Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: It's okay to meet your heroes, It's okay to dream,
Speaker 2: It's ok to let life float you to where you
Speaker 2: should be. In twenty twenty one, Quest Love asked me
Speaker 2: to do a one on one interview with Elvis Costello
Speaker 2: at electric Lyad Studios for Questlove Supreme. At first I
Speaker 2: said no, just kidding. I jumped at the opportunity. In
Speaker 2: this part too, you'll hear Elvis and I dissect the
Speaker 2: contents of wise up Ghost and go down rabbit holes
Speaker 2: so deep where even rabbits are afraid to go. Yes,
Speaker 2: I had to doggy paddle through this to survive Elvis
Speaker 2: and his title wave of Knowledge. But I'm so grateful
Speaker 2: and pleased that this document exists for the future. This
Speaker 2: was originally aired in April twenty twenty two. Wow, I
Speaker 2: can't even believe this happened. Enjoy and thank you Questlove.
Speaker 3: All right, put us all one, Uh huh, Sugar Steve,
Speaker 3: And I'm a legend in my whole time, Sugar Steve,
Speaker 3: just a legend that it is all fine.
Speaker 2: I've been doing a lot of interviews, have you It's getting.
Speaker 4: Sick of it, not this one, This is even.
Speaker 5: I had no sooner resolve to stop recording and just
Speaker 5: play shows than I found myself in a three way
Speaker 5: conversation with engineer and mixer Stephen Mandel and Questlove making
Speaker 5: Wise up Ghost. These began as new bulletins collaged out
Speaker 5: of my old papers, but ended up in the company
Speaker 5: of brand new verses, all jammed together. Quest speets gave
Speaker 5: the words different air to breathe and allowed me to
Speaker 5: place fresh emphasis. The words of Bedlin became the of
Speaker 5: the dead pan groove of wake Me Up, with a
Speaker 5: quotation from the River and reverse as its hook. She's
Speaker 5: pulling out the pin from the Mississippi sessions became she
Speaker 5: Might be a grenade. The tracks began with drums alone,
Speaker 5: over which I sketched out guitar or bass lines. The
Speaker 5: other members of the Roots entered as the music demanded,
Speaker 5: Captain Kirk Douglas adding his guitar or my bass sketches
Speaker 5: being replaced by a sousapharm or the Roots bassis. Mark Kelly,
Speaker 5: a Philadelphia horn section, reworked motifs from my records, a
Speaker 5: guitar riff becoming a horn line of ice versa. In
Speaker 5: the final days, of the recording quest Summer Brent Fisher
Speaker 5: add the.
Speaker 4: Beautiful orchestrations that pulled all these threads together.
Speaker 5: Each mixed of Stephen Mandel sent me got closer to
Speaker 5: the final picture. A beat dropped out here, sunds distorted
Speaker 5: out of all recognition. There, voices sent out into dub orbit,
Speaker 5: new ideas appearing where others vanished. The only precedent for
Speaker 5: this kind of recording in my catalog had been Pills
Speaker 5: and Soap, just some verses chanted over a spare beat
Speaker 5: with occasional musical punctuations. The original Pills and Soap lyrics
Speaker 5: were now reset in a dialog with verses and lines
Speaker 5: from Invasion, Hip Parade and National Ransom to become stick
Speaker 5: out your tongue. Like four or five of the songs
Speaker 5: on Wise up Ghast, this number delayed, leaving the first
Speaker 5: chord until absolutely necessary. The one chord song was something
Speaker 5: that I'd been working towards since writing Big Boys for
Speaker 5: Armed Forces, and this was almost it. I had sampled
Speaker 5: the Italian singer Mena's nineteen sixties recording of Unbacho Eetropopoco
Speaker 5: as the foundation.
Speaker 4: For when I was Cruel number two.
Speaker 5: But can you hear me, took a two bar bass
Speaker 5: figure from radio silence and told the same story on
Speaker 5: a six minute canvas. I almost persuaded Graham Nash and
Speaker 5: David Crosby to sing on that one. Graham really wanted
Speaker 5: to do it, but when I sent it to Crosbie,
Speaker 5: he didn't quite hear himself in that kind of mayhow
Speaker 5: I ended up tracking my own voice on the paths,
Speaker 5: and in the closing bars of the track quoted one
Speaker 5: phrase from the melody of Crosbie's song Draft Mourning clips
Speaker 5: from our rehearsal Jambs, recorded while preparing for my appearances
Speaker 5: on the Jimmy Fallon Show on m b C. They
Speaker 5: came the foundation of new tracks, high fidelity, yielding Sinko
Speaker 5: Minuto's convos, four bars from the Stations of the Cross
Speaker 5: under pinning Viceroy's Row, and quest rendition of the intro
Speaker 5: of Chelsea anchoring my new haunt. It was strange to
Speaker 5: walk past the Dame Judy Dench, Lindsay Lohan or the
Speaker 5: other studio guests in the studio hallway and then disappeared
Speaker 5: through a door into the Root's own personal tardis a
Speaker 5: converted technical cupboard that served as the rehearsal in the studio,
Speaker 5: Wise Up Ghost looked out from that Windowlas's room at
Speaker 5: a world where one woman's freedom was another man's blasphemy,
Speaker 5: where one man's wealth was another man's bankruptcy, where security
Speaker 5: can only be preserved by unaccountable means, from eavesdropping to
Speaker 5: air strikes. If peace and order are now like the
Speaker 5: law and too complex to trust to any one but professionals,
Speaker 5: I suppose love and understanding will just.
Speaker 4: Have to wait out the imminent threat.
Speaker 5: How could any father not fear the world his sons
Speaker 5: will Inherit could her muster any hope at all? While
Speaker 5: the record does close with the song, if I could
Speaker 5: believe Mandel had looped my own string orchestrations for can
Speaker 5: You Be True? From North and I wrote the lyrical
Speaker 5: and vocal arrangement that wise Up Ghost over it. Stephen
Speaker 5: and Questlot then went to work scoring it as if
Speaker 5: it were a movie, with the horns that were doubling
Speaker 5: Kirk's guitar eventually obliterating the string loop, and questioned frank
Speaker 5: knuckles laying in waves of drums and percussion. It seemed
Speaker 5: at first like a piece that could only dwell in
Speaker 5: the studio, but when we performed the song on television
Speaker 5: and later in a bowling alley in Brooklyn, he really
Speaker 5: took on a life of its own.
