Gnarls Barkley - Crazy - Lyrics Meaning

By the time this track was officially released early in 2006, it had received enough airplay, thanks to a leak, to give it the number one spot in the UK charts based on download sales alone.

The music was inspired by the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti westerns but the lyrics came about by chance after a conversation. Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) of Gnarles Barkley explained in an interview, "I somehow got off on this tangent about how people won't take an artist seriously unless they're insane...we were saying that if we really wanted this album to work, the best move would be to just kill ourselves. So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy. Cee-Lo (Cee-Lo Green, vocalist) took that conversation and turned it into `Crazy.' That's the whole story. The lyrics are his interpretation of that conversation."

Cee-Lo himself described the writing process as questioning "...sanity, and its place in pop culture..." and the lyrics certainly create food for thought by making the listener question what sanity actually is.

The chorus after the first verse contains the line, `Does that make me crazy,' which becomes, `I think you're crazy,' after the second verse and then, 'Maybe I'm crazy, maybe you're crazy, maybe we're crazy,' at the end of the track. A very clever way of pointing out that any one of us could be considered mad from someone else's point of view!