Exploring 20 years of hits, surprises, and DOOM stories with the elusive producer.
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This year, youre dropping two albums in a handful of months.
We dont usually get that.
I wouldve finished them and started making new records.
But since I kept having more and more time, I obsessed over these albums.
Just put them out.I didnt want to push either one of them to the next year.
And I didnt know how much they were going to overlap.
Do you have to get real serious about carving out time?
But its our friendship.
I mean, the Bells thing really is that.
We became such close friends.
And its always fun to do that, from the time we started in 2009.
This time around, it was never supposed to take this long.
We didGood LuckandShelter,but we really didnt dig in on the album.
Years were going by, and we just decided to put out those two songs.
Then we had to jump in and do this one.
Im really close to it, but I think thats going to be pretty clear in years to come.
It was clear from the second Shins album that he is a world-class melodicist.
My favorite thing is usually to work with one vocalist.
We make music together, then I get them to sing.
A lot of rock musicians, when they do songs, thats not the way they do stuff.
When theyre making music, theyre doing melodies and new stuff.
Theyre all kind of constructing at the same time.
I can be there to hear that.
Thats my process a lot of the time.
James had never done that, I dont think.
Nobody gets to hear the bad stuff.
Thats how I do things.
That was a different thing for James.
(Im kidding.)
You hope some magic happens.
You hope theres a happy accident.
I havent worked with that many bands.
The way I work doesnt generally suit bands I know that now through time.
I generally work really well with one or two people.
If I work with a band, I make a run at work with each one individually.
But I did learn how to do it.
TheParquet Courts albumwas a great experience.
I really loved that album.
It was very different than what I know because I wasnt so hands-on in a certain way.
Most of those songs were already demoed out.
The Chili Peppers, I toured with them with Gnarls Barkley.
We toured for months.
We lived in L.A. together.
Josh Klinghoffer used to play in Gnarls Barkley.
He was one of my closest friends.
I remember when he first got the Chili Peppers gig, we talked about it.
We were already tight.
After he did the first record with Rick, they asked if we would try it.
Im always down to try stuff.
Youre someone whose music is inspired, I think, by film and film music.
I flirted with movie music, but its not really … Ive seen the way the process works.
Its not really something Im that interested in.
But theres definitely other things that Im thinking about that have to do with the visual arts.
I didnt think anything bad was going to come of it.
I had already started getting some press around it.
It was starting to really get crazy.
I remember the doorbell ringing.
Not knowing anything, I called the number.
I was like, Hey, Im the guy who did the thing.
Dont worry, Im not going to do any more.
And they were like, No, no its not that simple.
You might need to get a lawyer.
I thought I was calling to say I wasnt going to do it anymore.
I didnt think it was going to get further than that.
Like, Oh, this is a big misunderstanding.
You must think I want to sell this in some big way.
I wanted [TheGrey Album] to be in record stores.
I wanted people to be trading it personally hand to hand.
I didnt think about it being downloaded or anything like that.
I didnt put it up to download myself.
Somebody took a CD and put it up.
The thing is I had a good thing going before that happened.
I was already doing Gnarls Barkley and DANGERDOOM before I ever didThe Grey Album.
CeeLo was in the studio and sang on it.
Before he left, I was like, Can I bug you?
Heres some music from a project Im working on.
I need someone who can rap and sing.
The beats are either too fast or too slow to rap on.
I know you like weird shit.
I think it wouldve been his second album.
I said, I dont really do that.
We did a couple songs, and I was pressuring him.
I didnt really have much of a name.
I kept trying to get him into the studio.
He was very elusive.
With DOOM, wed already started a record.
I was helping Prince Po from Organized Konfusion do his record.
I mightve met DOOM on that.
He lived in Atlanta near my parents, and I was there a lot, near Adult Swim.
We kept seeing each other.
It was like, Lets do something.
He was up for it.
So I had the Jemini stuff.
I had something with DOOM.
I had something with CeeLo.
So whenTheGrey Albumhappened, I didnt want to be a gimmick.
I didnt want to be some remix guy.
I dont even really like doing remixes myself.
I wanted to bridge the two worlds, really.
I grew up in upstate New York in a mostly Jewish neighborhood.
We were the only Black family, and I listened to 80s pop, hair metal all that shit.
Then I moved to the South, and it was mostly hip-pop and Black music.
It was all different until I got to Georgia.
Youve got anElephant 6shirt on.
It just isnt that way.
WithTheGrey Album, thats what I was doing.
When I listen to the Beatles, I can hear hip-hop in it.
It makes sense to me.
From a cultural standpoint, it was an identity thing.
I was always trying to fit in with the identity stuff.
