
Hawaii, he can get away with it. On his feet are crocodile loafers (no socks, per usual); on his head is a brown
fedora. He wears the hats largely to avoid dealing with his tightly curled hair, which has gotten long enough to
do a Sideshow Bob thing.
Much like Jessica Alba, Mars is panethnically, almost futuristically, good-looking: It’s as if his face was designed
by a focus group. The golden-skinned child of a Puerto Rican/Jewish dad and a Filipino mom, he never thought
much about race in Hawaii. “Everyone’s kind of mixed up there, kind of brown because it’s sunny,” he says. “So it
was a shock for me when I came out here.” He was taken aback when record execs had trouble categorizing
him. “They were talking about ‘What radio station would play this?’ And it basically boils down to ‘Who’s gonna
buy your albums? Black people or white people?'”
As traffic crawls on, he gestures across the street. “I used to live right down there, on Mansfield – it was really
bad.” That was nine or so years ago, when he first moved to L.A. One time, he recalls, he pulled up to his
parking space and found it already occupied by a homeless guy. “It was a dude taking a shit in my stall,” he says.
“No toilet paper, nothing! It was just foul, and no one cleaned it up. So every morning, I got reminded of where
I’m at.”
Started from the bottom, now he’s here – except Mars actually started closer to the upper-middle. He’s 27 and
has been in show business since he began impersonating Elvis Presley with his family’s band at age two. That’s a
quarter-century of performing, which means he’s got more stage experience than, say, Justin Timberlake – and
his stagecraft-savvy parents put him through a homespun version of Motown’s charm school literally from birth.
His dad, Peter “Dr. Doo-Wop” Hernandez, recalled dimming the lights in the delivery room as his wife gave birth,
so it was “almost like a nightclub,” and playing “oldies but goodies” on a cassette boombox to usher Bruno – born
Peter G. Hernandez – into the world.
At four years old, Mars appeared as a tiny Elvis in Honeymoon in Vegas and was interviewed by Pauly Shore on
MTV. By age six, he had appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show . Throughout grade school, he sang with his family’s
band in front of a packed club for two shows a night, expanding his repertoire to Frankie Lymon and Little
Anthony. But around age 11, as he’ll explain, it all went away. It’s not a stretch to say he’s spent the past 16
years trying to get it back.
He pulls into an underground parking garage, and we’re whisked up to the penthouse dining room of the West
Hollywood branch of the members-only club Soho House, where he’s given the best table in the place, under the
branches of an olive tree. The sun has set, and the picture windows show most of L.A – including his own house,
somewhere in the Hollywood Hills – glittering beneath his feet.
Mars orders us each a cocktail that turns out to be not only super sweet but served in a  Sex and the City-ready
cosmo glass. “Now we’re really on a man date,” he says. We both decide on the same fish entree. “I’m gonna get
the cod,” he tells the waitress with a smirk, “and my boyfriend is gonna get the same thing.”
When Mars’ onstage assurance spills over into real life, he can come off as charmingly cocky: the hardest-
working bro in show business. But he can also seem strikingly insecure, seeking approval in a manner that’s
maybe not surprising for a guy who grew up expecting two shows’ worth of applause each night. We’ve been
talking for hours at Soho House when he suddenly asks me, in a soft voice, “Do you like the album?”
I tell him I do, and mean it – his style-hopping second album,  Unorthodox Jukebox, is a leap forward from his
debut, Doo Wops & Hooligans, which was weighed down by soggy ballads.
But he’s not satisfied: “Yeah? What songs?” He doesn’t relax until I name four or five. Mentioning the surging sex
jam “Gorilla” earns me a fist bump.
‘Double time! Half-time! Break it down!”
It’s not easy, these days, to find hip young musicians fluent in spit-shined, turn-on-a-dime Famous Flames-style
dynamics – but many of the guys in Mars’ fiery eight-piece touring band grew up playing in gospel churches,
where those skills are still mandatory. A few hours before our dinner, Mars puts his guys’ chops to the test in a
Hollywood rehearsal studio, burning through a large chunk of the set for their upcoming tour. “Don’t it feel good,
baby,” Mars croons in his silken tenor, as they ease into a vamp. He starts hyping up the nonexistent audience:
“Does it feel good on the left side? What about the right side now?”
