Biography
Danger Mouse stands among the most pivotal musicians and producers to emerge in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, blending rock, hip-hop, dance, and pop into a singular vision he compares to that of an auteur. The bold mash-ups on 2004’s The Grey Album, which fused vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album with instrumentals from the Beatles’ White Album, established the free-ranging method he would continue to develop. His own ventures encompass Gnarls Barkley, the genre-defying pop-and-hip-hop alliance with CeeLo Green that yielded the 2006 blockbuster “Crazy,” along with the Grammy-winning St. Elsewhere that same year and its 2008 successor The Odd Couple; Broken Bells, the atmospheric indie collaboration with the Shins’ James Mercer; and the earlier The Mouse and the Mask plus 2022’s Cheat Codes, both rap-duo outings recorded with MF Doom and Black Thought respectively. In constant demand as a producer following his breakthrough, he has partnered with Beck, Gorillaz, the Black Keys, Norah Jones, and Adele, whose 2017 album 25 brought him a further Grammy. Returning to an earlier partnership with rapper Jemini, he issued the archival collection Born Again in 2023.
Born Brian Burton in White Plains, New York, to a schoolteacher father and a social-worker mother, Danger Mouse passed much of his youth farther upstate in Spring Valley. At age thirteen the family relocated to Stone Mountain, an Atlanta suburb that acquainted him with hip-hop from the South and Midwest. Although Burton had long aspired to cartooning, the offer of a full scholarship persuaded the eighteen-year-old to enroll at the University of Georgia, where he studied telecommunications. College exposed him to Nirvana, Pink Floyd, and Portishead as well as Athens’s rising indie-rock community, prompting remixes of Neutral Milk Hotel material. He served as a DJ at the campus station and began issuing his own recordings under the Pelican City moniker, delivering The Chilling Effect in 1999 and Rhode Island in 2000 on the December First label while still enrolled. Around the same period he adopted the alias Danger Mouse—taken from the cartoon character he had watched as a child—and performed in a mouse costume to manage stage fright. A second-place finish at a 1998 Athens talent show earned him an opening slot for OutKast and Goodie Mob, leading to a friendship with the latter group’s MC/singer CeeLo Green.
One credit short of graduation, Burton relocated to London intent on a career as a trip-hop DJ, yet soon shifted focus to crafting his own hip-hop beats and took a bartending job at the pub The Rose to cover expenses. Encouraged by a friend, he submitted material to the British techno imprint Warp; impressed by a mash-up of Air and Audio Two, another of Nas and Portishead, and his original productions, the label offered a two-album contract on its hip-hop subsidiary Lex. Burton returned to the United States to record 2003’s Ghetto Pop Life with Green and Brooklyn MC Jemini, followed by the 2004 Twenty Six Inch EP.
Widespread recognition arrived later that year when the now-legendary Grey Album surfaced online. Damon Albarn enlisted him for Gorillaz’s second album, 2005’s Demon Days, earning a Producer of the Year Grammy nomination. Danger Mouse also teamed with MC MF Doom to create Danger Doom, whose debut The Mouse and the Mask—featuring characters from Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim—appeared in 2005, succeeded by the Occult Hymn EP of new tracks and remixes.
Further acclaim arrived when he formed Gnarls Barkley with Green; their debut St. Elsewhere attained double-platinum status on the strength of the hit “Crazy,” which reached number one in the U.K. and number two in the U.S. In 2007 the album captured the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album and “Crazy” won Best Urban/Alternative Performance.
Throughout the remainder of the 2000s Burton stayed highly sought after. In 2006 he contributed to the Rapture’s Pieces of the People We Love and Sparklehorse’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, the latter also featuring Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips. The next year he rejoined Albarn to produce the Good, the Bad & the Queen, whose lineup included the Clash’s Paul Simonon, drummer Tony Allen, and former Verve guitarist Simon Tong. Additional 2008 productions encompassed Martina Topley-Bird’s The Blue God and the Shortwave Set’s Replica Sun Machine, while Gnarls Barkley’s second album The Odd Couple earned another Best Alternative Music Album nomination. That same year he helmed Beck’s Modern Guilt and the Black Keys’ Attack & Release.
