Opposites Attract

Gnarls Barkley Reinvents Popular Music, From Here to Estonia

Writer: Matt Price, photo by Jeremy & Claire Weiss
Feature, Issue 41, Published online on 18 Mar 2008 Page 1 of 3 Next >

Part I: Soundtrack for a Superhero

I’m in my Honda Accord, heading to a Los Angeles recording studio to interview the members of Gnarls Barkley about their new CD, The Odd Couple. Unlike Gnarls, my car is not cutting-edge. And thus, I’m hoping to find parking somewhere a few blocks away—then I can walk up to the studio of Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, and neither he nor his Gnarls partner Cee-Lo Green will notice my uncool ride.

I shouldn’t be so worried. In fact, my obsession with Danger and Cee Lo’s opinion of my automobile is antithetical to what Gnarls Barkley is all about. After listening to The Odd Couple earlier this morning, it occurred to me that the duo’s avant-garde pop sensibility challenges other musicians to unlock their own creativity and make truly unique music. And Gnarls Barkley is designed to have this effect on its listeners, too: Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse want us to be ourselves! To celebrate our idiosyncrasies! These dudes don’t care what kind of car I’m driving. I’m an idiot. I’m going inside.

The studio reinforces my hypothesis about perception vs. reality. You’d think it would be a flashy space with three secretaries wearing headsets in a mod waiting room where I’d be forced to sit awkwardly in a hanging-ball chair. Danger’s studio is actually nondescript—not quite dingy, but very worked-in, with computers and keyboards lining the walls. The down-home feel sets me at ease as the guys walk in and introduce themselves.

I’m immediately drawn to how laid back they seem. They give off a regular-guy vibe, even though nothing they create, either independently or as Gnarls Barkley, has any hint of regularity. They also both have an understandable “here-we-go” look on their face, the kind you get when you’re about to embark on a several-month-long publicity tour promoting your latest creation.

Cee-Lo wears a gold satin jacket, black jeans and an inch-thick diamond bracelet over his heavily tattooed arm. Danger Mouse is sporting a vintage grey blazer with a shirt underneath that says “Cassius Clay” in red cursive. I’m distracted by the fact that I could never pull off the blazer-over-shirt look, and by my bubbling excitement to ask not only about The Odd Couple, but also their obvious love of ’60s music and melancholy pop. And of course I’m also curious as to how they maintained any sort of artistic vision after birthing the monster that was their ubiquitous smash, “Crazy.” But instead of getting to any of that, I spend the first two minutes rambling about the following idea:

“I think The Odd Couple is the soundtrack for a tortured superhero.” They look at me and nod politely. For reasons still unknown to me, I continue: “Yeah, when I heard the album this morning, I felt like I was listening to a story about a very lonely superhero who raced from planet to planet looking for someone to love. At one point, I even saw myself as the superhero, and I was floating underwater looking up at the moon through the water, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the pressure of being who I was destined to be and the sadness that no-one could help me with that.”

Cee-Lo flashes a big smile, and Danger Mouse says, “That’s why we don’t like telling people what these records are about.”

It turns out that this is one of Gnarls Barkley’s main goals: to create a mysterious new sound that allows for individual interpretation. They accomplished this with their first album, St. Elsewhere, which crossed all boundaries by sampling Gianfranco Reverberi, covering the Violent Femmes and unleashing a pop masterpiece that could be heard everywhere from here to Estonia. Literally. It was #1 in Estonia. Number üks with a bülletään!

The Odd Couple is a continuation of St. Elsewhere’s sound. “We weren’t trying to depart from what we’d done because what we had done was so fractured and different from itself anyway,” Danger says. “If anything, we just wanted to do better. We felt like we could do better musically.”

And they did. The Odd Couple goes deeper than St. Elsewhere, creating a visual soundscape. It’s as vivid as if Gnarls shot a movie and put it on CD. Both albums strive for this effect, even beginning and ending with the sound of a filmstrip starting and stopping. And while this framework enhances the music’s cinematic feel, it’s really the depth and colors of the music that provide the imagery. Cee-Lo’s lyrics are more personal than before, without being clichéd. Danger Mouse again showcases his love of spaghetti Westerns, but his music is more brooding this time. St. Elsewhere offers a glimspe of Gnarls’ world, but The Odd Couple sets you on a journey—in my case, an underwater superhero fantasy I shared in embarrassing detail with both members of Gnarls Barkley.

Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse went about creating the songs on The Odd Couple in the same manner as St. Elsewhere. Danger laid down a bunch of demos and sent them to Cee-Lo, who wrote lyrics to certain tracks if he felt emotionally drawn to them. I can see how some people (myself included) would think Danger Mouse is the puppet master pulling Gnarls Barkley’s strings, simply because he’s choosing the source material. But Danger Mouse goes out of his way to make sure Cee-Lo gets credit as a collaborator. “Everything that was there, everything that you hear, was something that he decided to take and work on lyrically,” he says. “In the same way that I’d try to lead him with the music, he’s led the direction of this album by picking the songs that he did.”

Their complimentary nature is remarkable. Here’s an exchange they had after we talked about the popularity of “Crazy”:

Cee-Lo: “Every now and then, I can’t help but feel like I coulda sang that song better.”

Danger Mouse: “And I’m thinking, ‘I’m lucky as hell he sang that song over that track.’”

Cee-Lo: “I’m lucky that that track made me like that song.”

I mean, maybe I’ve lived too long in L.A., where you can only wear a “save the whales” T-shirt if you’re being ironic, but it’s refreshing to see two musical powerhouses who not only enjoy making music together, but also actually like each other as people. At one point while we’re at the studio, Danger Mouse gets up and grabs Cee-Lo a VitaminWater—just because. Maybe if Lars Ulrich had gone out of his way to fetch James Hetfield a bottle of Aquafina in the middle of an interview, Some Kind of Monster would’ve never been made.

Page 1 of 3 Next >

Opposites Attract

Gnarls Barkley Reinvents Popular Music, From Here to Estonia

Save & Share