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Cee-Lo Green is lying on a couch, talking about his mother. Which is fitting, because the thirty-two-year-old singer and rapper has a new duo, Gnarls Barkley, whose insanity-themed "Crazy" is the most inescapable jam of the summer. Hanging out in a small room off the lobby of his West Hollywood hotel -- dressed like a hip suburban dad in a linen button-down, khaki shorts and soft brown loafers -- he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd write a pop song about a Syd Barrett-like descent into madness. His decision to kick back into a full recline is probably explained by his physique, which is that of a man with a healthy appetite ("I like fried chicken and scrambled eggs," he says). His bald head is covered with tattoos, including some large, stylized tribal characters on the back and a homemade-looking trill (Atlanta slang for "true" and "real") above his left ear.

But as tourists filter in and out of the room to check their e-mail on a nearby computer -- and an elderly woman nods off in an overstuffed chair -- Cee-Lo (whose real name is Thomas Callaway) talks for two straight hours, not stopping for so much as a drink of water, about his battle with childhood depression, the death of both of his parents and his remorse for a teenage career as a petty thief and gang enforcer. The discussion goes a long way toward explaining why one of the summer's best party albums, Gnarls' St. Elsewhere, is also a dark tour of Cee-Lo's damaged psyche, with songs about paranoia ("The Boogie Monster"), necrophilia ("Necromancer"), schizophrenia ("Who Cares?") and suicide ("Just a Thought"). "I experienced a lot of detachment, a lot of isolation when I was a kid," Cee-Lo says. "I thought I'd grow up to be a hit man. Isn't that crazy?" He laughs, before quickly adding, "No pun intended."

The product of a transcontinental collaboration between Atlanta's Cee-Lo (formerly of the pioneering Dirty South rap group Goodie Mob) and the L.A.-based DJ and producer Danger Mouse (who became famous with his brilliant copyright-ignoring Beatles/Jay-Z mash-up The Grey Album in 2004), the string-soaked, bottom-heavy "Crazy" first caught on in the U.K. in April, when it debuted at Number One based on download sales alone. It stayed in the top spot for nine weeks, tying Queen's 1975 run with "Bohemian Rhapsody" -- before the duo made the unusual decision to stop manufacturing the record. "We figured tying with Queen is enough pressure for now," Cee-Lo says.

In this country, St. Elsewhere has sold more than 600,000 copies, making it one of the breakout debuts of the year. Much like "Hey Ya!" in 2003 -- also by a couple of hip-hop guys from Atlanta -- "Crazy" is the rare hit that connects with the broadest possible audience, scoring airplay on virtually every format and climbing to Number Two on Billboard's Hot 100 chart and Number Seven on the Modern Rock chart. "I don't know when I last saw a record that charted at the top of the AC chart, the pop chart, the Modern Rock chart, the AAA chart, the urban chart, the mainstream AC chart," says Craig Kallman, CEO of Atlantic Records Group, which put out St. Elsewhere. "You don't see a lot of records that have such a broad spectrum of connection to people -- young and old. There's something for everybody."

The duo say they didn't have a specific audience in mind when they were making the album. "A lot of people perceive that if black people are doing music that isn't traditionally black music, then it's a deliberate attempt to do something different," says the twenty-nine-year-old Danger Mouse (whose real name is Brian Burton). "But this record wasn't deliberate on either one of our parts. We didn't worry about who would listen to it or what station would play it. We were just trying to impress each other."

Nor did they think anyone would necessarily respond to it. In 2003, Cee-Lo was struggling to keep his career afloat, recording a second solo album (Cee-Lo Green . . . Is the Soul Machine) after the first one failed to find an audience; Danger Mouse was unknown outside of a small and geeky group of electronic-music and indie-hip-hop fans. Says Cee-Lo, "My original title for the album was Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green: Who Cares?"