The band’s flashy drummer, a beefy dude named Eric Hernandez, is ever-ready to crash a cymbal or cut to
silence at the slightest flick of Mars’ arm – and he was Mars’ easiest recruit: He’s Bruno’s older brother, who
abandoned a 10-year career as a police officer to continue the family-band tradition. “I knew, I was like, ‘If I
don’t give this up and I’m watching some other guy play drums for my brother, that’s going to eat me up,'” says
Eric. At five feet five, Mars is maybe seven inches shorter than him. “But I mean, honestly, I wish I had his
swag,” Eric adds. “I’m actually taking tips from that little guy.”
Laid-back as he may be, Mars expects perfection. “I’ve never seen someone be so meticulous in my entire life,
when it comes to anything,” says Ari Levine, who, along with Phil Lawrence, formed the songwriting-and-
production team known as the Smeezingtons with Mars. “Even when we remodeled our studio, if one thing was
off” by an inch, it literally would drive him crazy. It’s borderline neurosis, but in the best way possible.” They
spent three months, for instance, trying to come up with a second verse for “Moonshine.”
Mars acknowledges that he yells during rehearsals. “I always tell everybody that we finally get to enjoy all the
hard work that we’ve done when we play and when we sing. So don’t fuck up our good time, you know what I
mean?”
Right now, Mars is fixated on a two-song stretch of the set, where the dub-reggae-influenced track “Show Me” is
meant to move seamlessly into his earlier tune “Our First Time.” He’s also unhappy with the band’s synchronized
moves during the song – he wants them to be choreographed without actually looking like they are. He walks
down three carpeted steps, lights an American Spirit and watches from in front, where he determines that it’s the
guitarist, Phred, who’s not nailing the dance. “We’re spending way too much time on this shit,” Mars says,
eventually – and ends up dropping the moves altogether.
The rehearsal soon devolves into a jam session, with Mars sitting at a keyboard singing and playing some
of Prince‘s “Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” Afterward, he says he copped its feel for the indelible hook to his
own breakthrough song, “Nothin’ on You.” “We could do a ‘Beautiful’ medley,” he jokes, and then immediately
does it a cappella, jumping from “You Are So Beautiful” to “Wonderful Tonight” to James Blunt’s ‘You’re
Beautiful.”
Back onstage, Mars plays a synthesizer version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” a.k.a. Elvis‘ Vegas-era intro music,
then jumps behind the drum kit. Phred kicks into Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire,” and Mars plays a credible approximation of
Mitch Mitchell’s jazzy drum part. He doesn’t do this in the actual show for fear of coming off as a circus act.
“Bruno’s got good feel on the drums,” says his brother, before adding with a laugh, “but I blow him away.”
Finally, Mars lets the band go for the day – it’s time to embark on his man date. “Good job, guys,”he says. “We’ll
change everything on Monday.”
Much like Alvy Singer, Bruno Mars never had a latency period: He was always into girls. As a kindergartner, he
was mesmerized by the pretty singers in glittery dresses he’d see backstage. “I was like, ‘These girls don’t look
like the girls I go to school with,'” he recalls, eyes lighting up.
Right from the start, he loved everything about performing with his family’s band, the Love Notes. “I would look
forward to getting out of school,” he says. “Just looking at the clock, waiting for it to hit 2:15.” Mars would
memorize videotapes of Elvis, James Brown and Michael Jackson, and to this day, he plays Brown’s T.AM.I.
performance or Hendrix at Woodstock or Prince singing “Purple Rain” before he goes onstage.
One night when Mars was five, he forgot to pee before the show, and found himself wetting his jumpsuit while
he sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The audience tried not to laugh, and his mom cried – afterward, his parents
briefly wondered if they were making a mistake. Mars himself never wavered.