Im so light-skinned, and I talked a certain way …
I got to Athens, Georgia, which is still probably my favorite city.
But then the first instinct is to continue on with what you were doing.
Now I dont care anymore.
But thats what got me going.
Thats the reason I never made music before I was 19.
Im curious about that.
Every Tuesday at midnight at Tower Records, I was getting CDs.
I was always getting what was new.
But I never considered it something to do for a living.
I wanted to be a graphic artist.
I wanted to draw.
I love comic books.
Then I didnt do that.
I always thought music was entertaining, but I didnt want to be an entertainer.
But people who were making the music were trying to be famous and get money.
And I wasnt really about that at 17, 18, 19.
When I started going to shows in Athens, theyd be good, then theyd do really weird shit.
Id be like, Itll never get on the radio.
Thats not what they were trying to do.
I didnt understand that it’s possible for you to do whatever you want.
I thought the point of music was you get on the radio and get big.
There was nobody who had experience.
My next-door neighbor played guitar.
The internet really wasnt what it is now back then.
We didnt really use it for information.
I used it for schoolwork.
Everything was still done hands-on, trial and error, from messing around with stuff.
I think it was good for me.
It was definitely for the sake of what you were doing.
That was something new to me, and I loved it.
I was trying to do the same thing: just do it my way.
I didnt really know them.
I wasnt playing live.
I wasnt some cool guy in town or anything.
I was a fan like anybody else.
They just happened to be there.
They were the local bands.
I didnt realize people even knew them outside of Athens.
I met him at a talent show.
They did a Day of Soul every year in Athens.
They always had a big Black artist.
It was the Pharcyde the first year I was there.
A few years later, they had OutKast and Goodie Mob.
The Black Student Union had a talent show.
If you won, you got to open for them at Day of Soul.
I didnt have a group, but some friends wanted to put one together.
We got second place.
Then the first-place group broke up and they put us in.
I met CeeLo for two seconds and gave him a CD.
He was doing this remix with Jemini.
I didnt tell him that I was at that Day of Soul five years earlier.
Have you ever met Paul McCartney?Yes, I have.
It was a friendly conversation, without getting into the details of it.
Ive seen him at shows.
Ive been to a couple of shows and seen him after.
He was very nice and very, very cool.
You never placed a beat with actual Jay-Z.
Whys that?It could still happen.
Time goes by quick.
How I work is I like to take time.
Thats not good, and they can do the same.
Thats why I like to do whole albums for the most part.
For something like that, Jay-Z is not going to have time to do that.
Thats why I never reached out.
How do you know he never wanted to?I guess hes tricky, if that makes sense.
And to me, hes one of those people like Black Thought where hes not getting worse.
Hes not going away.
Its still something that could happen.
What excites me more is making a project likeCheat Codes.
That was the album I dreamed of making with one of my favorite rappers.
Its better than if I had done a couple of songs somewhere.
Youve done it, though.
You produced a few songs on A$AP RockysAt.Long.Last.A$AP.This is a good point.
When we met, it was a similar thing.
Wed been talking about making a whole project.
He was playing me the record he was making, and I thought it was great.
I started doing some sampling, and hes a charming guy.
I was like, I only do whole albums.
Thats a funny thing to say when youve done the huge Black Keys records and worked with Adele.
I really love that record.
Youll understand this, I think.
I dont want to be the producer of a certain band.
Its happened where Ive done multiple albums with the Black Keys.
It happened with Michael Kiwanuka.
But Michael was great.
I want people to leave what they do to purposely do something different and then go back to it.
I dont want to be the sound of a band.
That doesnt really interest me for my own personal, selfish, artistic reason.
Thats changed in the last 20 years.
Theres a line in the DOOM verse onCheat Codesthat calls back toMadvillainy.
I dont know if you noticed.
It felt like this full-circle, send-off moment.He recorded that verse years ago.
This was one of the things we did after DANGERDOOM.
He had gotten a big record contract.
He had put out the next DOOM album.
He had finally started to get money not underground-hip-hop money.
I figure its the kind of thing he always wanted to be able to say and really mean it.
I took it for face value.
On the DANGERDOOM album, there are bleeped-out words.
He was trying to make it as if it was in the cartoon.
Was there ever movement on a second DANGERDOOM album?Yeah.
There were some ideas.
Thats where some of the demos with Black Thought came from.
I didnt think the quality was high enough with what we were doing.
I was super-busy with Gnarls, and I was just more interested in doing some different things with singers.
You end up making the record with Beck,Modern Guilt.Yeah.
Then I met James.
You also worked on the Sparklehorse record.It was right around that time, too.
I was doing so much stuff.
I stopped DJ-ing around that time, too.