Speaker 4: For that Brooklyn Bowl show, Quest only.
Speaker 5: Called a handful of songs from the record and let
Speaker 5: the roots take possession of some of my numbers, from
Speaker 5: Spooky Girlfriend to a nine minute Captain kerk guitar Wigout
Speaker 5: and I Want You. In the summer of twenty fourteen,
Speaker 5: Steve Naive, Dennis crouched, Kareem Riggins and I played Wise
Speaker 5: Up Ghost with the La Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.
Speaker 5: When Kareem kicked into a take on his friend Quest's
Speaker 5: groove at the half way point of the song, I
Speaker 5: felt as if we might end up hovering above the
Speaker 5: Griffith Observative walkers. Uptown and Wise Up Ghosts were never
Speaker 5: intended to be defeated songs.
Speaker 4: The album unavoidably.
Speaker 5: Contemplated the unthinkable, the despair at every news bulletin. But
Speaker 5: the most surprising moment came not in a cupboard contemplating oblivion,
Speaker 5: but sitting at my own kitchen table thinking about my father.
Speaker 5: It was close to midnight when a repetitive sequence of
Speaker 5: unusually harmonized music that Quest and keyboardist Ray Angry had
Speaker 5: laid down arrived over the wire.
Speaker 4: It was clearly a ballad.
Speaker 5: We had got into this thing without any rules or consultation.
Speaker 5: Little more than a word or two had passed between
Speaker 5: Question and me. While the dialogue had been musical, Mandell
Speaker 5: had been tireless in making his own editorial decisions and
Speaker 5: trying to satisfy those that we had independently suggested or
Speaker 5: even demanded. We had never discussed any of the lyrical content,
Speaker 5: but it had turned out to consist mostly of outward
Speaker 5: looking commentary. I suppose we had just come to trust
Speaker 5: each other, as working musicians usually do. I now found
Speaker 5: myself writing a very detailed account of my father's last
Speaker 5: days and hours, something that I had told myself would
Speaker 5: be too hard to visit in a song.
Speaker 4: It did no good to push those images down if
Speaker 4: they arrived unbidden.
Speaker 5: So I sat at the kitchen table, singing into the
Speaker 5: recording function of my computer. The breath is slow and
Speaker 5: shallow too. The sky is bright Venetian blue. The cardboard
Speaker 5: sun is all ablaze. The air is painted Clifford brown caressing.
Speaker 5: Yesterday I wrote and sang down the entire song in
Speaker 5: one pass, mixed it down as such, and hit send
Speaker 5: before I had time to take it back. The next day,
Speaker 5: I went to NBC to re record the vocal properly.
Speaker 5: When I walked in, quest was adamant that was the vocal.
Speaker 5: He would not let me touch it. All right, It's
Speaker 5: funny this list. I just looked at it. I had
Speaker 5: to look it up. This the five hundred list. I
Speaker 5: haven't looked at it for years. I pick a lot
Speaker 5: of the same records today, but but some I come
Speaker 5: around to again, Like.
Speaker 4: Like when I saw Black Messiah and it opens with rass.
Speaker 2: That's what I wanted to ask you about get on
Speaker 2: the make there.
Speaker 5: Nobody's put found a weight of context to put that
Speaker 5: that piece of music. Anything that's so so powerful is
Speaker 5: that you know that nobody's put that in the context
Speaker 5: of a movie before that.
Speaker 4: I ever remember which piece of music the Russ and
Speaker 4: Roland Kirk inflated to you, it's the opening music of
Speaker 4: that movie.
Speaker 5: Wow, how do you kind of go, well, that's kind
Speaker 5: of right, you know, that's that's kind of what I thought.
Speaker 4: That's what that music feels like to me.
Speaker 2: G'angela's influences are are vast. So yeah, like I was saying,
Speaker 2: wise up Ghosts ends up becoming the ultimate flip album,
Speaker 2: you know, flipping the music, flipping the lyrics, sampling from
Speaker 2: the sampling from that, well, sampling.
Speaker 5: From our own brief kind of live library. So that's
Speaker 5: ingenious in itself. And then you know, in myself, like
Speaker 5: starting off with two ideas. One one is to write
Speaker 5: completely new words and others to kind of do a
Speaker 5: kind of sort of cut up collage of ideas that
Speaker 5: were related. Part of it is I thought of it
Speaker 5: being in the tradition of bulletins, you know, lyrics, the
Speaker 5: lyrical side of it.
Speaker 4: There's not many songs in the in the group that
Speaker 4: we recorded that are to do.
Speaker 5: With matters of the heart. They're mostly outward looking. So
Speaker 5: it seemed to me that then it gave me the
Speaker 5: opportunity to think about things i'd seen or things i'd
Speaker 5: written because of the way I fell about something I
Speaker 5: saw in the world, or something happened and you'd write
Speaker 5: something and then that thing would happen again.
Speaker 4: Like you know, history repeating history repeating.
Speaker 5: Yourself, or war breaks out and then another war that
Speaker 5: seems to be the same kind of mistake. So then
Speaker 5: you stated again, but you have the other this that
Speaker 5: came from another time, and they kind of talked to
Speaker 5: one another a little bit. Now, some people that were
Speaker 5: skeptical about the whole endeavor just thought, well, maybe you
Speaker 5: couldn't be bothered to write new words.
Speaker 4: But to me, you did.
Speaker 5: You hear oh, I wrote a lot of new words.
Speaker 5: But but even those ones that some of those became
Speaker 5: to me like the version of that lyric because I
Speaker 5: got a chance to lay it down a different against
Speaker 5: a different foundation, you know. I mean, if you recall
Speaker 5: the way we began the recording was with a handful
Speaker 5: of the beats that the Quest had put down, and
Speaker 5: I and were we in Were we in Vancouver?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, we didn't want The very first thing was
Speaker 2: pills and soap.
