Gnarls Barkley Biography, Albums, Live Performances, Crazy, Awards & Nominations

Gnarls Barkley Biography

Gnarls Barkley is an American neo cum psychedelic soul and rock duo, composed of singer and songwriter CeeLo Green and producer Danger Mouse. In 2006, the duo released their debut studio album titled ‘St. Elsewhere’ which contained their hit single “Crazy”. The hit song peaked at number two on the US Hot 100 and topped the UK Singles Chart. Additionally, it was nominated for the Record of the Year at the 2007 Grammy Awards, and was platinum certified for shipping over 1,000,000 records. The album also received a nomination for Album of the Year. Gnarls Barkley’s second studio album titled ‘The Odd Couple’ was scheduled for release in April 2008, but was released earlier due to a leak of their album over the internet. The album  received positive reviews, but did not have as much commercial success as their first album due to the consecutive leak.

Gnarls Barkley Ceelo Green

Gnarls Barkley’s singer and song writer CeeLo Green first entered the scene as part of the Atlanta hip hop group Goodie Mob which had a large hand in the Dirty South movement of the 1990s. The singer left the group after their third album in 1999 and started his solo career. That year he sang on “Do You Like the Way” along with Lauryn Hill on Santana’s multi-platinum Supernatural album.

Gnarls Barkley Brian Burton| Danger Mouse

Brian Joseph Burton, better known by his stage name Danger Mouse, has produced albums for a number of hip hop and rock artists, including  Gorillaz’ Demon Days, and The Black Keys’ Attack & Release, El Camino, and Turn Blue. He received international attention for his mash-up The Grey Album, which blended the a cappella edition of Jay-Z’s The Black Album with samples from The Beatles’ White Album.

Ceelo Green & Danger Mouse Collaboration

The duo first met while Green was on a tour for which Danger Mouse happened to be the DJ. They became musical partners and worked together on the songs that featured on their album  St. Elsewhere. prior to the release of that album they collaborated on the songs “What You Sittin’ On?” for Lex Records in 2004, and “Benzie Box” from the Danger Doom album The Mouse and the Mask in 2005.

Gnarls Barkley Name

Sanjiv Bhattacharya; The Guardian’s correspondent met with the duo; asked about where their band name came from, to which Green replied: “You ask me why we’re called Gnarls Barkley and I’m asking you ‘why not?’…The name Gnarls Barkley isn’t anchored down. It’s a drifter. A High Plains drifter, I might add”. Danger Mouse said: “There’s no story behind it…The name doesn’t have anything to do with anything”. Although many people believe that their name has something to do with former NBA player Charles Barkley; when Sanjiv asked them about it, Danger Mouse replied: “Nope. It’s just like everything else on this record. There was no conscious decision about stuff”.

According to a Billboard article: “Burton and CeeLo have been cagey about what the name of the act means, and each live performance is an opportunity to play dress-up as tennis players, astronauts and chefs, among many other get-ups. The costuming extends to photo shoots, as Burton and Cee Lo would rather impersonate characters from such films as Back to the Future or Wayne’s World. They also have dressed up as characters from films A Clockwork Orange and Napoleon Dynamite.

CeeLo Green said in an interview:

That is that electric industrial Euro soul, that’s what I call it… if I can call it anything. It truly is shapeless and formless. My style and my approach is still water, and it runs so deep. So, with that project I got a chance to be a lil’ zany, of course a continuation of eccentricity, abstract and vague, and all of those wonderful things that make art exactly what it is. And that’s subject to interpretation. As far as the artiste himself, it does cater to and extend the legacy of Cee Lo Green, and showcase the diversity and range and intention of Cee Lo Green. It is a great project that I’m very, very proud of.

Gnarls Barkley St. Elsewhere 

On April 24, 2006,The duo released their debut album titled, St. Elsewhere  in the United Kingdom and on May 9, 2006, in their native United States. The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and at  No. 20 on the U.S. Billboard 200.It topped the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart for 39 non-consecutive weeks in 2006 and 2007. The album’s first single, “Crazy”, was the first song to become a UK number one single based solely on downloads. The album was certified Platinum in the US by the RIAA, for shipping 1,000,000 units. A limited edition deluxe package of St. Elsewhere was released on November 7 2006. The CD+DVD package includes a 92-page booklet, four music videos and bonus songs from live performance.

Gnarls Barkley Crazy

May 24, 2006, the band performed their hit song”Crazy” for their American television debut on Late Night with Conan O’Brien . The duo catapulted to fame and Warners Bros. Records in the United Kingdom signed the band after several songs including “Crazy” were played for them by Danger Mouse’s management company Waxploitation. “Crazy” was released as their first single on April 3, 2006, preceded by its release as digital download and 12″ vinyl record single in March 2006. It gained some of its popularity due to its use on primetime BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe’s television advert, and it was also made Record of the Week by Ken Bruce of BBC Radio 2, Scott Mills and Jo Whiley of BBC Radio 1 as well as being made ‘Weekend Anthem’ by DJ Spoony and Sara Cox (also of Radio 1).

