Best Producer: Danger Mouse

Burton's next few projects are even more eclectic. He's working with Martina Topley Bird, a former protégée of trip-hop producer Tricky, and a British band called the Shortwave Set, for whom he unleashed the full force of his Beatles obsession, recording Mellotron-infused tracks that sound like they were recorded in Abbey Road circa 1968. Also coming is an elaborate Morricone homage called The Rome Project, for which he's using the composer's former musicians and studio.

What does all this music have in common? Burton — dressed like a hipster grad student in jeans, brown Converse, striped blue blazer and white T-shirt — fluffs his modest Afro as he considers the question. "I like to think that the stuff I do is very visual," he says, "where you're able to really have your own visions and dreams and thoughts based on what you're hearing. Because a lot of music can take you out of that and can be overbearing, where you just picture the person singing."

Burton cultivates an air of mystery. Before a reporter visits his studio, he has a bunch of employees run in and strip it of personal effects. This reticence has helped lead to some confusion over what he actually does in the studio: Though he's best known for his prowess at sampling, these days Burton mostly plays live instruments — drums, guitar, bass, keyboards — editing the results until they sound better than his chops allow.

Burton was an underground hip-hop producer until he achieved wider fame through 2004's The Grey Album, a stunt that was as audacious as it was labor-intensive: He lifted bits of the Beatles' White Album to serve as backing tracks for the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album.

In his studio's control room, a copy of the book Recording the Beatles sits next to a rack of vintage keyboards, and an Eventide effects processor is programmed to a preset called "Lennon." Burton loves the band so much that he can't bring himself to name a favorite song — though his favorite album at the moment is Revolver.

Burton has spent a lot of time thinking about race, about black and white music — he says it's at the core of what he does. Both of his parents are black, but he happens to be light-skinned. "People don't know what I am," he says. "And I didn't know when I was younger." First, he was one of the few black kids in a Jewish neighborhood in the New York suburbs, and then his parents moved to a mostly black neighborhood in Georgia, where he felt culturally out of place. "I was obviously so different in each environment I was in, and I just wanted to be the same. I didn't want to stand out."

But then, at the University of Georgia, he discovered Sixties rock — and he vowed never to throw up walls around himself again. "I just was in horror," he says. "I just couldn't believe that there's all these films I hadn't seen, all these records I hadn't heard because I didn't want people to think I was weird." He sits up in his chair, seeming less sleepy all of a sudden. "That was what made me want to make music. You know, maybe I could show other people how similar we all are."