“We grew up in Versailles,” Mars recounts, “where the weight of the past is so strong that the only way to exist is to be a little bratty.” As a result, Phoenix’s members came into consciousness immersed in the rupture between high history and art and a sort of simplified populism better befitting postcards and amusement parks. Such cultural contradictions not only dominate Mars’ thoughts but also ostensibly provide an apt mission statement behind his band’s aesthetic: dada, pop art, art-rock with doubtless popular appeal. 
     For a band whose reputation is rooted largely (and understandably) in a couple contagious singles from each album (“Too Young”, “Everything Is Everything”, “Long Distance Call”), Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix marks possibly the quartet’s most complete record to date. Its ten tracks may not vastly depart from the band’s now dependable sound; but Mars’ swooning croon and the band’s soft-rock polish mixed with some modest doses of spiky guitar-work (invoking the Strokes) and disco synths (partly guided by album co-producer and “fifth member” Philippe Zdar of Cassius-fame) reach their zenith on “1901”, “Fences”, and “Lisztomania”, among other such standouts. “The more we do music the more we want to do something that no other bands can do,” Mars modestly proclaims. “It is our favorite to have something unique.” 
     Speaking of “Lisztomania”, the single, in both sound and theme, seems to represent a microcosm of the larger clashes and crashes defining the album, notwithstanding Mars’ insistence that he doesn’t do concept albums and that all of  his songs are “hermetic”. Despite the belief currently pervading the blogosphere, “Lisztomania” has no direct correspondence to the 1975 Ken Russell film of the same name, starring Roger Daltrey as the pre-modern pop idol Franz Liszt. “I saw [the film] before so I’m sure it influenced me in some way,” Mars admits. Nevertheless, he is quick to recognize the man himself, as well as his indulgent lifestyle, his charismatic performances that could move fans (predominantly female) into throes of ecstasy, and his redemptive relationship to the city of Paris, as more substantial fodder for his songwriting. 
     “When I read a [Liszt] biography, it was really a biography about Paris. How Paris saved him,” Mars says. “He was a rock star [who] lost everything. He lost his dad, he lost his love, he lost everything. Then the revolution in Paris [the July Revolution of 1830] came, and he embraced it. That was something super appealing to us. It was romantic.”
     Mars says he was also drawn to the seemingly anachronistic images of “crowds going crazy for” a classical pianist who more closely resembled what Mars regards as “a rock star” and how such a rock ‘n’ roll fervor subverts the “sophistication” popularly ascribed to the genre and its purveyors. Mars similarly points to Blair Tindall’s recent drug-abuse and sex-heavy memoir Mozart in the Jungle as further evidentiary deconstruction of the symphony as sophisticated. Once more, Mars fittingly summons his own childhood in Versailles, a place he imagines “as a museum that’s dead [and which] people like for the wrong reasons.”