The music I was connecting with more was mostly psychedelic music.
The Dark Night of the Soulalbum with Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse strikes me as this wild time.
What was the idea there?Basically what happened was I always make my own records first.
Thats just what I do.
I dont generally take advances from labels and then make the records with it.
I will make a record and then see who wants to buy it afterward.
I have complete creative control.
Its just a weird thing.
And I dont need that anywhere near my head.
When theyre completely done, I went to them saying, Heres this thing I made.
Do you want it?
Thats how I make records.
Nobody hears them until theyre done.
And then theyll tell me how much its worth to them.
I madeDark Night of the Soul, but I was under contract.
I went to the label with the record.
They really didnt seem like they wanted it.
They werent going to pay me the money I made to make it.
It was in limbo, the record.
Because they wanted me to do pop stuff.
We want Gnarls Barkley, basically.
And then we made a photo book.
But back then, CDs were still a big thing.
We made the book, and we put the CD in the book.
The CD was a blank CD-R, but it had the artwork.
I made it myself because I would get sued likeThe Grey Albumif I put the music on it.
Then, mysteriously, the album leaked.
I dont know how that happened.
Mark Linkous was still alive when we did theDark Night of the Soulbook.
He understood why we were doing the book with David Lynch.
He loved all that kind of stuff.
He wasnt very happy with the label situation.
The same label that we were fussing with just dropped him as an artist.
We just dropped Mark Linkous.
Why do we want a Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse album?
I was the one under contract.
We renegotiated everything, and we set up a release date, and Mark committed suicide.
And now DOOMs gone.
Three people on the record.
We did a song with DOOM that was going to be on the record …
The one that came out a few years ago?We always really liked it.
It just didnt fit with the album.
We always wanted to do something with it.
Did CeeLos bad press put a damper on a third Gnarls album?
People dont see him the same way they did in the 2000s.No, nothing like that.
He and I have been working.
We havent finished what would be considered a project yet.
But with everything else youre saying I dont know.
Well have to see when that happens.
But weve been making music over the years, and well see what happens with it.
I dont know when it will be finished.
DANGERDOOM has one of the slicker, cleaner-sounding records of that mid-2000s DOOM streak.
Songs likeBenzi Boxwere smooth in a way that DOOM beats have no interest in.
Im also thinking a lot about DOOM as this comic and historian figure.
The bars would have all these references to ancient wrestlers and stores that arent open anymore.
I would visit my parents a few times a year, and Id go hit up DOOM.
The Adult Swim thing was interesting … Theres not really stuff like that on there.
How do you fill up a whole album?
You gotta do it in a creative, fun, and silly way.
It was like,Lets find a new way to do that.
I had the Adult Swim connection because Id done some music for them.
I lived in L.A. at the time.
He would come out and stay in the room next to me in the house I was renting.
For days at a time, I wouldnt even see him.
Hed just be in there listening to stuff, writing, and recording.
We did everything but make the music together.
I made the music first.
He picked the stuff he liked.
He wrote and recorded on his own and then we would play stuff back and forth.
It was almost like Christmas every time hed finish something.
I got to know him really well over the years.
Then we did the album.
I was always surprised at the kind of stuff he wanted to use from the beats I had.
Sometimes it was obvious.
I dont usually do stuff like that.
It was making a beat without samples, and he liked it.
I got CeeLo on it.
We were already doing Gnarls Barkley, so he popped on.
All that stuff happened really fast.
I didnt get it that much.
I liked some of the stuff on it.
I liked Blur more than I liked what Gorillaz had already done.
I just didnt get what they were really doing.
I hadnt gotten around to it, really.
When Damon Albarn called about the second one, I wasnt sure what that was going to be.
Thats still probably the biggest album I ever did,Demon Days.
It was the first time I ever produced an album that was not my own in my bedroom.
Youve been nominated for Producer of the Year at the Grammys a few times.
Whats the best album that you worked on?
There were no real rules with that record.
It never left rotation for me.
I go up for that line.
I dont know what hes talking about.I thought it was referencing the Middle East and gas prices going up.
It was interesting how that song came together, because that was the first song.
I was like, Im not prepared.
I dont know how to use anything except the stuff in my bedroom.
He had a real studio, and we started messing around.
He had a demo for Dirty Harry.
I bought them pizza and had them sing the part.
I came back to Damon with that, and thats what basically got me the job.
But most of that record is still Damon.
Hes got such great melodies, and he played most of the instruments on a lot of it.
Hes got a big personality.
Hes a tough guy, but he just cares about the music.
That sounds cliched, but its true.
You realize you dont have to deal with people who dont care about just the music.
I dont have to lower my standards.
In the U.S., the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.
