Songfacts®:

• "Do Things My Own Way" is Sparks' version of a mission statement written in guitar riffs and handclaps. Released January 30, 2025 as the lead single from their 28th album, MAD!, it's a breezy, swaggering reminder that Ron and Russell Mael have been delightfully peculiar since bell-bottoms were mainstream and cassette tapes were cutting-edge. You can hear the same eccentric DNA running all the way back to 1974's "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us," a glam-pop gunfight set to falsetto yelps; and stretching forward into more recent oddities like "Hippopotamus" (2017), which manages to fit an entire menagerie into a bathtub; or "The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte" (2023), where existential crisis is served with a frothy top.
• Russell Mael told The Sun that Sparks' "my own way" approach has been their guiding philosophy since their 1971 debut, when their producer Todd Rungren wisely told them not to sand off their eccentric edges. "Don't succumb to outside influences, keep your vision," he said.
  
  Sparks have done exactly that. In a 2025 interview with NME, Russell Mael said: "It's been our unspoken mantra from day one. We're proud that we haven't succumbed or veered off course from maintaining the Sparks universe. Not succumbing to outside influences is what has kept Sparks pure through this long a career."
• Visually, the track got its own surreal playground courtesy of director Ambar Navarro and digital artist Dillon Petrillo, who built a bizarre, animated world where pianos tumble from skyscrapers. Sparks, never missing a gag, dryly suggested they hoped the video would "finally start a meaningful dialogue about the dangers of pianos falling out of tall buildings." Navarro had previously worked with the Lemon Twigs and Weyes Blood, but Sparks gave her perhaps her strangest brief yet.
• "Do Things My Own Way" was the first track written for MAD! "We don't carry over older, unused material onto a new album, so we start from scratch," Ron Mael told Apple Music. "After we recorded all these songs, it seemed fitting that it be in first place, because it is an overall statement of the album and Sparks."
• MAD! reached #2 on the UK Albums Chart, Sparks' highest position ever, surpassing even the glittering heights of 1974's Kimono My House, which peaked at #4. Not bad for a pair of brothers who have spent half a century insisting on doing things their own way and still sound like they're just getting started.