The Love Notes, who specialized in doo-wop and other Fifties music, were as successful as a local cover band
could be. Mars’ dad, Peter, paid the group members $1,000 a week at their height, according to one member,
family friend Bobby Brooks Wilson. Peter was also doing well as an entrepreneur, with businesses ranging from a
temporary-tattoo parlor to two huge memorabilia shops. Mars’ dad is handsome and smooth-talking – he met
Mars’ mother, Bernadette, at a Polynesian revue. “He was a Latin percussionist,” recalls Mars. “Mom was a hula
dancer. And he put the charm on her.”
At the peak of his success, Peter had seven Cadillacs, and the family lived in a big house in Kahala. “Bruno had a
room the size of most people’s living rooms,” recalls Wilson. “And he had a little drum set, a little guitar, a little
piano, you know, some percussion. He’d take me in his room: ‘Bobby, look! I can play this!'” Wilson remembers
Mars pouting backstage when he was seven or eight – he was furious because he had a bad cold, and his mom
had benched him for the night.
Around the time Bruno was 11, the band broke up, and his parents’ marriage did the same. For reasons Mars
doesn’t elaborate upon, his father’s many businesses also tanked. All their money was gone, and Mars moved
with his dad to “the slums of Hawaii.” It was a tough adjustment. “But you know what? I realized I wouldn’t
trade it for anything, man,” he says, sipping a beer in Soho House. “Because I feel like I can enjoy this so much.”
Mars had been accustomed to being a star among his old classmates, but at his new school he found himself
being bullied. He acquired a nickname, “Peter Pan Hyma Dingier” – the first part playing off his pixieish looks, the
second part still inexplicable. “Even the nerds were calling me that!” He laughs. “Oh, man, it was rough. I didn’t
even want to go to school. But then the guys that called me that became my good friends.” He was popular for
the rest of his school days – his best friends were the alpha jocks – but he never forgot what it felt like to be an
outcast.
Through it all, Mars’ dad never lost faith in what he seemed to see as his boy’s destiny. One day, he and Bruno
made a last-ditch effort at selling the remains of his Elvis memorabilia at a swap meet, earning a total of $125. At
the end of the day, Bruno pointed out a Fender guitar at the next stall priced at $115 – and his dad bought it for
him on the spot. “It was literally all the money he had,” Mars says.
His dad taught him Ventures, Chuck Berry and Carlos Santana songs on guitar, even as Mars was getting into
more modern music, gravitating toward the Neptunes’ and Timbaland‘s production. His dad started up a band
again; Mars would get up and sing songs like “My Girl,” and also opened with his own ‘NSync-style boy band, the
School Boys.
Through it all, Mars’ dad never lost faith in what he seemed to see as his boy’s destiny. One day, he and Bruno
made a last-ditch effort at selling the remains of his Elvis memorabilia at a swap meet, earning a total of $125. At
the end of the day, Bruno pointed out a Fender guitar at the next stall priced at $115 – and his dad bought it for
him on the spot. “It was literally all the money he had,” Mars says.
His dad taught him Ventures, Chuck Berry and Carlos Santana songs on guitar, even as Mars was getting into
more modern music, gravitating toward the Neptunes’ and Timbaland‘s production. His dad started up a band
again; Mars would get up and sing songs like “My Girl,” and also opened with his own ‘NSync-style boy band, the
School Boys.
It’s also the most personal song ever released by Mars, who’s been wary of getting too confessional. “I’m not a
fan of self-indulgence,” he says. “For me, music is ‘I want to feel good’ or ‘I want to dance,’ as opposed to me
singing about me growing up in Hawaii and ‘my struggle to relate.'” He mockingly sings that last bit. “Ain’t
nobody trying to hear that. I’m not even trying to hear that, and that’s my story!”
With extreme reluctance, Mars reveals that he wrote “When I Was Your Man” about his current girlfriend, model
Jessica Caban – he felt in danger of losing her at the time. The song started with simple chords and a line that
reflected his regrets: “I should’ve bought you flowers.” He’s so awkward at talking about this, though, that at one
point he actually buries his head in his arms on the table. “I’m not answering any questions about this song,” he
protests. “It’s too close to home.”