After the April 2009 release of The Last Laugh, his project with Helena Costas under the name Joker’s Daughter, it emerged that Burton and James Mercer had launched Broken Bells; their self-titled debut arrived in 2010. While producing the Black Keys’ Brothers, Burton also released Dark Night of the Soul late that year—an album conceived with Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous and featuring appearances by Frank Black, Wayne Coyne, Suzanne Vega, Jason Lytle, Iggy Pop, and David Lynch among others. In February 2011 he received the Grammy for Best Producer for his work on Brothers, Dark Night of the Soul, and Broken Bells.
Early in 2011 Danger Mouse disclosed a five-year secret collaboration with Daniele Luppi titled Rome, modeled on 1960s Italian film scores and featuring vocalists Norah Jones and Jack White. That year he also produced the Black Keys’ platinum-certified El Camino. In 2012 he helmed Electric Guest’s Mondo and Norah Jones’s Little Broken Hearts, then Portugal. The Man’s 2013 album Evil Friends. In 2014 Broken Bells issued After the Disco, the Black Keys released Turn Blue—their fourth collaboration with Burton—and U2 put out Songs of Innocence.
Danger Mouse returned to hip-hop in 2015 for A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$AP. Later that year he established 30th Century Records. He replaced longtime producer Rick Rubin on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2016 album The Getaway, the band’s first without Rubin since 1991, and contributed to Adele’s 25, which won Album of the Year at the 2017 Grammys. In April 2017 he released Resistance Radio: The Man in the High Castle, a set of 1960s covers by the Shins, Beck, and Andrew VanWyngarden, tied to the Amazon series of the same name. That year he also joined Big Boi and Run the Jewels on “Chase Me” for the Baby Driver soundtrack. In 2018 he produced Parquet Courts’ Wide Awake!. The following year Danger Mouse collaborated with Karen O on Lux Prima, whose single “Woman” later garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance, and co-wrote and co-produced Michael Kiwanuka’s Kiwanuka with Inflo, a U.K. number-two album nominated for Best Rock Album. Cheat Codes, his project with the Roots’ Black Thought, appeared in 2022; the duo’s record featured Kiwanuka, Joey Bada$$, Raekwon, and Run the Jewels, with a posthumous MF Doom verse on “Belize.” Born Again, the long-unreleased second Jemini album recorded two decades earlier, emerged in 2023.
Born Brian Burton in White Plains, New York, to a schoolteacher father and a social-worker mother, Danger Mouse passed much of his youth farther upstate in Spring Valley. At age thirteen the family relocated to Stone Mountain, an Atlanta suburb that acquainted him with hip-hop from the South and Midwest. Although Burton had long aspired to cartooning, the offer of a full scholarship persuaded the eighteen-year-old to enroll at the University of Georgia, where he studied telecommunications. College exposed him to Nirvana, Pink Floyd, and Portishead as well as Athens’s rising indie-rock community, prompting remixes of Neutral Milk Hotel material. He served as a DJ at the campus station and began issuing his own recordings under the Pelican City moniker, delivering The Chilling Effect in 1999 and Rhode Island in 2000 on the December First label while still enrolled. Around the same period he adopted the alias Danger Mouse—taken from the cartoon character he had watched as a child—and performed in a mouse costume to manage stage fright. A second-place finish at a 1998 Athens talent show earned him an opening slot for OutKast and Goodie Mob, leading to a friendship with the latter group’s MC/singer CeeLo Green.
One credit short of graduation, Burton relocated to London intent on a career as a trip-hop DJ, yet soon shifted focus to crafting his own hip-hop beats and took a bartending job at the pub The Rose to cover expenses. Encouraged by a friend, he submitted material to the British techno imprint Warp; impressed by a mash-up of Air and Audio Two, another of Nas and Portishead, and his original productions, the label offered a two-album contract on its hip-hop subsidiary Lex. Burton returned to the United States to record 2003’s Ghetto Pop Life with Green and Brooklyn MC Jemini, followed by the 2004 Twenty Six Inch EP.
