The current issue of Relix features a cover story on Rome, the collaboration between Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi, Jack White and Norah Jones. Here’s an excerpt from Alan Light’s piece which chronicles how it all came about…

Athens, Ga.

It’s 1995, maybe 1996. Brian Burton is a freshman at the University of Georgia and an aspiring moviemaker, taking an “Introduction to Film” course. Burton has not yet borrowed the name of the British cartoon character Danger Mouse, or embarked on a career in music that will include his own groups Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells, plus production work for Gorillaz, the Black Keys and others, which will establish him as one of the sonic visionaries of our time.

During class one week, the students watch one of the films from Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – starring Clint Eastwood, perhaps the best known “spaghetti westerns” to American audiences. The eerie, evocative score by Ennio Morricone – all twangy guitars, floating blocks of voices and mysterious whistling – stops young Burton in his tracks.

“I had never heard anything like that music before,” he says on the phone, during a break from his work producing the new U2 album, and two days before picking up this year’s “Producer of the Year” Grammy award. “It was such a mixture of different things – it had a psychedelic element, guitars and jazz and rock all in one. I was completely blown away.”

Burton’s focus at college soon shifted to music. The first project that he recorded was a soundtrack to an imaginary movie. “I had this idea for a film,” he says, “but I thought maybe it was more possible to make the music that would sound like that idea. The music I wanted to do was very visual stuff, anyway.”

So let this be a lesson to you: Like James Brown once said, don’t be a drop-out. That one film class assignment set Burton on an epic journey which reaches fruition this month with the release of Rome – a collaboration with Italian producer/arranger Daniele Luppi, featuring the voices of Jack White and Norah Jones – that attempts to capture and extend the feeling that he got from those vintage movie scores.

The budding producer began working at a record store, and began researching classic Italian movie music ( “and remember, there was no Internet back then” ). Meanwhile, in…

Rome, Italy

…Daniele Luppi, five years older than Burton, had grown up watching films from the ‘60s and ‘70s on state television each weekend, becoming increasingly obsessed with the soundtracks created by Morricone, Nino Rota and Robert Molinelli. But by the time he discovered the drama and power of these sounds, the musicians who had recorded the tracks were no longer in demand.

“These guys were hired by all the biggest composers,” says Luppi. “They even did pop records – they were really kind of an elite in Italy, like [Phil Spector’s top-call session players] The Wrecking Crew. But in the mid-‘80s, as the sound was changing to synthesizers, these people started to feel totally out of place, and they kind of left the scene.”

So, Luppi eventually moved to…

Los Angeles, Calif.

…where he found work writing music for TV shows and films like Sex and the City, Nine and Under the Tuscan Sun. But his heart remained close to the sounds of his youth, and so, in 2001, he attempted his own version of those classic soundtracks.

“I thought the best way to create an homage to this music was to hire the musicians who inspired me in the first place,” he says. “I had all of the albums, but they never listed the names of any of the musicians.” Luppi hunted for clues and eventually contacted the surviving members of Marc 4, a group that had played on many of the old film scores.

When the resulting album An Italian Story came out in 2004, Danger Mouse was one of its biggest champions. The producer had recently achieved celebrity status with The Grey Album, a mash-up of the vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album with the tracks from the Beatles “White Album.” After EMI, the Fab Four’s label, ordered that the limited number of discs he had pressed be pulled from stores, a “Black Tuesday” protest was organized, during which people downloaded more than 100,000 copies of the mix in 24 hours.

Danger Mouse’s work became a landmark in contemporary copyright arguments. The Grey Album received widespread rave reviews; it was even named Best Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly. The producer received a message from…

New York City, N.Y.

…where the New York Times asked to write a column listing his current favorite music. Danger Mouse’s “Playlist” of April 18, 2004 included An Italian Story; he wrote that the album “sounds like some rare – and expensive – LP from 30 years ago.” (He also described his own love of Italian soundtracks, reliving his freshman year revelation: “when I first saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I couldn’t believe how futuristic the music was; I was almost convinced that someone had overdubbed a new score on an old movie.” )

A mutual friend of Luppi and Burton realized that both of them were now located in…

Los Angeles, Calif.

…and set up an introduction. “We couldn’t have been more different,” says Luppi, “but we started to hang out as friends.” They started exchanging music, movies and ideas. Inevitably, the talks quickly turned to their mutual love of vintage soundtracks. “I showed him my collection of film music,” says Burton. “I think he was impressed, but I could see that he really knew everything about this stuff.”

When Danger Mouse began working with Cee-Lo Green in 2004 on what would become the Gnarls Barkley album St. Elsewhere, he invited Luppi to collaborate on some of the string arrangements. The album included the monster hit “Crazy,” which became a Top 10 hit around the world and was later named the best song of the decade by Rolling Stone. Significantly, “Crazy” sampled and borrowed part of its melody from the song “Last Man Standing” by Gian Piero Reverberi and Gianfranco Reverberi from the 1968 spaghetti western Viva! Django.

The recording of St. Elsewhere took more than two years. During the hours that they spent together in the studio, Luppi and Danger Mouse started to think more seriously about working together on a project that they were previously only able to fantasize about. In early 2006, they began sketching out musical ideas that were rooted in the haunting, lonely feel of Italian movie music.

But what exactly did they want to achieve? Was it a faux-soundtrack, a new set of songs, a combination of forms? The duo was not yet sure where they were going.

“From the first things we wrote,” says Luppi, “we knew we’d be using these players and those sounds, but what could we do differently? We were not interested in just doing a fake, retro-sounding soundtrack.”
“The idea wasn’t a tribute,” Burton emphasizes. “I wouldn’t have put all this effort into just doing a retro record – that’s not interesting to me. I wanted to do something that hasn’t really been done, to expose people to this music. How do you write songs that an average person might listen to, but also get this concept across?”

After six months or so, though, the two producers had enough promising material to start recording. So in the fall of 2006, they made their first trip to…

Rome, Italy

…and began the instrumental sessions for the Rome album…

To read more about the project including the involvement of Jack White and Norah Jones, pick up the April/May issue of Relix.