Speaker 4: Cutting up pills and soap. Yeah, that was that.
Speaker 5: But then when it came to the newly recorded the
Speaker 5: things that weren't sampled from the catalog, and it weren't
Speaker 5: sampled from this this bed of of loops that you
Speaker 5: created from the live performances. Then it was like Quests
Speaker 5: laying down those beats and me improvising song structure over them,
Speaker 5: so I was playing like electric piano and bass. There's
Speaker 5: quite a lot of bass in the original draft where
Speaker 5: I'm playing the bass sort of so that there's a
Speaker 5: foundation structure. And that's as far as I recall. I
Speaker 5: did wise up ghost pretty much to the drums and
Speaker 5: maybe some.
Speaker 4: I don't know, some chords on the piano not very
Speaker 4: much full. So why is it?
Speaker 5: Because it's just really the sample from the from the
Speaker 5: sample is really giving the tonality.
Speaker 2: So the sample is from North.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's the opening of the It's what Vince mean
Speaker 4: Doza said to me when he conducted it when I
Speaker 4: did it live, the same song, Can He be True? Live?
Speaker 4: He said, I'm going to take your human records away
Speaker 4: from you because he thought it was so sort of Germanic. Well,
Speaker 4: I was. I had written that opening, like you know,
Speaker 4: it was very that's a lot of drama.
Speaker 2: And I heard just right for that, and I heard
Speaker 2: hip hop in that, you know, in that intro, and
Speaker 2: that's why.
Speaker 4: I hear that a lot.
Speaker 5: I hear a lot of Triikowskian in the synth and
Speaker 5: sometimes real string, you know, the synth strings that that
Speaker 5: that became like I hear it a lot. I hear
Speaker 5: a lot of Triikowski and a lot of borrowed in.
Speaker 5: I don't know where it's conscious. So whether it's just
Speaker 5: the tendency to be in a minor so I hear
Speaker 5: a lot of classical things. I don't know whether people
Speaker 5: are actually drawing out or it's just a coincidence. You
Speaker 5: end up with a few chords in a certain kind
Speaker 5: of ominous rhythm, you know, and then you get that right.
Speaker 4: So that was that was a pretty free piece, and
Speaker 4: it built as you record.
Speaker 5: You built it really all of those layers, when you know,
Speaker 5: with Kirk playing those sustained guitars and everything.
Speaker 2: That was really Are you a Queen fan?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: You don't like any prog rock? I put them in
Speaker 2: pro Do you like Jeff Toll?
Speaker 4: No, I really don't like Jeff.
Speaker 2: How about yes, they're the best at it all right,
Speaker 2: Well if you don't like, yes.
Speaker 5: Like I really don't like prog rock, but I did,
Speaker 5: and I sort of hear, I suppose it is King
Speaker 5: Crimson prog rock? Yes, yeah, But I mean I never
Speaker 5: listened to any of their records, but I was aware
Speaker 5: of one record of theirs which I liked, which was
Speaker 5: a later one called Red that had Adrian Bello on it,
Speaker 5: and because I liked him because he played with Bowie
Speaker 5: and and of course Fripp played with Bowrie as well,
Speaker 5: So I liked that kind of thing when I could
Speaker 5: hear it like an orchestral instrument. And that's what I
Speaker 5: heard when when, when when Kirk was playing those that's
Speaker 5: those sustained guitars, sounded like a Fripp part to me,
Speaker 5: you know, it's like, that's what it sounds like, one
Speaker 5: of his sustained guitar things.
Speaker 2: I guess someone's still a little surprised because in my opinion,
Speaker 2: prog rock is there's a lot of classical influence and
Speaker 2: there's a lot of English folk.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, and that jaffre Tell for sure. But there
Speaker 5: were groups i'd like that did that better, who were different,
Speaker 5: like Febal Convention and you know, Richard Thompson is a
Speaker 5: guitar player I really love who came out of that group,
Speaker 5: But not so much the Emson like em Palmer kind
Speaker 5: of stuff or.
Speaker 2: The you just like shorter songs.
Speaker 5: I just like shorter songs, and I just like, you know,
Speaker 5: I like Jack McDuff. I don't really need to hear
Speaker 5: Kenith Emerson. You know, he's great. I'm sure, but it's
Speaker 5: not really my thing. And you know what, I bet
Speaker 5: Keith Emerson loves Jack McDuff as well.
Speaker 2: You know, jazz is a lot more blues and less classical.
Speaker 2: Prog rock has all that classical in.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I love classical music, but I like
Speaker 5: actual classical music, and I like Leonard Bernstein. But you see,
Speaker 5: to me, like West Side Story Score, the original West
Speaker 5: Side Stories Score, you don't. It didn't make it cooler
Speaker 5: to hear it played on the organ, but maybe somebody had.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's somebody that had never heard, never really thought about,
Speaker 5: well that song was about heard that tune, that America
Speaker 5: tune played by Keith Emerson a nice and thought, hey,
Speaker 5: that's great, and that's kind of a subversive idea to
Speaker 5: do that in a wild way.
Speaker 4: But I think it's already wild. I think that original
Speaker 4: versions wilder.
Speaker 2: So as you were sampling your own lyrics and ready
Speaker 2: new lyrics on Wise Up Ghost, we were busy doing
Speaker 2: our version of sampling, actual sampling, including come in the
Speaker 2: Meantimes with the backing sample from a Glasshouse, Glasshouse.
Speaker 4: Victius Holland does a Holland label after Motown.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that beat that is come in the meantime,
Speaker 2: is meaning the sample and the drums, yeah plays on it.
Speaker 2: That was five years old or something like that. He
Speaker 2: had made that five years prior to Whup Ghost and
Speaker 2: it just always was on the drive. He never used
Speaker 2: it for anything, and I was like, that's something.
