The only saving grace of the whole experience was that I was working for an online video marketing start-up that I believed in. I mainly interviewed clients and then scripted their online commercials, but I also was composing and recording all of our production music (to avoid copyright issues) and running a video blog that covered community events around the city. It wasn't unusual for me to put in a full day of work and then have to head right back out with my camera to interview the organizer of a charity run or street fair, and then come home to eat a late dinner by the glow of the video editing suite on my laptop before working on some new production music for Client A, who'd specifically requested "something that sounds like Duke Ellington" for her commercial.
After spending my late night hours chopping up video or channeling the spirit of Billy Strayhorn, I'd crawl into bed around 1 a.m. to try and sleep before doing it all again. Inevitably, my asshole upstairs neighbor (I lived in a ground floor apartment) would come stumbling home around the same time—often with an entourage, fresh from some bar downtown, and the afterparty would continue into the wee hours of the morning. This was on weeknights, by the way; weekends were their own, unique frat house kind of hell. (I had to wonder how a salesman for Rubbermaid Industrial Products could literally and figuratively afford to live like Vince Neil, circa 1989, seven days-a-week.)
Point is, the days were long, and I wasn't getting much sleep. I was enjoying the work, but I wasn't making any money (none of us were). There were lots of external stressors—from lingering college debt to family drama—making life tricky. And I was in a relationship that wasn't working.
It all began to take its toll.
One sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2006, I came home after a very long day. We'd had a brand new laptop stolen from our reception desk (all signs indicated that a client's wife had walked off with it while we were shooting the husband's commercial in our studio), and my faith in humanity was pretty shaken. I simply was exhausted and sick of the whole Charlotte experience.
Anyway, I'd been hearing about this song called "Crazy" that supposedly was a collaboration between Thomas Callaway (a.k.a. CeeLo Green) and Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse). But I'd yet to actually hear it. So I was poking around iTunes, trying to get inspired to do some more backing music for an upcoming production, and I finally had a chance to preview the track. It was just a :30 snippet, and all I heard was the end of the second verse (You really think you're in control?) and that now-famous chorus. Chalk it up to extreme fatigue, but it hit me hard, and I started to bawl.
CeeLo's Nina Simone-like delivery seemed to capture all of the frustration I was feeling, but he also seemed to be channeling the world's anguish in his man-in-the-wilderness wail. It was cathartic. Necessary, in fact.
It was no surprise to me when it became a massive worldwide hit.
As Burton told New York magazine in 2006, the basic track (which samples the instrumental "Last Men Standing" by Italian composers Gianfranco and Gian Pero Reverberi from the 1968 film Viva! Django) was a blatant homage to Spaghetti Westerns and the music of Ennio Morricone (think: "The Theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly").
In a separate 2006 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Burton expanded on this by saying he'd played the instrumental track for Callaway, who was blown away by it. From there, that sparked a conversation between the two about artistry, insanity, and the public's perception thereof, leading them to the conclusion that no one takes artists seriously unless they're perceived as being crazy.
Said Burton, "So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy. We talked about this for hours, and then I went home. But while I was away, CeeLo took that conversation and made it into 'Crazy,' which we recorded in one take. That's the whole story. The lyrics are his interpretation of that conversation."
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