Mark Ronson gave the public a small taste of his upcoming fourth album Uptown Special with the single "Uptown Funk" featuring Bruno Mars. The pair performed the tune on Saturday Night Live at the end of 2014, and it even climbed to No. 1 on the United Kingdom's singles chart and No. 2 on Billboard's Hot 100. The musician/producer took some time to reflect on his year with The Guardian as well as one of his favorite collaborators, Amy Winehouse.

While he was in the studio working on the new album, due out later this month and which features guest spots by Stevie Wonder, Ronson claimed his health declined due to his exhaustive work effort. In one instance, he even fainted.

"We did 45 takes of it and I just couldn't get it, it sounded like horrible bulls--t, so we went to lunch, walked down to a restaurant. Everyone was saying: 'Dude, what's wrong with you? You've gone totally white.' Because I was going on pretending everything was just fine; you don't want to admit that you're just not there, you're not where you want to be. And I went to the toilet and just ... fainted. I threw up, and fainted. They had to come and carry me out of the toilet," he said.

The album will be a follow-up to his 2010 release Record Collection. Ronson has kept busy in recent years, working on albums by Paul McCartney, Rufus Wainwright and Mars. Still, Ronson's greatest contribution to pop music might be Winehouse's groundbreaking 2006 release Back to Black.

"No one's ever going to compare to Amy because of the talent she had and the unique bond we had, that rapport, that energy in the studio," he said about the singer, who died in 2011. "'Valerie' was done in two hours. Her thing was so effortless in a way, because ... well, because she would just ... it was just what came out — that's it. 'That's it, I'm not changing anything, that's what came out of me and it's good enough.' And every time it was obviously good enough, and special. It was just ... a thing."

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