Best Producer: Danger Mouse

Brian Burton didn't get much sleep last night, and it's all Beck's fault. On a Wednesday morning in early March, Burton is trudging toward a Starbucks near his Los Angeles recording studio, where he wrapped up a session for the next Beck album just a few hours earlier. "Some of it was fun, some of it wasn't," is all he will say about the evening's work. Inside the coffeehouse, Burton — who is better known as the virtuosic, boundary-breaking producer Danger Mouse — orders a ham, egg and cheese sandwich but no coffee. He never drinks it. A caffeine boost "seems too easy," Burton says, eyes bleary behind aviator shades: He has been working almost nonstop for the past few years, only recently starting to take weekends off.

Danger Mouse is the perfect hitmaker for Obama's America — a hip-hop fan whose life was changed by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. "Hip-hop was what I knew really well," Burton says, drinking Vitamin Water back in his studio's control room. "But it's not what inspired me to make music. It was the older rock stuff I started to hear." His sound blurs the line between samples and live instruments, slipping warped hip-hop beats under the orchestral twang of Ennio Morricone, the analog punch of the Beatles and the unhinged freedom of psychedelic rock. Singer-rapper Cee-Lo and Burton just released The Odd Couple, their second album as the experimental rock-R&B duo Gnarls Barkley. The album may not spawn a hit on the order of 2006's smash "Crazy," but its futuristic combination of fractured robo-beats and go-go-booted Sixties textures does manage to sound like no other music in recent memory. "My initial audience is Danger, and Danger alone," says Cee-Lo. "He has impeccable taste. I aspire to impress him."

Though he's become one of the most famous producers in the world, Burton, 30, doesn't churn out hits for superstars — the high-profile Beck gig is an anomaly. He turns down most big-name offers, reserving his colorful, cinematic production style for more personal projects. "I only go with what I really am passionate about," he says. "I want to be around for a long time, not necessarily the hot guy." Burton's other current album is Attack & Release, by the Black Keys — on it, he essentially became a third member of the Akron, Ohio, indie blues-rock duo. "It was total teamwork," says singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach. The band was impressed both by Burton's musical prowess and by his willingness to spend his Gnarls money: One night in an Ohio Wal-Mart, Burton bought a fifty-inch TV so he could watch DVDs while he was in town.