Crazy by Gnarls Barkley Song Info
"Crazy" is the first single from Gnarls Barkley, a musical collaboration between Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, and is taken from their 2006 debut album St. Elsewhere. It became a top ten hit throughout Europe, North America and Oceania, in the first half of 2006, reaching number one of the single charts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand and other countries. According to the Crazy Songfacts, this was the best selling single of 2006 in the UK, The song was leaked in late 2005, months before its regular release, and consequently received massive airplay on BBC Radio 1 in the United Kingdom, most notably by radio DJ Zane Lowe, who also used the song in TV ads for his show. When it was finally released in March 2006, it became the first single to top the UK charts on download sales alone. The song remained at number one in the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks (which no other song had achieved in over ten years, and was only surpassed by Rihanna's "Umbrella" in July 2007) before the band and their record company decided to remove the single from UK stores so people would "remember the song fondly and not get sick of it." In spite of this deletion, the song became the UK's best selling single of 2006. The song won a 2007 Grammy Award for Best Urban/Alternative Performance, and was also nominated as Record of the Year, which it lost to "Not Ready to Make Nice" by the Dixie Chicks. It was also nominated and further won a 2006 MTV Europe Music Award for Best Song. The song was also named the best song of 2006 by Rolling Stone and by the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. Musically, "Crazy" was inspired by film scores of spaghetti Westerns, in particular by the works of Ennio Morricone, who is best known as the composer of Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. The song samples a portion of "Last Man Standing" by the brothers Gian Franco and Gian Piero Reverberi from the 1968 spaghetti Western Django, Prepare a Coffin (Preparati la bara!) (The track is listed as "Nel cimitero di Tucson" on the film's soundtrack). In a 2006 interview with The lNew York Times, Danger Mouse said: "I brought in a song that I felt was a complete Ennio Morricone ripoff, but Cee-Lo and I started talking, and I somehow got off on this tangent about how people won't take an artist seriously unless they're insane." The song's lyrics, written by Cee-Lo, were inspired by a conversation he and Danger Mouse had in the studio with the instrumental playing on repeat: Danger Mouse was "caught up in thinking that people have to believe you're crazy to think you're an artist." After the conversation, Cee-Lo recorded the vocals for the song in just one take.
