Gnarls Barkley Album and "Run" video

"Run" video by Gnarls Barkley (hi-res hosted by NYT). I love the early eighties retro homage intro.

And the New York Times article on the album "The Odd Couple"
April 6, 2008
Music
First Came Crazy, Now Comes Odd
By JEFF CHANG

LOS ANGELES

ON a late February afternoon Gnarls Barkley, the duo known for its funny costumes and psychedelic post-hip-hop sound, was unmasked and at rest at a quiet hotel in Beverly Hills. Cee-Lo Green, the short, heavily tattooed singing and lyric-writing half, had just finished a snack of sushi. Danger Mouse, the tall, scruffy producing half, was wiping sleep from his eyes after a head-down nap on a marble table.

They were pondering how their second album, “The Odd Couple,” then unreleased, might be received, given the buzz that it was a good deal weirder and darker than their million-selling debut, “St. Elsewhere” from 2006.

“It’s going to be a surprise for me,” said Danger Mouse, 30, whose real name is Brian Burton, in a baritone you might hear on late-night soul radio. “It may be really big or really modest, I don’t know.”

Clues came much more quickly than the two probably expected. In early March the album leaked onto the Internet. On March 18 the band’s label, Atlantic Records, rushed it to digital and retail stores, weeks ahead of its planned April 8 release. Fans were notified by an eccentric press release issued just hours before the album became available: “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now.”

The day after its release “The Odd Couple” was atop the iTunes albums chart. But its first-week sales were only 31,000 copies, landing it at No. 18 on the Billboard chart. Jeff Antebi, the band’s manager, said many brick-and-mortar stores did not get shipments until the end of the week.

“No one was looking at extraordinary Week 1 numbers,” he said. Given that the first single, “Run,” received a lukewarm response from radio and that most early reviews bemoaned the lack of a song as infectious as “Crazy,” the band’s smash single from 2006, it appeared the album was not on track to match the success of “St. Elsewhere.”

But Craig Kallman, the chairman and chief executive of Atlantic, remains optimistic. “It’s a fantastic album, and it’s one that’s going to continue to get discovered,” he said.

Mr. Burton, who had been inspired by 1960s psych-rock and his recent collaboration with the Good, the Bad and the Queen, said he wanted to create a more cohesive set of moods with the album’s songs. “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?” implies the blues through hushed textures and subtle rhythmic disjunctures. In “Open Book” the beat skitters like arrhythmia as Cee-Lo does some not-so-soothing Lennon-inspired wailing reminiscent of “Mother.”

Cee-Lo, 32, whose real name is Thomas Callaway, often flips familiar rap themes like jealousy and rage into close studies of loneliness and connection, darkness and sunshine. “Hurt people hurt people,” he sings on “Would Be Killer.” The album’s pivotal moment may be the slightly ominous ditty “Surprise,” which evokes the duo stumbling down Sunset Boulevard arm-in-arm with Arthur Lee, the leader of the ’60s rock band Love, who died in 2006. In it Cee-Lo sings, or perhaps warns, “If that big old smile ends up being just a disguise, don’t be surprised!”

Cee-Lo, who started his rap career as a member of the groundbreaking Atlanta rap group Goodie Mob, said that Gnarls Barkley “has been my safe haven and my sanctuary to expose or share and bring closure to my own issues.”

He was referring to the deaths of his parents, both ordained ministers. His father died when he was 2. His mother was paralyzed in a car crash and died two years later when he was 18, just as he was beginning to find success. Cee-Lo addresses their passings on “She Knows” and “A Little Better,” from the new album, and speaks of his mother’s presence as that of a lingering friendly ghost. “I want to thank you mom and dad for hurting me so bad,” he sings on “A Little Better,” “but you’re the best I’ve ever had.”

“The first show we did in Atlanta, the day our record came out, his mother died,” said Cameron Gipp, known as Big Gipp, an original member of Goodie Mob and one of Cee-Lo’s closest friends. “We found out as soon as we came off the stage.”

Mr. Gipp said that, devastated, Cee-Lo poured his emotions into the Goodie Mob song “Free,” which implied that he had suicidal thoughts. “His emotions, he really had to learn how to control them,” he said.

When Danger Mouse was a teenager, his parents moved his family from Rockland County in New York to Atlanta. He later worked at the same Athens, Ga., record store where members of R.E.M. and Olivia Tremor Control had worked. Danger Mouse asked Cee-Lo to contribute to a remix for the rapper Jemini in 2003, their first collaboration. At the time Cee-Lo had left Goodie Mob over artistic differences and made a well-received but commercially unsuccessful solo record; Danger Mouse had yet to make his name with “The Grey Album,” the unauthorized mash-up of the White Album by the Beatles and “The Black Album” by Jay-Z, which became a cultural phenomenon in 2004.