Speaker 5: But you see, that's that's no different to me than
Speaker 5: if we had gone into the deepest kind of library
Speaker 5: of of like we were talking before about the you know,
Speaker 5: the sort of kitchier versions of covers of records, and
Speaker 5: then you might find some quirk to the way that
Speaker 5: drum drum sounded or something about or hearing even that.
Speaker 2: But it was just badass.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's badass, and that's all that matters when you're
Speaker 5: looking for that, you know. So it didn't really matter
Speaker 5: to me what the source was, whether it was a
Speaker 5: new beat that that that Crest had laid down, or
Speaker 5: whether you were taking it something that you would n't
Speaker 5: because I mean I didn't see I mean, I was
Speaker 5: taking lyrics from there are some lyrics from from the
Speaker 5: River Reverse, which you know, was only four years old.
Speaker 5: There's others that are that are from nineteen ninety you know,
Speaker 5: from from songs from Invasion, Hipparay, which is from der
Speaker 5: Like was that's nineteen ninety. The pills and solf is
Speaker 5: from eighty three that you know, yeah, the bills and
Speaker 5: so sort of like you know and fills and so
Speaker 5: was some kind of realization of you know, my my,
Speaker 5: you know, like Magnificent seven was the Clash's response to.
Speaker 4: To hip to early hip hop. Pills and Soap was mine.
Speaker 5: So the Clash did it first that I'd say I
Speaker 5: was using like more authentic tools. I mean, I really
Speaker 5: only had a piano and a drum machine. I didn't
Speaker 5: have a band playing on it. There's nobody else. It's
Speaker 5: just it's just me and Steve. You know, it's me
Speaker 5: Stephen Alndrum, you know.
Speaker 2: And not only were we sampling sampling, but we were
Speaker 2: flipping melodies and horn lines from your past into changing
Speaker 2: them into guitar lines and horn It's.
Speaker 4: An orchestrated record in that sense and a way.
Speaker 5: And it's orchestrated and and you know that there's some
Speaker 5: of the way that it sounds is because of the
Speaker 5: way the processing in the mixing as well and the
Speaker 5: changing of texture of things.
Speaker 4: Things getting much.
Speaker 5: Smaller than they actually would be if they were played
Speaker 5: in the room together, Like guitar sounds squeeze right down.
Speaker 5: This is kind of like coming out of balance, you know, drums,
Speaker 5: particular drum beats, you know, one beat in a phrase
Speaker 5: being kind of process in some way one you know.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, you came to me at a very strange
Speaker 2: time in my life, as they say.
Speaker 5: But all of this, all of this is attractive to
Speaker 5: me because it's sort of like literally getting It's not
Speaker 5: so much like trying to the mistake it seemed to
Speaker 5: me from the get go with using machines is to
Speaker 5: get the machines to try and imitate.
Speaker 4: Real musicians. I want the other way around. I want
Speaker 4: musicians that imitate machines.
Speaker 2: Well that's exactly what the roots did you know.
Speaker 4: That's always seemed to be the best thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it never seemed to me to make sense. When
Speaker 5: when I was about thirteen or fourteen, a man tried
Speaker 5: to sell my father a melotron. He took him into
Speaker 5: this This guy lived in a house next to the
Speaker 5: church where he used to go to me, and he
Speaker 5: took us into.
Speaker 4: The front room and he had this melotron in his
Speaker 4: front room.
Speaker 5: And he put it on and he tried to persuade
Speaker 5: my father it was going to put all the musicians
Speaker 5: in the band out of work, you know, and he's
Speaker 5: still playing in the dance band, and he said, this
Speaker 5: will replace them, because there was absolutely no way.
Speaker 4: You couldn't play with any feel.
Speaker 5: On a melotron because they hadn't yet got the action
Speaker 5: so that you could really play with any kind of
Speaker 5: swing or anything on it. Everything was, you know, there
Speaker 5: was always a delay, and of course the way people
Speaker 5: use melotrons was much more to sound like a process
Speaker 5: version of a flute into the most famous use of it,
Speaker 5: as like the beginning of Strawberry Feels Forever, you know,
Speaker 5: where I think, I don't even know whether the cello
Speaker 5: is a real cello that's been phased or it's a
Speaker 5: melotron cello, but you know, flute sound, and you would
Speaker 5: never group real flutes playing like that in that.
Speaker 4: Kind of harmony.
Speaker 5: You just would never play them. He would never voice
Speaker 5: him like that. In the real orchestra. You wouldn't have
Speaker 5: a flute section play like that. So, I mean, that's
Speaker 5: unique to that instrument, and that's what that instruments ended
Speaker 5: up being. If you hear one on a radio head
Speaker 5: record or you hear one on any cud of record,
Speaker 5: it's the sound of that instrument's quirks, right, just like
Speaker 5: the Hammond organ was never really going to replace a
Speaker 5: horn section, was it. You know, it's it's a different instrument,
Speaker 5: you know, So we I think we kind of like
Speaker 5: drew on that thing, or you did in the in
Speaker 5: the processing and the mixing and the cutting up and
Speaker 5: the slight kind of disconnect that you get rhythmically.
Speaker 2: Then you know, I grew up on your music in
Speaker 2: the way that that music was made. In fact, when
Speaker 2: I was coming up as an engineer here, we were
Speaker 2: still using tape. This was in the mid nineties, and
Speaker 2: I got to witness the turn from analog to digital firsthand,
Speaker 2: and I became a very digital oriented working in hip hop.
Speaker 2: It's a very digital for the most.
Speaker 4: Facility of it as well.
Speaker 5: It's very good and the speed with which you can
Speaker 5: edit is like tape phasing and things. I remember being
Speaker 5: in the time of all the Sis is Beauty their
Speaker 5: last racket any with the attractions, like some of the
Speaker 5: tracks had had loops. It was the first time I
Speaker 5: ever persuaded the band to play with a loop since
Speaker 5: green shirt. Pete would never do it. He thought it
Speaker 5: was like cheating. I said, no, this is what I want.
Speaker 5: I want the relationship of drums made small against the loop.
Speaker 2: That's big, or something quantized or something unquantized.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I want this tension. And I'd written this
Speaker 5: song called Little Atoms, which was really just a folk song.
