“It’s More Satisfying”: Thomas Mars on Phoenix’s Live Show

While preparing for his latest tour, Thomas Mars, lead singer of French indie pop band Phoenix, spent a lot of time in different theaters admiring the drapery. “I went to the New York City Ballet quite a bit, and I fell in love with the curtain,” Mars says. “And then I fell in love with a lot of curtains.”

Inspired by the grandeur of storied venues and the ingenuity of the New York City Ballet’s ever-changing backdrops (“It’s pretty magical that it reveals a set for every act”), Mars and his Grammy Award–winning group set out to create a digitally minded live show.

“We thought that we could do this on tour with screens, that every song could be its own little world,” he says.

Touring in support of its seventh album, Alpha Zulu, recorded during the pandemic at the Louvre Museum, and out this Friday, the result is “really like an opera,” he says.  

“There’s a big set, and there’s a curtain, which is one of my favorite things. The curtain is down when we start the show so we can be onstage and hear the crowd…before the show starts, which is such a nice feeling. It’s more satisfying, it feels like you’re putting on a play as well as a show,” Mars notes. 

Though the concert production itself may, as Mars says, “upgrade” ideas from the past, the band’s latest release was born during a period of unfamiliarity.

“It took us more time to make it, but we didn’t have to look for inspiration, we didn’t have to look for a concept. The theme came to us. We were not searching for a theme…because of how heavy and dark the times were. I’m super excited to put it out because we will play the songs live, which is something we didn’t think we could do two years ago,” Mars adds.

In those two years, streaming has changed the face of the music industry, propelling existing artists to the top of the charts and launching careers with bite-sized snippets of songs and audio memes, upending how listeners discover new music. 

“What I’m more worried about is more the algorithm, the way that music is presented to you, that there’s less,” Mars says of the sea change. “I listen to the radio a lot because I never thought I would like music to be curated to me but I like when someone is introducing [new music to] me. I like happy accidents. I don’t want my own algorithm, the version of myself telling me what to listen to. I’m bored by myself, so I don’t want myself to be involved in the process.”

But worries aside, one example of a TikTok success story, Steve Lacy, has a fan in Mars. 

“I like Steve Lacy,” he says. “The fact that he’s making music on his cell phone. It’s pretty refreshing…. I feel like if I was a teenager now, that’s what I’d be doing.”