Everybody's Brother (19 page)

Something in Danger Mouse’s music did resemble the wonderfully odd eternal rhythm that exists somewhere inside of me, so in a way it was easy to write words for him. To my ears, the music that the world has come to know as Gnarls Barkley sounded like the score of my soul—the wild combination of words and music and texture and sound captured a kind of controlled chaos.

But like a lot of odd couples, Danger Mouse and I also have a way of rubbing each other the wrong way. I can only guess what he would say about me, but I would describe Danger Mouse as neurotic and narcissistic. He’s clean and neat, but also very meat and potatoes. In fact, all I that have ever seen him eat is hamburgers and pizza.
Every time we stood together it was like a great game of compare and contrast. It’s the age-old shtick of tall and short, fat and skinny, light and dark, serious and silly. We were just two sort of polar opposites—two bookends between which came some very interesting reading. He is extreme in his own right, but it’s natural and normal to him. And I’m the same way, only with different extremes. Working together can be tough because we’re both pretty set in our ways, yet somehow there’s still a straight line that connects us. In my mind at least, Danger Mouse and I were two ships on our own seas that were somehow hearing the same exact signal in the distance on a lower frequency. Because deep down we shared directions, we didn’t need to scream to be heard by one another.

Of course, sometimes Brian and I screamed anyway. For instance, we argued when I wanted to change the name of our group to Scarlet Fever because I liked the idea that we were these two very different characters who shared a rare sickness. I tried to get at the specific nature of our shared craziness in the song “Who Cares?” on the first Gnarls Barkley album,
St. Elsewhere
.

Basically, I’m complicated

I have a hard time taking the easy way

I wouldn’t call it schizophrenia

But I’ll be at least two people today

Anyone who’s ever spent any time with me recognizes a lot of truth right there. At the time they were written, I
thought those lyrics was just clever, but now they strikes me as downright poignant.

Still, while we were making that first album, “Crazy” was the one song that struck me hardest. We thought that it was the closest thing to a single we had. As the legend goes, I did my vocal for “Crazy” in one take. But I’m sure that many of the best and most important records of all time were done in one take. I’d bet Iggy Pop just had to sing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” one time.

“Crazy” wasn’t just the title of our first and biggest hit—it was also our musical calling card to an entire universe of freaks and fellow travelers. Let me say this in case no one else ever does—the music of Gnarls Barkley was insanely strange and thus oddly universal. The song “Crazy” was a kind international declaration of the basic human right to be weird—a right I have been exercising religiously my whole life. But is it crazier to internalize whatever makes you different or insane or to be able to hogtie it and articulate it so that the whole world can sing and dance along with you?

People think that I’m crazy because I can talk about the utter insanity of the human condition and artfully explore that insanity for fun and profit. So there’s a very thin line between being completely crazy and just being incredibly convinced and convincing too. That’s what makes me a diehard and always has—whatever cause I was dying for at the time.

Essentially, succeeding in this world all comes down to being a very faithful person and I believe I’ve taken a
quantum leap of faith—that’s how I got here and that’s how I’ve stayed here. I don’t want to bore people with the math—I’d rather charm their pants off with the poetry of it all. If any of this sounds crazy to you, then good, I’ve done my job.

In the music business, it’s feast or famine. “Crazy” became a moveable feast that sent me and Danger Mouse on a trip around the world. It took us to the Grammys together and just about everywhere music can go. I remember reading that “Crazy” was voted the biggest hit of the past decade. It was an anthem for outsiders everywhere that, at least for a time, made Danger Mouse and me insiders everywhere in the world we went.

Still, the way that song was written and structured defied radio logic. The hook wasn’t the same each time. It just appears the same, but it poses three different sets of circumstances. You should also notice that the only time I call myself crazy in the song is when I’m trying to call someone else crazy but acknowledging that I’m in no position to judge and criticize. We are all in no position to criticize because we’re all trying to figure this life out with varying degrees of success. So I say, “You’re crazy, just like me.” What I’m trying to say there is “Let me take a little of the blame and we’ll share it together”—that is, unless you don’t want to be with me, because I’m on some whole other level. But I don’t think we’re on different levels
because I’m standing here talking to you. You feel me? Maybe not, but that’s my way of thinking.