Speaker 5: You could play it on acoustic guitar, sound perfectly nice.
Speaker 5: But the minute that you did this thing, it had
Speaker 5: a tension between this repetitive loop that we constructed. Jeff Emeric,
Speaker 5: of course, is from an analogue ear or his Abbey
Speaker 5: Road train, you know who was there when the Beatles
Speaker 5: kind of introg used these things that they've absorbed from
Speaker 5: the avant garde tape loops, particularly McCartney. You know, they
Speaker 5: got enamored of these tape loop electronic composers. They all
Speaker 5: sort of fed into that desire to process sounds to
Speaker 5: a much greater degree that they spent the first part
Speaker 5: of the group being told not to touch the faders,
Speaker 5: you know, and they've gradually taken over the studio. We
Speaker 5: get the benefit of that revolution, of them being able
Speaker 5: to experiment, because everything that we've got now in a
Speaker 5: box is something that's most of it that somebody actually
Speaker 5: physically made an analog version of and now we've got
Speaker 5: a plug in rendition of it.
Speaker 2: But you can still experiment with that stuff. Of course,
Speaker 2: you can create new stuff.
Speaker 5: But you know, you know that the kind of edits
Speaker 5: that were possible to do it with tape if you yet,
Speaker 5: if you were skilled at it, though, you could do
Speaker 5: it really impossible edits, but.
Speaker 2: The sheer number of edits like on Wise Up Ghost would.
Speaker 4: Never be able to do it.
Speaker 5: No, you would never The tape would never hold together.
Speaker 2: No, not every song on Wise Up Ghost is created
Speaker 2: that way.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 2: There were a couple of sessions of live sessions right
Speaker 2: with Pino Paladin.
Speaker 4: Right at the end.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's the weirdest thing I've ever done, is
Speaker 5: I played that record is Quest.
Speaker 4: It's live, isn't it? The back in two songs are live.
Speaker 5: Sugar Want Work is interesting because it's a rhythmic song
Speaker 5: and the band is Quest very angry, and Pino and
Speaker 5: me playing bass at the same time. So I'm playing
Speaker 5: up with the octave and playing really a six string
Speaker 5: guitar part against Pino's bass, So I'm playing just figures,
Speaker 5: and you know, like guitar figures and he's doing all
Speaker 5: the bass playing.
Speaker 4: There's a weird choice and instruments.
Speaker 5: But I had that k that sounds like, you know,
Speaker 5: sounds like a six string six string guitar, that's what
Speaker 5: it sounds like. A barattar guitar doesn't really have the
Speaker 5: residence of a true bass, right.
Speaker 4: But that was a good track to cut.
Speaker 5: I liked that one, and if I could believe which
Speaker 5: was you know, it was obvious, an obvious ending song.
Speaker 5: If it was going to be a kind of something
Speaker 5: that was more melodic after all of this recitative stuff.
Speaker 5: What would you call the vocal I don't even know
Speaker 5: there's a word for the thing I'm doing vocally on
Speaker 5: Wise Up ghost I mean.
Speaker 2: It's on the song wise declamatory.
Speaker 5: Restive of which I can never say, which they call
Speaker 5: when you speak in opera, you know, sprechstimo, as the
Speaker 5: Germans call it. You know, it's a version of rhythmic talking.
Speaker 5: But it's not versifying in the hip hop sense. It's
Speaker 5: but it's not singing either.
Speaker 4: Most of the time.
Speaker 5: There's not a lot of pitch involved in many.
Speaker 4: Of the songs in Wise Up Ghosts.
Speaker 5: There's not a lot of melodic information that where the
Speaker 5: singing comes in is in the background vocals, which are
Speaker 5: mostly falsetto you know. So it's again that's all inherited
Speaker 5: from my teenage memory of like not so much like
Speaker 5: American records as Jamaican records. It's that soft vocal group
Speaker 5: singing up there, you know, like that's soft, very soft,
Speaker 5: not like anything like really virtuosic. It's just the soft
Speaker 5: three part group thing that you know that but a
Speaker 5: lot of a lot of rock bands imitated, like think
Speaker 5: of the band that backed Joe Cocker. What do they
Speaker 5: do with a little help from my friends? It sounds
Speaker 5: like they're sounding trying to sound like girls singing, but
Speaker 5: they don't really.
Speaker 2: Sound those aren't girls, No, it's just guys singing like that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I thought it was.
Speaker 4: Are's some great there's a great there's some great background
Speaker 4: singers that but on the original record though.
Speaker 2: It's guys speaking of great singers and still were on
Speaker 2: wise up Ghost Lamarasol and Diane Birch and Brent Fisher
Speaker 2: contributing strings.
Speaker 4: Well, let's go back.
Speaker 5: Marisol was a really great thing because I knew were
Speaker 5: already and that was Sebastian who's ended up being like
Speaker 5: really a great pal and that cohort on these last
Speaker 5: four records and EPs in between those and beyond those.
Speaker 2: You guys been tearing it up for.
Speaker 4: He is really you know, but he comes out of Miami,
Speaker 4: so he has done a lot of work, and.
Speaker 2: He has that eighteen Latin Grammys, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Producer of the Year twice, So I mean he's really
Speaker 5: got the you know it and it goes right across
Speaker 5: the whole you know, range of everything that's in Latin music.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's at least as much variety in Southern
Speaker 5: Hemisphere music as there is Northern Hemisphere music, maybe more,
Speaker 5: you know, justin making Spanish model, that's become apparent to
Speaker 5: me all the more because some of those things I
Speaker 5: knew Marisolo had sung with in the studio before and
Speaker 5: had done.
Speaker 4: A track with her, and she had sung live with us.
Speaker 5: So when I wanted to put that verse in Spanish
Speaker 5: and sincamnutas, which was again goes back to the very
Speaker 5: first high fidelity, it's that same hit, isn't it isn't that?
Speaker 5: Isn't that what we're using there is the high fidelity.
Speaker 2: Groove for Sinko. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: So we're back in that and now we've got it
Speaker 5: really to sound like Stations stage.
