The first time Ron and Russell Mael saw San Francisco, they were wide-eyed kids from L.A.
Their parents brought them north as tourists, and the city immediately lodged itself in their imaginations: cable cars rattling up hills, the painted lanterns of Chinatown, and the seemingly impossible geometry of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Years later, it was San Francisco on the silver screen—Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, Hitchcock’s Vertigo—that deepened its mystique for the brothers who would become Sparks.
“Growing up in L.A., San Francisco was always an exotic place,” Russell told 48 Hills. “We still love its iconic sites. On a musical level, San Francisco has always been supportive of Sparks with great audiences. We didn’t get there on the last tour, so fans were rightly upset. We’re making up for it this time.”
That make-good arrives with the MAD! Tour, landing at the Golden Gate Theatre on September 27. For Bay Area fans who last saw Sparks in San Francisco in 2022, their return feels long overdue. This time around, Sparks return not only with an extensive catalog but also with a record that carries present-tense voltage.
MAD!, the band’s 28th studio album, issued last spring on Transgressive Records, pores over modern texture—tattoos, branded backpacks, the social choreography of small talk—with Ron’s sly lyricism.
“Running Up A Tab At The Hotel For The Fab” signals Anna Delvey–style deception, asking, “Will you visit me in Rykers?” Lead single “Do Things My Own Way” drops a perfectly Maelian snapshot—“Howard Hughes in Jordan 2s”—while doubling as a manifesto.
Across the tracklist, MAD! threads familiar Sparks motifs into fresh shapes. “A Long Red Light” sits suspended, caught in the haze of going nowhere—a mood that echoes back to Sparks staples like “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’?” and “Your Call Is Very Important to Us, Please Hold.” Meanwhile, “Drowned in a Sea of Tears” twists the knife more quietly—a guarded woman, a narrator powerless to help, and, for once, a story that doesn’t deliver the band’s trademark late-game surprise. Then, “My Devotion” changes the tone—stately, hymnal, with a slow-bloom warmth over synths. Musically, the record maps Sparks’ expansive musical atlas—synth pop, art rock, and electronic opera—styles the duo helped invent or bend into new angles.
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Russell hears a different charge this time, a line running straight from lyric to feeling. “Hopefully, we’re connecting emotionally with all the albums, but this one has more sincerity,” he says. “Songs like ‘My Devotion to You’ and ‘Drown in a Sea of Tears’ are more direct lyrically, and they relate more closely to the melodic side of the music. People are responding that those songs feel like they’re about them, too.”
That directness even touches numbers that seem feather-light on paper. “A Little Bit of Light Banter” starts with the smallest of spurs—throwaway conversation—and finds something human inside it.
“Who would think to make a song about light banter?” says Russell. “Hopefully, it’s a fresh approach to relationship songs, which have long been a staple in pop music. The knack is finding new angles to express sentiments that have always been around.”
Elsewhere, Sparks pull meaning from the most ordinary objects—even a back-to-school staple on “Jansport Backpack.” On the operatic track, the popular school bag, which the brothers noticed on schoolgirls’ shoulders across Tokyo on a recent trip, becomes a grand symbol of the tragic end of a relationship.
For a band that isn’t afraid of a multiplicity of meanings, the album’s title is appropriate.
“It has obvious connotations of being angry or crazy, and it suits the music on this album well,” Russell says. “It also fits the insanity of what’s happening in the world now.”.
Even if the band sidesteps blunt politics, they see the act of making music as its own stance, at a time when art and art funding are undervalued.
“We don’t like to be obvious, politically—it feels too easy,” says Russell. “But people who like Sparks know where we’re at.”
That framework—art as counterstatement—has always harmonized with San Francisco, a city that reliably makes room for the experimental, the theatrical, and the arch. Sparks’ relationship with Bay Area audiences rests on that shared appetite for ideas that break form but land with feeling. Part of the bond is the band’s commitment to surprise.
“The goal is always to do something that shakes people up,” Russell says. “We want someone who knows nothing about Sparks to pick up this album and feel it sounds contemporary and provocative—not like it comes from a band with a 28-album history. The challenge is to preserve the Sparks universe—the vocals, the lyrical character—while framing it freshly.”
It’s an old-school attitude dating back to the making of the band’s 1972 self-titled debut album, produced by Todd Rundgren. The prog-rock legend warned the duo at the time: “Don’t listen to anybody; don’t water it down.” Sparks has lived and worked by that ethos ever since.
MAD! opens with “Do Things My Own Way,” and that’s still the Maelian instruction manual: take the everyday, turn it until it refracts, and aim for the heart as much as the mind.
San Francisco’s artistic legacy—psychedelia, punk, drag, and experimental performance—has long provided a fitting backdrop for Sparks’ own agile theater of ideas. The duo became a fixture on local FM radio and appeared twice at Berkeley Community Theatre in the ’70s, before truly breaking through with their first SF gig at North Beach’s The Stone in 1982, where they toured behind Angst in My Pants, delivering fan favorites like the title track, “Eaten by the Monster of Love,” “Sextown U.S.A.,” and “I Predict.”
And because Sparks can never resist a flourish, when asked for a prediction for the end of this year, Russell offers a parting bet pitched somewhere between bravado and wish: “By the end of the year, Sparks will be the number one band in the world and Time Magazine’s People of the Year.”
Tongue-in-cheek? Of course. But also a challenge, daring listeners to keep pace.
SPARKS September 27. Golden Gate Theatre, SF. Tickets and more info here.
