Broken Bells Say Debut Was Almost a Double-Album

Posted on Jun 14th 2010 5:50PM by Laura Lanktree
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With all of the time they spend together, it's hard to imagine there's anything Danger Mouse and his Broken Bells bandmate James Mercer have yet to share. But side-by-side on their tour bus, Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) admits to his pal that he may not have fully explained how hard it was to cut their debut album down to just ten tracks.

"To make something that just has one feel to it, when we did a lot of other stuff [while] making the record, it was really difficult to do," Burton admits to Mercer.

But this confession isn't something that appears to surprise Mercer. In fact, he laughs, remembering that, for one brief moment, the two flirted with the idea of a double album just so they could include all 20 tracks from their studio sessions.

"We definitely liked every song ourselves, but if you start to get self-indulgent you can easily ruin other people's experiences," Burton explains.

It's a running concern of his, this idea of pleasing others. The puppy dog-eyed artist tells Spinner that he didn't associate pressure with his work until other people started listening to and caring about it. So it's no surprise that those listeners were top of mind when it came to editing down the album.

"If you make something shorter, then they'll hear the songs that you want them to hear the most, more times, and it will make more sense as a whole," Burton says. "Then they'll have more of an experience with it. When they come back to it five years from now, they'll remember the entire thing."

Mercer agrees -- the shorter the better. Although he also concedes that it was Burton who had to rule the final mastering with an iron fist. "There were times when Brian was like 'let's take this off,' and I was like, 'Aw, man, people have gotta hear that,'" he recalls. "But then [Brian would repeat], 'We've got to take this off.'"

A tight edit was probably wise considering the short attention spans of the Internet generation. However, Burton muses that back when he was too lazy to fast-forward through cassettes he would often fall in love with the tracks he'd intended to skip.

But according to him the number of tracks isn't as much of a concern as the album's final running time. At a fraction under 34 minutes, Broken Bells' self-titled debut falls perfectly at the all-time ideal, which Burton claims is somewhere between 30 and 38 minutes.