David Lynch and Danger Mouse were interviewed by Jason Bentley on KCRW Tuesday morning, to discuss the Sparklehorse album ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. As Iman has already mentioned two of the tracks of the album among his favorites (‘Little Girl’ and ‘The Man Who Played God’) and I love the whole thing, I listened to the interview closely.
Danger Mouse (I mean David Lynch kept calling him Danger Mouse instead of using his real name during the whole show, so I will too), remembered working on Mark Linkous’ last album and hearing about these songs that Mark ‘could not sing’ even though he was excited about the songs and the music. A demo of ‘Just war’ (sung by Gruff Rhys on the album) started the whole project. As they first met in 2005, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse became good friends over the years, after Linkous’ manager gave him Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, a mash-up of the Beatles’ White album and Jay-Z’s Black album that I have never listened to after thinking it was a bad idea, but who knows?
‘Dark Night of the Soul’ was a long enterprise, Danger Mouse traveling from one place to another to meet with the different singers, which has led him to describe his role a little like a film director. During the interview, Danger Mouse recognized that it was not a premeditated process, and has nothing to do with a ‘great vision’. However, during the adventure, he contacted famous film-maker David Lynch, whom he had been a long time fan of, and who instantaneously loved the idea. And not only Lynch did the photographs but got to sing on two tracks of the album. Danger Mouse admitted he was first being polite with the ‘crazy old man’ who thought he could sing, but then realized Lynch had tried himself at singing before.
Naturally, David Lynch is a very visual man, and he explained he listened to the tracks (without the vocals at that time) while closing his eyes and got images from the music. He then organized a photo shoot, taking 4 photographs for each song, and these pics were gathered to create a 100-page book (5,000 copies were sold) and were exposed in galleries in Miami, Los Angeles and New-York. As for the singing part, Lynch admitted he was not really a musician or a singer, but things popped out of the music made by Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse. He laughed when saying he added a bunch of stuff on the child-like song ‘Star Eyes’.
Contrary to what many persons assume, James Mercer’s collaboration on the album was not what started Broken Bells, since he and Danger Mouse were already working together at that time. Something interesting that I hadn’t noticed, beside the song ‘Insane Lullaby’, James Mercer is also doing some backing vocals on ‘Just War’.
Danger Mouse explained he did not know all the people who are on the album and had sometimes to convince them, as it was the case for Julian Casablancas who doubted he could do the song. The line-up is pretty impressive since, beside Rhys, Casablancas, Mercer and Lynch already mentioned, Jason Lytle, The Flaming Lips, Black Francis, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson, Suzan Vega, and Vic Chestnutt sing on different songs.
He added that he wanted to direct films before getting involved into music, but went with music because of its immediacy. I supposed the cast of this album could be compared to a movie.
They closed the interview by talking about Mark Linkous who was working on a different album when he died. Linkious, a very sensible and humble guy, who curiously never told his real age to Danger Mouse, took his life after a long battle with depression despite the fact he had a lot of people around who cared about him.
It was very moving to hear Danger Mouse say it was a choice to be friends with someone like Mark, but once you were friends with him you had to accept and be prepared for the idea that may be he would want to be here for a while or not want to be here for a while. Suicide of a close friend is just a very uncomfortable thing to talk about on the radio, but he and David Lynch ended on a positive note saying how good it had been to work with Mark Linkous, despite him being very opinionated, and how nice it had been to just hang out with him, watching movies, or smoking cigarettes down to 1/8 inch as he used to do.