Italian film scores inspire Danger Mouse's new album 'Rome'

By Will Hermes, Rolling Stone

Superproducer Danger Mouse has been privately talking about a project like this for years.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Danger Mouse creates album inspired by 1960s-70s Italian film scores
Composers booked a studio in Rome co-founded by Ennio Morricone
Album is "a 15-track score to a film that exists only in your head"

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(Rolling Stone) -- It's nice when dreams come true, and even better when the person has dreamed big.

Superproducer Danger Mouse has for years been talking privately about a project inspired by 1960s to 1970s Italian film scores, and he didn't cut corners:

He and co-composer Daniele Luppi booked a studio in Rome co-founded by Ennio Morricone, and reconvened the soundtrack guru's key musicians.

"Rome" opens on the tumbleweedy voice of 76-year-old Edda Dell'Orso, who sang the haunting operatic vowels around Clint Eastwood in 1966's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

It's a 15-track score to a film that exists only in your head.

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Co-stars Jack White and Norah Jones get three songs each. White is a ghostly high-plains drifter on "The Rose With the Broken Neck" and a self-loathing mercenary on "Two Against One."

Jones plays even more against type, conjuring a sultry Sicilian soul diva over Isaac Hayes-style strings on "Season's Trees," and awesomely declaring, "I'm the disease," on "Black."

Rolling Stone: Click to hear the album

More vocal tracks would be nice, but "Rome" is as much about sublime instrumentals -- made of celesta, harpsichord, Hammond organ, strings, nasty funk guitar and those weird-ass choirs -- as lead singers, just as Sergio Leone's great Westerns were as much about fantastic landscapes as acting.

Just switch your cell to "vibrate" and enjoy the show.