Listen Now: Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's 'Rome' Featuring Jack White

Click here to listen to the Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi album Rome

Rome is the first full-album collaboration between Danger Mouse – the producer behind Gnarls Barkley, Broken Bells and the Gorillaz's Demon Days album – and the Italian composer Daniele Luppi. The record, five years in the making, is the duo's tribute to lush orchestration and psychedelic tones of classic Italian film music.

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Luppi and Danger Mouse made all of the music on Rome using vintage equipment, traditional production methods and veteran session musicians. They also recruited Jack White and Norah Jones to lend their distinct voices to three songs each. The tracks featuring White, such as "The Rose With the Broken Neck," are a revelation. After years of hearing White's voice mainly in the context of loud, minimal rock music, his vocals take on a new dimension on these elegant tracks.

Rome will be in stores on May 17th, but you can stream it in full now.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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