In an interview with journalist Stephen Mooallem about their single “Crazy”, Mooallem asked the duo, “Is it true that Cee-Lo recorded the vocals for “Crazy” in just one take?” to which Danger Mouse replied, “Yeah. He had the words written on paper, and what you hear on the album was the first time he ever tried singing it. He went in and gave it a shot, really just to see what it would sound like. We just kept it because it sounded great.” The song was, in addition, considered by the duo to be an “independent joint venture,” paid for entirely “out-of-pocket.” Catapulting the two into stardom, the single was primarily responsible for their success, as they “didn’t even have a formal deal in place” until the song hit No. 1.

In the United Kingdom, “Crazy” became the first ever single to top the UK Singles Chart purely on download sales as it was released online a week before it was released as a CD single. It is also the first single to top the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks consecutively since 1994 when Wet Wet Wet’s “Love Is All Around” was number one for fifteen weeks. ‘Crazy’ also equaled the Queen 1975 classic “Bohemian Rhapsody”, which also topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks. Gnarls Barkley announced that as the record had spent its ninth week at number one, it was to be deleted as a vinyl/CD listing from May 28, 2006, so people will “remember the song fondly and not get sick of it”. “Crazy” is also the longest number-one on the UK Official Download Chart with its stay lasting eleven consecutive weeks. In late 2009 the song was voted as the best song of the decade by Rolling Stone magazine.

Gnarls Barkley Film Appearances| Kung Faux

They did a collaborative short film in both the Spring of 2006 and 2007 with the international TV series Kung Faux which airs heavily on Channel V around the world.an American action comedy television series and audio visual art assemblage created by Mic Neumann that remixes classic kung fu movies with popular music, comic book style editing with video game style special effects, and new storylines with voice-over dubbing from contemporary art stars, hip hop personalities, and pop culture icons.

Gnarls Barkley The Odd Couple 

In early March 2008, the duo’s second album, The Odd Couple, was leaked over the internet prompting the duo to push the release date up from April 8. In an interview with Entertainment Magazine, Danger Mouse said that he “knew it [the leak] was coming…every day, I expected to get a call saying it leaked, and eventually I got a call saying it leaked.” On March 18, 2008, the album became available via download on the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. Hard copies of the album were released on March 25.

Prior to its official release, Green spoke to the album’s anti-formulaic qualities, noting bluntly that “there’s no formula to it,” and that to expect the same wild success of St. Elsewhere is to neglect the ever-present “risk factor in any artistic endeavor.” He called it something of an “act of faith” – a true, earnest attempt to create and disseminate a piece of art to those who would seek out its conception.

Gnarls Barkley| Who’s Gonna Save My Soul Ep

On November 11, 2008, they released an EP, Who’s Gonna Save My Soul, featuring four versions of the song which originally appeared on The Odd Couple, along with a live version of “Neighbors” and a previously unreleased song, “Mystery Man.” A music video for “Mystery Man” was directed by Walter Robot and premiered on Yahoo! Music.

Gnarls Barkley Third Album

In 2010, Green announced Gnarls Barkley would start recording their third studio album after he finished work on the latestGoodie Mob album. However, the Gnarls Barkley album did not materialize and the duo was dormant for several years. In 2013, Green stated they will be releasing a third album sometime in the future. In late 2017, Cee Lo stated “We have already started on a new [Gnarls Barkley] album, we’re halfway in and we have some overtures from the other projects that may not have stood the test of time, we don’t know yet.” 

In an interview with DJBooth, CeeLo Green said he and collaborator Danger Mouse are 50 percent through recording the duo’s third album.

“We have already started on a new [Gnarls Barkley] album,” Green said. “We’re halfway in and we have some overtures from the other projects that may not have stood the test of time, we don’t know yet.” The current plan is for the pair to get back in the studio in early 2018 and rip through the rest of the songs in a week or so, per their usual working method. “That’s pretty much all the time we had to do St. Elsewhere because we were heating up around that time,” he said. “We were doing something recreationally.”

Gnarls Barkley Albums

• St. Elsewhere (2006)
• The Odd Couple (2008)

Gnarls Barkley Tours & Live Performances

From January until March 2007, they toured with the Red Hot Chili Peppers through the U.S. In October 2006, Gnarls Barkley recorded a live session for Live from Abbey Road at Abbey Road Studios. The duo  also toured Australia in March and April 2007 as part of the Channel V Festival.

They appeared as the musical guest on the April 12, 2008 episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. They were supposed to be in a Digital Short parodying amateur music videos according to the scrolled text but only appeared in the singing performances of the live broadcast.

Gnarls Barkley MTV Movie Awards

The duo performed along with AFI, Christina Aguilera, and Wolfmother at the MTV Movie Awards 2006 on June 8, 2006. They were dressed as characters from the film series Star Wars. Rebel Alliance pilots, Imperial officers, Stormtroopers, Chewbacca, Jango Fett, Obi-Wan, with Cee-Lo singing as an unmasked Darth Vader.

Gnarls Barkley Awards &  Nominations

St. Elsewhere was nominated for four Grammy Awards in 2007 including for Record of the Year, and Album of the Year, winning two of them for Best Alternate Music Album, and Best Urban/Alternate Performance for “Crazy”.

BET Awards

MTV Video Music Awards