In 2005 the duo made a demo for the song “Crazy,” which earned them a deal with the boutique label Downtown Records; the song became a blogosphere favorite and a sensation in Great Britain.

Mr. Kallman was so intrigued by the song that he pursued a joint venture deal with Downtown. He said that when he first played “Crazy” for Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic, Mr. Ertegun congratulated him after the first chorus.

“Crazy” lingered around the top of the charts in 15 countries for much of 2006 and won a Grammy Award, leaving even its creators a bit thunderstruck. They began work on “The Odd Couple” while on tour for “St. Elsewhere,” which also won a Grammy. Afterward Danger Mouse went home to Los Angeles, and Cee-Lo returned to Atlanta. They communicated primarily through the music they sent back and forth via e-mail and Federal Express.

Cee-Lo said they didn’t try to write another “Crazy.” “If there was a formula to it, I would cut this interview short and go to the studio,” he said with a beatific grin in his raspy, reedy Southern drawl.

When the duo performed “Crazy” at the MTV Movie Awards in 2006, Cee-Lo dressed as Darth Vader and Danger Mouse as Obi-Wan Kenobi. During the interview, Cee-Lo wore a white T-shirt and black Polo sweat pants, a diamond-encrusted necklace and a sparkling Rolex beneath a tattoo of a laughing clown. Danger Mouse wore a thick camouflage jacket and an ironic rock T-shirt.

He told a reporter that the duo picked a self-explanatory album title so “we wouldn’t have to talk about it.” But then he wondered aloud to Cee-Lo if they should put a question mark at the end to make it more provocative.

“It would change the meaning,” he said. “Like, are we? Are we really that odd, with ourselves or compared to anybody else?”

Few recent groups have so consistently feinted right while going left. In its riotous videos and stylized performances Gnarls has played with what Nate Chinen called a “miserable exuberance” in a review of “The Odd Couple” in The New York Times.

The song “Run” may be about a soldier in Iraq or a heroin dealer (not unlike the way “Crazy” might have been about a spurned lover or a serial killer). But the video is nothing but a party. It is a tribute to Michael Holman’s “Graffiti Rock,” a rap television show from 1984, with a bewigged Justin Timberlake starring as the host and dancers recapping a history of hip-hop dance crazes. For its promotional photos for “The Odd Couple” the duo chose to dress as a bride and groom.

All of this might suggest that the two spend a lot of time devising stratagems. Not so, Cee-Lo said. “As far as songs or albums or concepts are concerned, there’s not ever really a formal conversation about it.”

Neither member had initially figured Gnarls Barkley for a career-making project. Until “The Odd Couple” Danger Mouse had never done a second album for any of his many eclectic projects, including Gorillaz, MF Doom and Beck. His latest credit is “Attack and Release,” the new album by the Black Keys, a hard-rocking duo from Ohio.

“He doesn’t overpower you,” said Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, referring to Danger Mouse’s production style. “He’s just a completely unpretentious guy for somebody who has such a stranglehold on the Top 10 all around the world.”

For his part Cee-Lo has been working on a reunion album with Goodie Mob, buying masters of unreleased Jimi Hendrix recordings, producing an album by a group called the Good Time Guys and gearing up to start his own label, Radiculture.

But both Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo said that the Gnarls Barkley project best captures who they are as artists and as people, at least right now. This project is “pure me,” Danger Mouse, the more private of the two, insisted. “It’s the most me.”

Earlier, while Danger Mouse napped, Cee-Lo made the same point. He said that he grew up listening to funk and hip-hop, and “everybody from ABC to R.E.M., Billy Joel to Billy Idol.” When Danger Mouse first played him sample tracks in 2003, including the strange groove that would become “Run,” he could not believe his ears.

“As soon as I heard the music, it immediately struck me as mine,” he recalled. “I said, I can’t see anyone doing anything to these tracks but me. And I mean the real me, the inner me, the me deep down that nobody knew I was made up of. All of me.”

So finally the duo gave up trying to explain the new album. Instead Cee-Lo puzzled over how these two unlikely musical partners, who seem to be able to communicate a great deal without ever really talking, had even found each other. He first turned to a reporter. “I think I asked him this once, but he never answered it.” Then he looked across the table to Danger Mouse. “Like, did you seek me out?”

Somewhat startled, Danger Mouse answered, “Well, no other singer or rapper ever heard the Gnarls stuff.”

“And how did you know I could do that?” Cee-Lo wondered. “Because I hadn’t really done stuff like that before.”

Now Mr. Burton sat straight up: “I don’t know! I mean, I had his solo record, and it was a great solo record. I knew he could do a lot of things.” He trailed off.

Then he looked straight at Cee-Lo. “But I had been around a lot of rappers with that music and never thought to play them any of it.”

Mr. Callaway nodded slowly and didn’t have to smile. “I got it,” he said.