Karen O
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“Brian Burton [a.k.a. Danger Mouse] hit me up and said he wanted to play me some music. He was totally vague about what it was, but I went over to his apartment and he played me a few songs off of this record he was helping Daniele with.
I was shocked. I hadn’t heard that kind of music since the dawn of my career in the really early 2000s — that post-punk, underground New York, late-‘70s, early-‘80s stuff. It felt like a lifetime ago that I’d heard music like that sounding so fresh. I thought it was dead and gone for a while! To hear it re-envisioned with a new energy was so cool. I was hooked.
Everything about it was appealing, except for the prospect of doing more than one song. Even one song I wasn’t sure about. I hadn’t done anything in that style in a really long time, not since the early days of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And I had basically been on another planet, raising a child for a year.
After all that time, it was kind of the opposite of what I thought I’d do as a first thing coming out of that baby haze. I was like, “Man, maybe I should recommend this gal or that gal instead of me.” Then I thought about it some more, and I was like, “Ah, fuck that, I can do this.”