Sleepless Nights with Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and Dark Night of the Soul

We spend our lives at the mercy of transcendent moments. Some of us chase them - by gulping our way to the bottom of a bourbon bottle; by pressing our bodies against each other with breathy, thoughtless momentum; by hurling ourselves into the physicality of backbreaking labor. And some of us flee them - with the rigorous temperance of never more than one drink; with the wherewithal to quell even the most violent infatuation; with the even-keeled focus to keep from diving completely in. But control is a dubious and flimsy construct. And it falls apart once we fall asleep. 

Every night, whether we’ve willfully hopped into bed with strangers or tucked ourselves in behind a dead-bolted door, we all submit to sleep. We lie in our beds, unconscionably and utterly vulnerable - not only to everything that surrounds us, but also, and more terribly, to everything within us. With every auditory and visual image we’ve ever encountered passing through our heads in endless permutations, the line between a sweet dream and a horrid nightmare is impossibly fine. There’s always the potential to be jolted awake in a fit of cold sweats, thrust back into consciousness and the darkness of night. Still, at the end of each day we relinquish control. On our backs in the dark like Beckett’s fools, we disappear into a collective blank.

The ability to eschew control isn’t something one generally attributes to a songwriter. Or a producer. Or a director. Those titles assume a uniquely high level of ownership, agency, and craftsmanship - rightly so - and are, for one reason or another, often associated with creatively obsessive insomniacs. Yet it’s precisely that ceding that can yield both the brightest dreams and the greatest achievements, especially in collaborative acts.

However, when what resembled abstract movie posters first spread word about Dark Night of the Soul - the mysterious art partnership between Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and David Lynch - a question formed: Who among them would take control? Would it be Lynch, whose directorial hands create that unmistakable blur of twisted Americana, Hollywood detritus, and harrowing waking-dreams? Would it be Danger Mouse, whose producer credits include Gorillaz; Gnarls Barkley; Beck; The Good, the Bad and the Queen; dangerdoom; The Black Keys and more? Or would it be Linkous, whose simultaneous surrealism and sincerity smacks listeners in the gut with Sparklehorse’s devastating beauty, derived from his unique perspective of what it means to be alive?

The answer, of course, is that control was both shared and surrendered by each player, and what they produced is immaculate. A 12-song pop opus, written and produced by Linkous and Burton, Dark Night of the Soul features a mind-blowing assembly of vocalists and musicians - The Flaming Lips, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black, Iggy Pop, James Mercer of The Shins, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, Vic Chesnutt and even Lynch himself lend their voices to the record. It’s also accompanied by a stunning, 100-page book of photographs taken by Lynch and inspired by each song, which underscore the project’s themes of dreams, awakenings, and our undeniably human efforts to connect. 

But if anyone can be said to exert - or to feebly try to exert - control upon the project, it’s EMI, the record company that, because of an ongoing dispute, is refusing to release the album. As it stands, Burton, whose aesthetic triumph, The Grey Album, is the mash-up of all mash-ups and a pinnacle of creativity in this new century (and made him no stranger to the legal trappings of a slow-to-evolve music industry), is releasing the book with a blank, recordable CD-R and the accompanying note: “For legal reasons, the enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you see fit.” Burton won’t talk about that part of the story, but even if, as some cynics suspect, it’s part of some elaborate, closed-door marketing ploy, it’s also an acutely tacit acknowledgement that every desirable piece of music made these days will, indeed, be leaked. Moreover, from both artistic and commercial perspectives, at some point, we all lose control.  In 1996, Mark Linkous overdosed on a nasty cocktail of heroin and painkillers, and nearly lost the use of his legs. His battle with depression in the time since has been much chronicled, and the music he’s written evokes visions of a life both enduring and fragile. Most of us haven’t experienced the specific pain of a near-death overdose, but everyone has gotten in over his or her head at one point or another - and just about anyone who hears a Sparklehorse song will at some point think, “Huh, I can relate.”

That’s certainly true of Brian Burton, who in 2004 met Sparklehorse’s manager and asked her to pass Linkous word that Burton was a fan. The next year, the two artists met and fast became friends, bonding over music and art and eventually making a record together, as Burton produced some of Sparklehorse’s 2006 album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. However, when the album was finished, an incomplete track remained.

