Super producer and collaborator extraordinaire Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton has teamed up with Italian composer and arranger Daniele Luppi (oh, and Jack White and Norah Jones) for the album Rome. After a five-year gestation period, it’s finally ready to greet the world. Burton and Luppi tell Jim Carroll what took so long
IT'S TRUE: Romewasn't built in a day. The collaboration between A-list producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton and Italian composer and arranger Daniele Luppi took five long years.
When the pair started working on the album in 2006, they didn’t expect it to take up five years of their lives. “It just took time to get all the people we wanted, like Jack White and Norah Jones, involved,” says Burton.
“We had to do a lot of figuring out about what we wanted to do next with it. We knew, for example, that we wanted choirs, so we had to go back and write the choir parts and then the string parts. We had to sit on the backing parts for a year before we had the people in place.
“Of course, we did other stuff during the five years, but I don’t think the record would have turned out the way it did if we tried to do it all in one go. This is as satisfied as I’ll ever be with a record, because I’d a lot of time to consider things. I know I got better as a writer and producer as the album went on.”
Suited and booted, Burton and Luppi are slouching on a sofa in a London hotel room towards the end of a long day of talking about Rome. For Luppi, it's his first experience of this kind of full-on, intense promotion. For the jet-lagged Burton, talking about himself has been the norm since The Grey Albumfirst placed him in the spotlight.
Long before Rome, the pair had worked together on several projects. Burton had heard Luppi's acclaimed An Italian Story, and was much taken by the composer's tribute to the Roman soundtracks of his youth. Prior to Romethey had worked together on releases for Gnarls Barkley, Joker's Daughter and Broken Bells, as well as Dark Night of the Soul, Burton's album with the late Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse, David Lynch and a host of guests.
It’s pretty obvious from that list that they clicked as collaborators. “You find out very quickly if it’s wrong,” smiles Luppi.
“You don’t know if you’ve the right collaborator at first,” adds Burton. “You just start working together on stuff and see what happens. We had similar taste in music and similar ideas as to sound, so it was effortless.
“It’s the kind of thing you don’t think about too much. You obviously think about it and realise it when the situation is wrong, but you don’t really notice when it’s right.”
Rome was the album where Burton’s desire to make a great soundtrack album and Luppi’s immersion in that world comes gloriously together. Inspired by classic Italian cinema music, it’s rich, sumptuous, classic and beautifully textured.
The pair headed to Rome’s Forum Studios to record the album. Working with them in the room where Ennio Morricone once plied his trade were members of the legendary Marc 4 backing band and the I Cantori Moderni choir.
“I had the pleasure to work with a couple of those players in the past,” says Luppi. “For Rome, speaking Italian and knowing them meant I could add them to the team. Once you gained the trust of one of them, they all came along. They all knew each other, because they’d worked together since the ’50s. Getting the players together was the easy part.”
The musicians didn’t have a clue about Burton and Luppi’s other projects. “They didn’t know anything about what we do,” says Burton. “They probably still don’t. Our idea was to dress up our songs, and we wanted the songs to sound a certain way and have a certain vibe, and that vibe was what those players do best. They’re the masters, and we didn’t have to explain anything.”
Jack White and Norah Jones ended up on the album because they were the right people, says Burton. “It wasn’t a case that we’d a list of people to consider who would have jumped and done it if we asked. There were a lot of thoughts about this person or that person, but it never went beyond that. We waited a long time to get the right people and Jack and Norah were the right people.”
"With Jack, Two Against Onedoes sound like him, but the other two don't, because that's how he wrote the vocal part and because it wasn't in his range, so he had to sing a little differently. He'd never written lyrics to someone else's music before, so this was new to him. Norah's part was written for her, but not specifically for her, it was just a vocal part. She changed it a little and made it a little more vulnerable, a little darker, and she did it really well."
Burton and Luppi footed the bills for the album, not a record label. "No one paid us to do Rome," says Burton. "We still haven't been paid for it. But that's the way it has always been for me. I go and work on something if I like the sound of it, or the people. If it makes money, it makes money.
“With this record, I couldn’t go to the label and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this record’, because we didn’t know how it would turn out, who would sing on it and how they could sell it. They couldn’t give me any money, because even we didn’t know what was going to happen. Well, they could have, but they didn’t.”
While Burton has worked on many acclaimed albums (see panel, right), some haven't done so well. One was Joker's Daughter's The Last Laugh, from London freak-folkie Helena Costas.
“It’s a shame. I spent so much time on that record. I loved that record, it was beautiful, especially the strings. We had done a whole album together in 2004 and scrapped it and began all over again because we were getting better. Then it came out on an indie label and didn’t get pushed and just disappeared.”
Another was Replica Sun Machineby The Shortwave Set, which featured collaborations with Van Dyke Parks and John Cale. "That never even got released in America, and I spent so much time and money on it. It was a really big, fun, psychedelic pop album – very ambitious – and it just didn't happen. Again, it was a small label who did very little for the album and ended up hurting the release. You can only do so much. I'm not a label guy, and I don't want to be, but it can be so frustrating."
Then there was Martina Topley-Bird's The Blue God. Burton sighs. "That one went nowhere. The label just stuck it on iTunes."
But this is how the business rolls and Burton accepts that some albums will get the hard sell and some won’t.
“A lot has changed, but a lot is the same. For the most part, it’s about going out and making something and people don’t get it and I don’t get paid. It would be amazing to get paid to make records but that’s not the way it is. The labels say ‘we’ll give you this much’ and you say ‘but I spent that much’ so you end up with zero. What are you going to do? But, you know, things are going well so I’m moaning out of choice.”
Producing results: Five Danger Mouse triumphs
The Grey Album
The ultimate mash-up album where vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album are mated with samples from The Beatles' White Album. Aside from gaining the attention of the Def Jam and EMI legal departments, it also introduced Brian Burton to the pop world.
Danger Doom The Mouse & The Mask
Burton hooks up with rapper MF Doom for an album composed of samples from Cartoon Network's Adult Swimshows.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Burton has worked with Damon Albarn on Gorillaz(he produced Demon Days), but his work on this album by the supergroup featuring Albarn, Paul Simonon, Tony Allen and Simon Tong makes it the one to check out.
Gnarls Barkley St Elsewhere
The collaboration with Cee-Lo Green produced worldwide smasheroo Crazy and probably set Cee-Lo up for his F*** Yousuccess last year.
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul
Burton’s collaboration with the late, great Sparklehorse singer Mark Linkous also features an all-star cast including Iggy Pop, Nina Persson, Gruff Rhys, Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas and Frank Black.
Romeis released today. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night Of the Soul, Burton’s collaboration with the late Sparklehorse singer Mark Linkous also features an all-star cast, including Iggy Pop, Nina Persson, Gruff Rhys, Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas and Frank Black