Widespread recognition arrived later that year when the now-legendary Grey Album surfaced online. Damon Albarn enlisted him for Gorillaz’s second album, 2005’s Demon Days, earning a Producer of the Year Grammy nomination. Danger Mouse also teamed with MC MF Doom to create Danger Doom, whose debut The Mouse and the Mask—featuring characters from Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim—appeared in 2005, succeeded by the Occult Hymn EP of new tracks and remixes.
Further acclaim arrived when he formed Gnarls Barkley with Green; their debut St. Elsewhere attained double-platinum status on the strength of the hit “Crazy,” which reached number one in the U.K. and number two in the U.S. In 2007 the album captured the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album and “Crazy” won Best Urban/Alternative Performance.
Throughout the remainder of the 2000s Burton stayed highly sought after. In 2006 he contributed to the Rapture’s Pieces of the People We Love and Sparklehorse’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, the latter also featuring Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips. The next year he rejoined Albarn to produce the Good, the Bad & the Queen, whose lineup included the Clash’s Paul Simonon, drummer Tony Allen, and former Verve guitarist Simon Tong. Additional 2008 productions encompassed Martina Topley-Bird’s The Blue God and the Shortwave Set’s Replica Sun Machine, while Gnarls Barkley’s second album The Odd Couple earned another Best Alternative Music Album nomination. That same year he helmed Beck’s Modern Guilt and the Black Keys’ Attack & Release.
After the April 2009 release of The Last Laugh, his project with Helena Costas under the name Joker’s Daughter, it emerged that Burton and James Mercer had launched Broken Bells; their self-titled debut arrived in 2010. While producing the Black Keys’ Brothers, Burton also released Dark Night of the Soul late that year—an album conceived with Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous and featuring appearances by Frank Black, Wayne Coyne, Suzanne Vega, Jason Lytle, Iggy Pop, and David Lynch among others. In February 2011 he received the Grammy for Best Producer for his work on Brothers, Dark Night of the Soul, and Broken Bells.
Early in 2011 Danger Mouse disclosed a five-year secret collaboration with Daniele Luppi titled Rome, modeled on 1960s Italian film scores and featuring vocalists Norah Jones and Jack White. That year he also produced the Black Keys’ platinum-certified El Camino. In 2012 he helmed Electric Guest’s Mondo and Norah Jones’s Little Broken Hearts, then Portugal. The Man’s 2013 album Evil Friends. In 2014 Broken Bells issued After the Disco, the Black Keys released Turn Blue—their fourth collaboration with Burton—and U2 put out Songs of Innocence.
Danger Mouse returned to hip-hop in 2015 for A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$AP. Later that year he established 30th Century Records. He replaced longtime producer Rick Rubin on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2016 album The Getaway, the band’s first without Rubin since 1991, and contributed to Adele’s 25, which won Album of the Year at the 2017 Grammys. In April 2017 he released Resistance Radio: The Man in the High Castle, a set of 1960s covers by the Shins, Beck, and Andrew VanWyngarden, tied to the Amazon series of the same name. That year he also joined Big Boi and Run the Jewels on “Chase Me” for the Baby Driver soundtrack. In 2018 he produced Parquet Courts’ Wide Awake!. The following year Danger Mouse collaborated with Karen O on Lux Prima, whose single “Woman” later garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance, and co-wrote and co-produced Michael Kiwanuka’s Kiwanuka with Inflo, a U.K. number-two album nominated for Best Rock Album. Cheat Codes, his project with the Roots’ Black Thought, appeared in 2022; the duo’s record featured Kiwanuka, Joey Bada$$, Raekwon, and Run the Jewels, with a posthumous MF Doom verse on “Belize.” Born Again, the long-unreleased second Jemini album recorded two decades earlier, emerged in 2023.
Albums
Singles
