Every time I'd heard something new from CeeLo, I kept thinking: Why is he not a superstar? His style was so unique, and there was so much damn soul in everything he did. It just confounded me why he wasn't a household name.
Anyway, unless you've been living under a rock--or, at the very least, a bunker without an internet connection, you know that CeeLo is now a huge star, largely as the result of his creative partnership with writer/producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse.
But I'm not going to talk about the song you might think I'm going to talk about. Yet.
Instead, there's a brief track sitting at the very end of 2006's St. Elsewhere called "The Last Time." It uses a sample from a somewhat obscure funk song called "Chicano Chaser" by Ian Langley, which--as far as I can tell--was recorded in 1973 as production (or stock) music for use in TV and film.
In other words, it basically was a track intended for use under a car chase scene in a cop show.
Which, considering how infectiously catchy "The Last Time" is, is a testament to Danger Mouse's production acumen and CeeLo's ability to sing anything from the phonebook to his damn ABC's and make it sound like church.
Like a lot of the other tracks on St. Elsewhere, there's a party vibe, but there's also a little melancholy at the bottom of that glass of Courvoisier. It's as much a call to dance away the troubles of your day as it is to reconnect with a lost passion within oneself.
And that's what makes it good. That, and that funky tambourine.
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