Danger Mouse and his partner in Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, spoke on Thursday, May 29, with NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross about the construction of their new album, The Odd Couple. Asked by Gross about how the prevalence of sampling in hip-hop may have influenced the way Danger Mouse thinks about music, he replied:
I was in the bathroom the other day looking at a picture and I saw something in the picture that looked like a certain kind of face, and it was a child’s face, the way it was looking, but when you back away from it, it’s not that at all, it was just a tree branch, you know, and the arm of a bear, or something like that.Check out the full interview at npr.org.But what I saw was that, and if I took that little piece and made a big picture out of that, then it would be the way I looked at or what I saw that was beautiful about it or nice about it or whatever. And with music, it’s a similar thing for me, when it comes to sampling. I just want to work with stuff that’s affecting me.