When Danger Mouse later worked with Damon Albarn from Blur and the Gorillaz on their project
The Good, the Bad & the Queen
, Damon asked Danger Mouse, “So this song that you have with this guy CeeLo, who is he? I want to see him. What’s he look like?” So Danger Mouse showed him a picture of me, and Damon said, “Oh damn, he’s the real thing.” Because he could immediately tell there was nothing pretty or pretentious about me. These eyes, they don’t lie—and I’m not here on Earth to lie. I’m here to tell my truths. Everyone’s been called crazy or felt crazy. And everyone has wanted to tell someone “Fuck You” a time or two.

Having a universal hit like “Crazy” opened a lot of doors for me, and it made me a very recognizable figure. And that’s how I got to meet my childhood idol, Prince. I was hanging out with some friends in a club in Las Vegas. All of a sudden “Erotic City” started playing on the system—they must have cued it up when they saw Prince coming—then this beautiful woman walked in all alone, wearing a tight pencil skirt, horn-rimmed glasses, looking like a sexy stenographer. Just stunning, to say the least. Like some mermaid out of water. Then Prince walked in after her. He has this confident, swaggerish walk, and he blew right past us with the girl and his security guard. I saw
he was looking at us, with a little smirk on his face, as they led him to this roped-off area. Next thing I knew, his security guard came over to say Prince wants to see me. So I went over there and sat down for a while. Out of everything he said, what I remembered the most was that he had listened to
St. Elsewhere
.

“Great album,” he said. “It scared me, though.”

I was like, “Well,
shiiiiit…
I don’t know! Let me tell you how much you scared me when I was a kid!” So I told him about how when my mother was in that Pentecostal church they had a seminar warning us that Prince was up to demonic mischief when he released “Darling Nikki.” Not only did the lyrics scare the hell out of us, but the backward part at the end of the song sounded like the devil himself. Actually, when you play the backward part forward, there was a positive message, and he was just being sly. But it didn’t make no difference. “We were just terrified of you!” I told him. He laughed when I said that. We exchanged numbers and he ended up calling me, to say that he had been loving “Crazy.” Years later I opened for him at Madison Square Garden and he played “Crazy” with me, one of the great moments of my life. If I could choose anyone to collaborate with on a musical project, Prince would be on top of my list.

I think Prince is the kind of weird we would all love to be. You could go crazy with that much talent in that little body. I don’t even know what he’s talking about half the time, but all of it means something to me. Prince is so
cool. So calm and calming. So unlike some of my other collaborators.

As you can tell by now, Danger Mouse is dark—dark enough even to scare Prince. From my point of view, he’s still in his dark night of the soul—or whatever he thinks he is doing. Seasons change and to me if you’re just seeing the darkness, that means you’re perpetuating that darkness. The world is always going to look dark if you’re sitting in your room with all the shades down. Perpetuating the darkness is purposed. That’s no mistake. That’s a choice.

As time went on, I came to feel like I wanted to tell Danger Mouse, “You are not going to perpetuate the darkness on me, especially when the sun is out and I can see and feel it.” See, I’m dark at night when the darkness feels right, but when the sun comes up, I see it and I get up and work and earn the day. That’s how I feel about life—I earn the day and appreciate the opportunity that comes with it. That’s me—I’m balanced just like the dusk and dawn, dawn and dusk. I felt I might lose that balance if I let Danger Mouse steer me into the underworld too often. And so I started leaning into the light and away from my dark companion.

By now there should be no confusion why we called our second Gnarls Barkley album
The Odd Couple
. In my opinion, our second album was better than the first, but
you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. And any way you looked at it, we had made a very big first impression.
St. Elsewhere
was one of those albums that entered the stratosphere and has never really left. The second album hit a kind of sophomore jinx because it was so close in terms of proximity to the original release. To me, Gnarls Barkley’s second album is clearly just all-around better than the first album in every conceivable way, and probably in a few inconceivable ways too.
The Odd Couple
would be a killer coming out now, but like a lot of art and people I love, it was ahead of its time.

My biggest records have been psychological. I think that if I had stayed in school, I might have earned my masters in psychology, sociology, and maybe some other ’ologies too. Instead, music has given me some sanity and the most meaningful education of my life. I don’t have a high school diploma. I have music—and it has educated me thoroughly. In music, I found my college, and my church too. Because I am so headstrong, and music is so personal and means so much to me, it is hard for me to be contained by any group for too long. Even one as willfully strange as Gnarls Barkley.