Once Upon A Time In Rome -by Alyson Camus

Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton) and Daniele Luppi were both fascinated by Italian spaghetti westerns, and especially Morricone’s music, which they have respectively described as a whole new world never heard before, and a combination of pop music and avant-garde technique.

The five-year project will be released next year and they are at last revealing how all this happened.
They originally knew each other as they had met in Los Angeles in 2004, and Luppi was so impressed by Danger Mouse’s work and his knowledge of music, they ended up working on projects together: Luppi added some arrangements on the Gnarls Barkley’s album, and worked on strings for both Broken Bells and The Dark Night of the Soul’s albums

For ‘Rome’, they hired retired musicians, who worked on scores for Sergio Leone’s films such as ‘A Fistful of Dollars ‘, ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’ and ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’ 40 years ago, and hadn’t worked together in several decades
Although they didn’t understand what they were doing at first, and especially, did not have a clue about who Danger Mouse was, the drummer from ‘A fistful of dollars’ score, the whistler and the soprano from the soundtrack trilogy all got involved, and ‘Rome’, which will feature big choirs and lots of strings, was recorded on vintage instruments in Forum Studios, a converted Church in Rome.

The two men basically rethought Morricone’s music as pop songs, and Daniele Luppi, who had never co-wrote music before, said that mixing ideas was the most interesting part, as him and Brian Burton had very similar ideas when it comes to chord and melodies.

Jack White and Norah Jones’s vocals were used on some songs, which are about love, death, happiness, and driven by a dark vibe. Here is the track list of this homage to Ennio Morricone, which will be out March 2011 on Capitol Records: