Word: burtons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Brian Burton's life was turned upside down by a joke. As a composer-producer-DJ working under the name Danger Mouse (often in a mouse costume to ease his stage fright), Burton had a solid career on music's experimental fringe when it hit him: mix the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album, and you get a gray album. "I was cleaning my house at the time," says Burton. "It wasn't my deepest thought ever." Still, he spent three cloistered weeks in his bedroom translating snippets of Beatles music into hip-hop rhythm and synchronizing...
...Suddenly Burton was famous, and not entirely happy about it. The Grey Album didn't just use unlicensed samples from two of the world's most famous artists-it was only unlicensed samples, and the Beatles' label, EMI, is vigilant about enforcing its copyrights. "You couldn't make a more illegal album," says Burton. "When it spread beyond being a little art project, of course EMI came after me." It wasn't just the cease-and-desist business that bothered him. He was also a little put out by the acclaim heaped on his Frankenstein's monster (ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY named...
...Luckily, Burton got a second chance to make an impression on the world's ears. Damon Albarn, the singer-songwriter behind the acclaimed British band Blur and the multiplatinum rap-rock concoction Gorillaz, heard The Grey Album and liked it. "But I loved the metaphor," says Albarn, "the mixing of genres and the idea that you can take past and present and make something futuristic." Albarn summoned Burton to London and quickly hired him to produce Gorillaz's second album, Demon Days, out this week. Albarn says he and Burton had "loads of music" in common. They are also both...
Albarn should have been more concerned that his new producer didn't have much experience producing. "I've been making music for 10 years," says Burton. "But a lot of that was me sitting in my bedroom." Despite his greenness, Burton announced early on that he doesn't like happy songs ("I'm just really into dark music and minor chords") and that he wanted to turn his back on sampling, which, at that point, was the only thing he was known for. Having spent most of the '90s with Blur, warring with Oasis' Gallagher brothers over the very important...
...After Burton moved into Albarn's London studio-ever the bedroom prodigy, he had most of his equipment shipped from his Los Angeles home-the duo settled into a comfortable routine of routinelessness. "We just chased ideas and tried anything we wanted," says Burton. Those are words to chill a record executive's heart. And, sure enough, so many ideas were tried, chopped up and discarded that production went well past its initial deadline. When EMI announced in February that Gorillaz's and Coldplay's albums were both delayed, the company's stock dropped 16%. Burton says that gave...