The sound he minted on Back to Black and Version proved to be one of the most pervasive in modern pop – nearly a decade on, people are still making records indebted to it, not least Sam Smith and John Newman – but Ronson's 2010 album Record Collection, a bold attempt to break free of his trademark retro-soul formula, "sold way less than Version".
"A company's soul is kept in formulas," Bill Downey, a former flavorist at Fritzsche, told me.
Stan's heart and soul is software, a master formula of elaborate differential equations that represent the interrelationships of human physiology.
A formula for your soul mate?
So it's good news, then, that the central formula to Dark Souls 3 remains the same as ever.
Assuming the Cowboys go through some soul searching, that's probably not the best formula for a running back to have a breakout moment.
Scrappy and lightly recruited, Dieng is the heart and soul of a defense that has found a formula to win games beyond its talent level.
The idea for "Lay It Down" was to pair Green with today's top young soul vocalists, and about half the album follows that formula: there's a pair of songs with Anthony Hamilton, and one each with Corinne Bailey Rae and John Legend.
Embrya experienced a critical backlash similar to that of other neo soul artists' work that broke their previous releases' successful formulas in favor of more compelling projects.
Dancing in the dark regions of the soul, focusing on what fascinates and frightens is a good formula for fiction.
Neither rewrites any rules, but both follow formula with a good deal more spirit and soul than Jurassic World's high-shine machinery.