Speaker 2: I always forget what you forget, which one.
Speaker 4: You don't even remember you're not even covering your own tracks.
Speaker 5: But I think that that one there, You know, it
Speaker 5: really was funny how it came. I said, we realized
Speaker 5: this attempt to imitate Barwie's kind of you know, he
Speaker 5: had a funk mat basically for a lot of the seventies,
Speaker 5: he had a funk rhythm section, killer rhythm section, And
Speaker 5: so when we were trying to play like that in
Speaker 5: seventy nine, we didn't really know how to get there,
Speaker 5: not so much rhythmic textually with the other instruments that
Speaker 5: you had to have if you were going to play
Speaker 5: the song that slowly. Now we're playing a song that's
Speaker 5: supposed to go that slowly. That new text is supposed
Speaker 5: to be over that groove. I'd written just this melody
Speaker 5: that that there was a little more melody to that.
Speaker 5: Even though this song never varies from two chords, it
Speaker 5: doesn't ever really get off those two chords. There's no release,
Speaker 5: there's no four chord. In most of these songs, it's
Speaker 5: all on the one, you know, so harmonically it's really
Speaker 5: tricky to sustain the tension. So what halfway through as
Speaker 5: the story was the kind of answer song the ship
Speaker 5: building was. It takes place in the in the conflict
Speaker 5: in the early eighties between England and Argentina, and the
Speaker 5: second verse needs to be in it in Spanish, but
Speaker 5: it didn't need to be in Spanish Spanish.
Speaker 4: It needs to be in Argentine Spanish.
Speaker 5: So Sebastian and another friend of mine his family also
Speaker 5: left Argentina in those years, wrote the adaptation for marisolt
Speaker 5: to sing Barsola is Mexican Americans, so she would know
Speaker 5: the different words that are in Argentine Spanish.
Speaker 4: Hence its sincamental was convose, not sincamon contu.
Speaker 2: Couldn't we get a real Argentinian I mean, was it
Speaker 2: not in the budget?
Speaker 4: Not at that time. That would came later. That that's
Speaker 4: you know, that's one of my favorites, and it's also
Speaker 4: one of the really beautiful songs.
Speaker 5: I mean, do you remember I thought we were done,
Speaker 5: I thought the record was done. I thought, you know,
Speaker 5: there's a mix of this record that is barer than
Speaker 5: the final one. And then you told me that Quest
Speaker 5: was saying, now we're going to get bread to do that,
Speaker 5: and I like from where, like how we gonna well
Speaker 5: it is, how are we going to pay for that?
Speaker 4: It was the first thing. Yeah, but that was a genius.
Speaker 5: Call and that call alone transformed the cohesion of it.
Speaker 5: As each track would have worked if we had never
Speaker 5: thought of put.
Speaker 4: The strings on.
Speaker 5: Each track would have been interesting enough because of the
Speaker 5: relationship between what's going on in the rhythm and the
Speaker 5: and the accumulated instrumental parts of the root, the members
Speaker 5: of the roots added and what I was doing with
Speaker 5: the combination of new texts and you know, these collages
Speaker 5: of lyrics bring a new meaning against this other rhythmic flow.
Speaker 2: What was interesting to me was the songs that Quest
Speaker 2: chose to put strings on. It was the ones I
Speaker 2: wouldn't I wouldn't have chosen, you know. It was like
Speaker 2: these ones that I thought were fused.
Speaker 5: Was refused to be said, was it was? But it's
Speaker 5: but it but you can't I caught it without it, right.
Speaker 5: I think the the and the things like having the
Speaker 5: introduction to sugar won't work integrated that song, which was lighter,
Speaker 5: lighter lyrically than some of the others into the body
Speaker 5: of these kind of much more grievous sounding lyrics.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: So my joint is grenade. Okay, of all the of
Speaker 2: all the songs, I know you love Sinco, I know
Speaker 2: you love Meantimes and other songs. For me, what I
Speaker 2: was going for was grenade. Like we're talking about the flip,
Speaker 2: I was trying to essentially flip one mogain from Voodoo
Speaker 2: song on Voodoo that has a similar vibe, a similar
Speaker 2: amount of space and within the song, you know air.
Speaker 2: That was where I was like, Okay, this is making
Speaker 2: sense to me because I'm covering both my quest I'm
Speaker 2: covering my elvis and I'm hearkening back to this soul
Speaker 2: that we're all looking to have in this kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: So I think everything that reference it doesn't have to
Speaker 4: be said out loud. One of the strengths of it.
Speaker 5: People have asked me about the record, and I said,
Speaker 5: I think we you know that one of the reasons
Speaker 5: that it was that it ended up being the record.
Speaker 5: It is whatever people expected it to be, or whatever
Speaker 5: they thought when they even heard about it.
Speaker 4: My name and the roots in one sentence.
Speaker 5: Would just put a question mark over some people's heads,
Speaker 5: whatever they thought it was. I think the strength of
Speaker 5: the record is that we didn't do a lot of
Speaker 5: theorizing about what it was going to be. And sometimes
Speaker 5: when an idea like you just expressed there, you didn't
Speaker 5: tell me that at the time, so I couldn't have
Speaker 5: reacted in a way that adjusted my performance to take
Speaker 5: that further towards what you were trying to achieve. I mean,
Speaker 5: the records that I heard in my head were not
Speaker 5: reference points that I even thought were were pertinent to it,
Speaker 5: you know, I mean, I know I'm not going to
Speaker 5: sound like any of the people as ever said from
Speaker 5: the get go.
Speaker 4: Makes no difference who's.
Speaker 5: Playing in the studio, which musicians are playing, whether it's
Speaker 5: a collaborative record or essentially one that I'm driving the
Speaker 5: whole train. I'm not going to tell people where I
Speaker 5: get every cue that I've written, because that's then they're
Speaker 5: going to react to that, right, They're gonna they're gonna
Speaker 5: if I say, well this is such and such, that's
Speaker 5: just gonna they said, Well, they'd either laugh at you
Speaker 5: and well that's ridiculous, that's you're never gonna sound like that,
Speaker 5: or they're going to try and adjust to what they
Speaker 5: think you want them to play right, and then you're
Speaker 5: losing the whole point of making that that reference point.
