Mark Ronson

And I was like, ah.

And even in my, like, 10-year-old brain, I saw the song Wonderful Tonight on there.

And I was like, that is an appropriate song for now.

That is, like, my mom looks wonderful in her dress, and it seems romantic, and I'm going to put that on.

I quickly queued it up.

You know, I had some crazy...

80s cassette deck with an auto cue and found the song hit play and I remember standing inside the house looking through the window as my stepdad pulls my mom in for like a slow dance and the moon and you know I even say in the book my memory here is blurry and it might be a little Hollywooded out but it was like he brought her in she's luminescent in this dress and I just stood there watching this scene slightly drunk off this feeling of like oh my god you know this is my music but

playing out there, but also it was this thing.

It was like the first time in my life I genuinely have a memory of having done something right.

So, you know, obviously at that moment that wasn't like my Spider-Man Genesis story.

It wasn't something like, ah, now I'm going to be a DJ.

I didn't even put this together probably until I was writing the book, but it really is one of my most sort of visceral early childhood memories.

Well, I think it's one of those things, you know, when I was 18, starting out as a DJ in clubs in New York, music was just my passion.

So I'm chasing this thing at night because if you're a DJ, obviously you work at night.

But then as I was writing the book and I started to piece together, like, wait, this really tight-knit crew of maybe 200 people that we saw all the time that were all a little broken in their own way or maybe...

It's too much of a generalization to say everybody was like, you know, falling apart or a vampire.

But there was this thing that just the people that I saw out night after night were people that the daytime was just like a little too like the bright light of day.

It was like too much for people.

Maybe they were running from something, running towards something, looking for community.

So I realized, you know, I came up with the term night people because I thought that applied to our little cracked community of people.