 “We had no idea what we were creating at the time,” Linkous explains over the phone. “All we had was a song left over from the last Sparklehorse album called ‘Revolution.’ It was a really good pop song with a really good melody, and I wanted it to be an anti-war song, but I couldn’t sing it because I couldn’t write the lyrics - I’m not that great at writing literal lyrics. Mine are pretty surreal and metaphorical. Plus, it was a little bit out of my range, and I always thought one of Brian’s Britpop friends would sound better singing it anyway.” The song would end up as Dark Night of the Soul’s “Just War,” sung by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals.

Long before the song got to Rhys, though, Linkous and Burton started toying with the track, and in it Burton saw vast potential. He convinced Linkous to fly from North Carolina to Los Angeles to work on what would become the album, though Linkous did so with the caveat that he wouldn’t sing on all of the songs. “I guess that was sort of the egg that started the whole thing,” Linkous says.

According to Burton’s written introduction to Dark Night of the Soul, Linkous and Burton assembled a wish list of singers for the songs they were writing. In conversation, though, Burton puts it more casually: “We kind of figured we’d get with our friends, people we knew that sang. We weren’t hiring these people, and we didn’t make any specific songs for specific people. We didn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s write a song for James,’ or, ‘Let’s write a song for Jason.’ We just started doing stuff.”

They continued working, and months turned into years, the longest period of time Burton has ever spent working on a project. “I was always afraid of working on things for too long,” Burton says, “because what if it didn’t turn out right and you did all that for nothing?” But in perhaps a subconsciously serendipitous happenstance, Burton caught a screening of David Lynch’s 2007 film, INLAND EMPIRE, and proposed to Linkous the idea of involving Lynch in the project. 

“[Lynch] and I don’t live far from each other,” Burton says, explaining the curious ease with which he recruited one of the towering filmmakers of the past three decades to take part in a pop record. “So, I guess when you’re in the same city and you’re two artists, there’s always some way to get in contact; it wasn’t a very difficult thing, actually. It was a surprise to me, in a way.” It was Lynch - whose voice can be heard on some of the songs on INLAND EMPIRE’s soundtrack - who proposed the idea of shooting a collection of stills in response to the songs on what would become Dark Night of the Soul. To that, Linkous responded with exuberance and a bit of disbelief: “[Lynch] is one of my heroes and it’ll always be one of the biggest things in my life, meeting and working with someone who’s been an inspiration to me musically since day one.”

Other than Linkous and Burton, Lynch was the only contributor to hear every track on the album and he eventually broached the topic of singing a few songs himself. “When Brian told me that he wanted to involve [Lynch] singing one of the songs,” Linkous says, “I went into my studio that night and recorded a song on my Optigan, which is a Mattel child’s fun-machine thing [and musical instrument along the lines of a chord organ] that was made in Compton in the ‘70s. I sent that song to [Lynch] and he sang, and in a couple days it was just perfect. In the third verse, we were able to pull a lot of the other instruments down and make apparent the unmistakable sound of the Laura Palmer synthesizer [from Twin Peaks].”

The song would become “Dark Night of the Soul,” an uncompromising closing number that speaks to the inherent relationship between terror and beauty in all our dreams, and which seemed to encompass the undercurrents of the entire project. It fast became the title for the album and book. Burton puts it this way: “Lynch was the one who got to hear everyone else’s songs before he wrote his parts, vocally. So, I looked at it like he was kind of summing up what he was hearing for himself, even though I don’t know if that’s what he did or not. But, it helped me look back on everything else, and it felt like that was the title all along. I almost don’t remember it ever not being called that, even though it was the last song that was recorded.”  

To fully appreciate Dark Night of the Soul is to listen to the album all alone, with the book in one’s lap, at disconcerting hours when the only other sounds in the house are certain to inspire fear and consternation. To shift from gorgeously unsettling pop song to pop song (from Jason Lytle’s heart-warming lilt, to Julian Casablancas’s masculine murmur, to Nina Persson’s delicate verse) while following along with the loosely tied narrative of the photographs (a shadowy figure whispers a secret into an elegant woman’s ear; a trio of saddle-shoed starlets pose on a leaf-covered lawn in front of a fake background of crashing surf; a fuzzy-robed housewife stares out her kitchen window into a shadowy black midnight) - all which are unmistakably Lynchian - is to inhabit that place between dreams and waking life, where everything is fragile, ill at ease, and near a breaking point. Burton describes it as an effort to confront our increasingly shortened attention spans, but it goes far deeper than that. It’s a journey into a collective space, a world created by an army of authors, sung by a chorus of voices. And no one who lives there seems in control.