Speaker 5: If you keep it to yourself, it's like a card
Speaker 5: you can lay down.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you remember me falling to the
Speaker 2: floor in that studio in Vancouver, A shout out to
Speaker 2: Cruise Studio. It's a great little studio out there. We
Speaker 2: made this beat out of some of the drums that
Speaker 2: Quest sent, and you added keyboards and bass, and you
Speaker 2: went in the vocal booth and you sang over it
Speaker 2: in a way that I was like, I got this
Speaker 2: like it was. It was that moment where I was like, okay,
Speaker 2: I kind of achieved at this moment, like what I
Speaker 2: was maybe thinking about this could sound like where I'm
Speaker 2: creating something that's going to please everybody, and that's going
Speaker 2: to please me and you in Quest and whoever needs
Speaker 2: to be pleased, especially even if they don't get it
Speaker 2: at the beginning. Because in September of twenty thirteen, Wyse
Speaker 2: Up Ghost was released and nobody really cared, did they?
Speaker 2: I don't know about that, so I'm just kidding nobody.
Speaker 2: But such a different record, Which.
Speaker 4: Song was it?
Speaker 5: Do you think that we were doing that, that you
Speaker 5: had that strong fail and it was it one particular
Speaker 5: song what.
Speaker 4: That nobody cared no, no, but the one that you
Speaker 4: said we were in crew, which one was the one
Speaker 4: that grenade grenade? You felt that grenade that was to me, that's.
Speaker 2: The nobody knows that take the centerpiece.
Speaker 4: That's a set apiece for you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess, I guess, you know, we would have
Speaker 5: different ones.
Speaker 4: I think that that in.
Speaker 5: Some ways, there's so many different things that were hit
Speaker 5: on this.
Speaker 4: I can see grenade. I remember thinking late on.
Speaker 2: It's got the It's hard part from Doom's Day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think that that also, you know, because
Speaker 5: it was a song that was not very widely heard originally,
Speaker 5: and again we were re interpreting that very soon after
Speaker 5: its original release because it's only five years earlier. It's
Speaker 5: from the delivery Man sessions, but it wasn't on the album,
Speaker 5: so that's why you hadn't heard it.
Speaker 2: I have that EP.
Speaker 5: But yeah, yeah, but it was a fairly you know,
Speaker 5: it was elusive song and I just had all the
Speaker 5: more feeling that that thing that that mixed between the
Speaker 5: girl dancing around the pole and the and the woman
Speaker 5: walking through the market with the with the you know,
Speaker 5: the hidden divine that juxtaposician was was becoming more that
Speaker 5: was becoming more frequent and more in conflict. And that's
Speaker 5: part of the reason why I say, the part of
Speaker 5: the lyrical you know, imperative is this kind of just
Speaker 5: join up experiences that you feel. Otherwise, what the hell,
Speaker 5: what's the point of doing anything if you don't feel
Speaker 5: something for it. Now, that probably leads to the most
Speaker 5: unexpected thing.
Speaker 4: I mean, we worked very long.
Speaker 5: I think we worked as long you and I in
Speaker 5: the room, worked as long on two songs.
Speaker 4: That were not on the finished record. I mean, we
Speaker 4: worked a lot of time on can You Hear Me?
Speaker 5: Which is and of course we had that incredible sort
Speaker 5: of attempt to get David Crosby to sing on it,
Speaker 5: you know, because.
Speaker 4: Because I had quoted the birds.
Speaker 5: In one of the background vocals, and I wanted him
Speaker 5: to sing in the background group with me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you got Graham Nash to say yes. Crosby
Speaker 2: said no, why didn't we just take Graham Nash on
Speaker 2: his own?
Speaker 5: Well, I thought it would have been I just wanted
Speaker 5: to just perverse, I mean, but it was. It was anyway,
Speaker 5: that was that was I got to do the parts. Anyway,
Speaker 5: in the end, I ended up doing the parts. And
Speaker 5: then we worked on another song that kind of had
Speaker 5: a which was the one that had the Chelsea from
Speaker 5: from Loop My New Haunt, Yeah, my New Haunt, which
Speaker 5: it was a favorite of mine because it was I
Speaker 5: liked that lyric a lot, and that was an entirely
Speaker 5: new lyric. And then the one that really was the
Speaker 5: shock to me was was that I didn't expect to write.
Speaker 5: And I suppose this is what happens when you get
Speaker 5: over a period of time, the fact that we'd not
Speaker 5: spoken about anything, and we didn't all have this all
Speaker 5: the shared experience on the road or playing live, or
Speaker 5: we hadn't known each other for a hundred years. But
Speaker 5: there was that final group of pieces that were put together,
Speaker 5: and one of them was that was the piano piece
Speaker 5: with ray and Quest and you sent that to me
Speaker 5: and I wrote the words and sang it at my
Speaker 5: kitchen counter, just on my on my laptop without a
Speaker 5: microphone even, you know, just so it's just it's just
Speaker 5: the vocal that's the internal microphone.
Speaker 2: Over the track, which had the sound of like distortion.
Speaker 5: Like yeah, but sometimes it's like when you used to
Speaker 5: record on you know, eight or four track cassette. You
Speaker 5: would spend a million years in the studio trying to
Speaker 5: get the same distortion as the casseet naturally gave you,
Speaker 5: and you couldn't understand why you couldn't get it to
Speaker 5: sound as kind of crushed and exciting for everything, fighting
Speaker 5: for space.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: It's like, really, somebody should have could have come in
Speaker 5: with a graph and just explained it to you, you know.
Speaker 5: So that was the same sort of thing. It was
Speaker 5: a total fluke. And I came to the studio the
Speaker 5: next day very much the intention of re recording the
Speaker 5: vocal with proper fidelity, and you played it to Quest
Speaker 5: and he said, that's it. And that's as much direct
Speaker 5: intervention as I think that we ever had about any song.