The song’s narrative is exaggerated: Caban never actually left him for another dude. In real life, he says, “It was
a happy ending.” But he finds the song hard to perform. ‘You’re pouring your guts out, and you record it. And
you’re so proud of it. And then when you perform it, you know, you’re bringing up these emotions again. It’s just
like bleeding!”
With his tour approaching, his relationship is about to be long-distance again.
“When you find that one, you buy them flowers and you hold their damn hand,” he says, quoting himself. Even if
it’s over Skype? “Yeah,” he says, singing, “I should’ve Skyped you, and gave you a tweet.”
In his early years in L.A, he ran pretty wild: That’s what “Young Girls,” on the new album, is about. “You begin to
lose yourself, you know,” he says. “In that Mike Tyson documentary, he says something like, a lot of men think
the more women they get, the better. But he says you lose a piece of yourself with every time you do that. And
that’s true. If you’re out there wilding out, drinking and partying, that’s not real life.” Now, he can see marriage
and kids in the future. “That’s happiness,” he says.
Mars was a late bloomer as a songwriter – it was the final piece of his puzzle. He left Hawaii after graduating
(barely) from high school, signing a deal with Motown, which turned out to have no idea what to do with him. As
that collapsed, he realized he’d have to start writing, and hooked up with Lawrence, an accomplished lyricist. The
intention was to help Mars get signed again, but when they ran out of money, they added Levine and plugged
into L.A’s hits-for-hire scene, writing for Sugababes and Sean Kingston. Two of their best productions – “Nothin’
on You” and “Billionaire,” essentially choruses and beats, with blank spots for rappers – became smashes, with
Mars singing the choruses. They rushed to get his first album out while the songs were still on the charts.
Now, Mars is pretty much done with writing songs for other artists. “That part of me kind of died,” he says.
“Because, you know, it’s not a sport.” He says listeners are tiring of the very “L.A. circuit” that led to his success.
“I think people want to hear the artist talking,” he says.
Mars has moved outdoors, to his palm-tree-laden backyard, where a swimming pool glitters under the bluest of
blue skies. Today, as on most mornings, he woke up around 10 and swam with his Rottweiler. He’s dressed
down, in a Dolce & Gabbana black sweatshirt with Tyson’s face on it, long faux-acid-washed shorts and leather
sandals.
At the bottom of the pool, a little cleaning robot putters away. Mars is sitting on a deck chair, looking out to the
mountains in the distance. He’s idly strumming a blond Guild acoustic (when I admire it, he tries to give it to me
as a gift). A moment ago, he was playing Santana‘s “Europa”; now he’s strumming through fun.’s “We Are
Young,” which he kind of thinks he should have written: “Those are doo-wop chords I’ve known my whole life. I
heard that right off the bat and was like, ‘Shit, they did it.'” He’s trying to pull back on the reins of his ambition,
though. “I’m already jonesing to get into a studio,” he says, letting out a sigh. “But I’m trying to enjoy the
moment more – I used to be really caught up in, like, envisioning my life backward – like, this is where I wanna
take the music” He lights a cigarette – he hopes to quit soon, even though he’s not overly concerned about the
effect on his voice (“I could stand to lose a couple notes from the pixie range – the gnome range”).
Lately, he’s found himself missing Hawaii. “Everyone’s so content out there,” he says. ‘You’re out here to be
somebody. No one’s just living. In Hawaii, the mentality is more like, ‘Yo, we’re in paradise right now, and we’re,
you know, living.'”
He’s gotten back everything he lost and then some, and the truth is, he hadn’t planned much beyond this point.
“I don’t know where I’m gonna end up,” he says. “But I want to keep writing songs, man. There’s a feeling you
get from writing a good song that you don’t get from anything else. You forever want that feeling, the same way
you forever want to eat good food, you forever want to be in love.”
He’s never even imagined life without the crowds and the applause. “It’s been with me for so long,” he says. ‘You
know, it’s always been, All right, see you later, I’m gonna go do the show'” But there’s no show tonight, no
rehearsals this afternoon – for once, there’s nowhere he needs to be. Mars leans back in his chair, strumming his
guitar by his precisely arranged palm trees under the vast, cloudless sky. Everything’s pretty much perfect, and
for a moment, he’s just living.