Two Heads are Better Than One

Danger Mouse is explaining his singular creative process in a soft baritone over lunch in a nearly deserted Pasadena restaurant when a waiter approaches and asks, “Can I top off your iced tea?” This snaps the 29-year-old record-maker out of his reverie. “Wait—not yet,” he says, reflexively putting his hand over the brim of the tall glass. As the waiter backs away, Danger Mouse explains, with the hint of a smile, “I had the perfect mix.”

Having the perfect mix of ingredients has characterized everything the cerebral artist (given name: Brian Burton) has done since appearing out of nowhere in 2004 with his wicked-clever interweaving of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album, which inevitably came to be called The Grey Album.

“People think The Grey Album was a mash-up, and it wasn’t at all,” Danger Mouse clarifies. “It was a deconstruction of one record and reconstructing it into something else. I said to myself, ‘If it sucks, with the work that was put into it, at least somebody can appreciate that shit.’”

Within a few weeks after he sent it out to a few people who might appreciate it, The Grey Album became a viral phenomenon on the Internet. But the underground tour de force hardly prepared people for DM’s next coup—the second Gorillaz album, Demon Days, with its massive and indelible hit, “Feel Good Inc.”—or the subsequent, pan-genre triumph St. Elsewhere from his Gnarls Barkley collaboration with Cee-Lo, which yielded the even more massive and indelible “Crazy.”

“Music is what shook me up, and I want to do that to other people, especially now that there are so many people who just listen to one kind of thing,” he says. “Gnarls was one step in that direction, and the Gorillaz is another.”

What fuels Danger Mouse’s particular brand of creativity are creative partnerships, like those he’s formed with Damon Albarn on projects for Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad & The Queen; with Cee-Lo in Gnarls Barkley; and with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse (who’s called DM “the Jimi Hendrix of the laptop”). These collaborations, he says, “enable me to speak through other people, and they can use me in a way, as well, to get some of their stuff across.” It’s this synergy that led Albarn to say that Danger Mouse’s “instruments” are the people he works with.

DAMON DAYS
“Based on The Grey Album, there’s no way Damon could’ve known I could do that whole [Gorillaz] record,” DM says of Albarn, who eventually hired him for the project that made him a sought-after producer. “Initially, he didn’t bring me on to do the whole album; he brought me on to see what I was really like and if there was something more there and, obviously, there was. I mean, the Gorillaz record had no musical samples on it. It was played out and treated—we’d record something and then I’d mess with it; that’s the way I do it.”

As for The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Danger Mouse realizes it isn’t a one-listen album—“but it’ll get you eventually,” he promises. “I listen to that record more than any record I’ve ever worked on. The melodies just really get me.”

CEE-NOTES
One of most subtly beguiling aspects of “Crazy” is Danger Mouse’s use of a sample from an old Italian film soundtrack, one of several that appear on St. Elsewhere, along with some original string charts created by young Italian composer Daniel Luppi specifically for the project. “Italian film music was some of the first stuff I got into,” he points out.

While “Crazy” stands as the ultimate example of the Danger Mouse approach, it wasn’t a premeditated hit. “Cee-Lo almost didn’t sing on it because somebody else almost had that song,” DM admits. “The chord change after the chorus was the only thing that wasn’t in the original. When I played that change on the piano, it didn’t sound as good as when I used the Italian film sample and pitched it up; it sounded so odd but beautiful. So I thought that if Cee-Lo could sing it with a counter melody over that, it could be amazing.”

DM played the finished track for Cee-Lo during a two-week block of recording and winnowing in Atlanta. “When I heard it,” the singer recalls, “I said, ‘Oh, my. What is that, and why was it not the first thing you played me?’ He told me he had played it for people before, and they liked the beat, but no one could rhyme over it. So we put it on repeat, and for several hours it played in the background, and the words came really naturally. The production made it a lot easier for me; I could just not help but feel. I said, ‘I think I got somethin’, and I went into the vocal booth and sang it. He goes, ‘Hmmm. That’s cool. What else you got?’ That’s how casual it was to begin with.

“We balance each other out,” Cee-Lo adds. “I’ve described Danger as the picket fence around my garden of wildflowers—only to be contained momentarily.”

ON DECK
Coming up next for Danger Mouse are an as-yet-unnamed collaboration with Luppi—the sound beds for which they recently recorded in Rome—and a full album with Linkous with the working title Curse of the Danger Horse. Says Linkous, “I would like to bring the real pop aspect of whatever I do to his appreciation for The Beatles and the production style of hip-hop music. That’s what our future together holds, I think.”

Neither of these works in progress would seem to be about coming up with another “Crazy.” But you never know with Danger Mouse. “I don’t go in with the intention of getting a hit,” he explains, “and if it’s not there, I don’t try to make it happen. But if I hear something that could be a hit, I’ll jump on it.”

As he continues to lay it out in his intensively thoughtful manner, the waiter reappears, pitcher in hand. Danger Mouse points to the empty glass in front of him. “Now,” he says, another smile flashing briefly in his eyes.