Speaker 5: Everything else was like, okay, you go this, I'll do this,
Speaker 5: and then this added here, and then in the mix
Speaker 5: you're making it agree. But that I only mentioned because
Speaker 5: what was unusual about it is everything else was outward
Speaker 5: looking in the whole record, except that one song, I suppose,
Speaker 5: if I could believe, was a statement. But after everything
Speaker 5: that are being observed in the other songs. You could
Speaker 5: have a song called ever could believe if you just
Speaker 5: only say the title, you know what it's about, you
Speaker 5: know the disillusionment that you would arrive at after all
Speaker 5: the other miserable observations and the rest of the record,
Speaker 5: you get to that one. But Poppett was a minute
Speaker 5: to minute description of my father's death. Song one I
Speaker 5: would have ever imagined I would write two that I
Speaker 5: would record. I'd written two songs about my grandmother's pass
Speaker 5: and that I felt were One of them was quite
Speaker 5: joyful fornica, and the other was quite a celebratory in
Speaker 5: its own It was emotional song that there's done both
Speaker 5: wrote with for McCartney. That this one. You know, it
Speaker 5: wasn't like I had written it with Steve Naive. Somebody
Speaker 5: had known my dad, you know. It was raised cyclic
Speaker 5: kind of chord sequence over that meat that West was
Speaker 5: laying down. It was just all there and I didn't
Speaker 5: have to do very much, and I just had to
Speaker 5: sing the words, and of course I just thought the
Speaker 5: fidelity would never hold up.
Speaker 2: Did you write the words while listening to the beat
Speaker 2: or did you have those words?
Speaker 4: I don't even remember.
Speaker 5: I think I think I just started writing, and yeah,
Speaker 5: probably stream of car.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was really stream.
Speaker 5: Because it was like obviously something that I had been ready,
Speaker 5: I'd been ready to set talk about. Well, he had
Speaker 5: just passed away recently, fairly fairly well, he passed in
Speaker 5: twenty eleven, so it was pretty soon, and I'd spent
Speaker 5: you know, I'd been writing a book, and I'd written
Speaker 5: a lot, and it was really about my grandfather and
Speaker 5: my father, both being by musicians before me, and it
Speaker 5: was a slightly romantic fantasy, and I really probably kept
Speaker 5: him in the room with me writing it.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: That was the way I dealt with it, and the
Speaker 5: only song I've ever written about it. I've written several
Speaker 5: songs about my father, but always transposed into some other character,
Speaker 5: but not this one, which was literally describing you know,
Speaker 5: they're giving them these pills and he's now he's leaving,
Speaker 5: and the coffins is closing the whole bit. You know,
Speaker 5: he's gone in the grave. That's all in the song.
Speaker 5: And if you had listened to it, you know.
Speaker 2: I remember you told me that you didn't want that
Speaker 2: on the vinyl edition because you didn't want to hear
Speaker 2: that song.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to hear it every time.
Speaker 5: But I didn't I thought that in any way. I
Speaker 5: thought it was kind of selfish as part of me. Well,
Speaker 5: it was because it was wasn't. It wasn't a collaborative experience.
Speaker 5: It was maybe something that some of us had gone through,
Speaker 5: but it was the other things we had all contributed
Speaker 5: to the setting of the resetting of the words or
Speaker 5: the new words had been found in this home in rhythm,
Speaker 5: and the members of the Roots had come in and
Speaker 5: played their parts, the horns had played the parts, written
Speaker 5: his strings, and you had pulled it all together and
Speaker 5: it was such a ensemble piece in that way. It
Speaker 5: was a collaborative piece, collage like anyway, because it wasn't
Speaker 5: played by a group in the room kind of. And
Speaker 5: then when we did play it, it changed shape again
Speaker 5: and became a lot you know, freer. And then when
Speaker 5: Tarik came and played, that added another dimension because then
Speaker 5: you know, in the end it was worked out great
Speaker 5: because he did that amazing Kareem Rigginson, that amazing remix
Speaker 5: of thinking.
Speaker 4: Why thought, Why is up? Thought?
Speaker 5: With black thought on it, and those shows when he
Speaker 5: came up and we did you know, ghost Town and
Speaker 5: we did these other songs from our repertoire adapted and
Speaker 5: Kirk played like a huge long solo and I Want You,
Speaker 5: and we did John.
Speaker 4: Lennons I found Out and.
Speaker 5: All these other songs that sort of all kind of
Speaker 5: sort of it was like going back to what we
Speaker 5: started at when we did the appearances on the show,
Speaker 5: because we were suddenly doing songs for my Reportie and
Speaker 5: Spooky Girlfriend, which was one of the other records that
Speaker 5: I made with machines. But I just started out with
Speaker 5: just a really cheap sample, a really cheap drum machine
Speaker 5: and a Dan electro and no band, and that was
Speaker 5: like just before the Impostor started playing together.
Speaker 2: So the interesting thing about Puppet and the fact that
Speaker 2: it's about your dad. Recently, listening to it, I'm like, wait,
Speaker 2: this is mother from Plastic Goono Band and song of
Speaker 2: his father. I mean, we were referencing Plastic Ono Band
Speaker 2: in a couple of different ways on that record, I think,
Speaker 2: and it came out and then it came out with
Speaker 2: I got a great mix of that going by the
Speaker 2: way rehearsal session Dangerous Amusements. There's a podcast now about you.
Speaker 2: Have you been listening to that at all?
Speaker 5: I'm aware that Mark billingh that the crime writer because
Speaker 5: I did a because I just saw that he wrote
Speaker 5: something to us and he was doing it, he told us.
Speaker 5: But I can't listen to stuff about yeah's hard.
Speaker 2: But I was listening today and I heard an interesting
Speaker 2: point by one of the guests. And because you were
Speaker 2: talking about these headlines on wise up ghosts and these
Speaker 2: outward looking things about society and so forth, it's almost
Speaker 2: as if you're Nostradamis predicting things that are going to
Speaker 2: be happening in society. They were talking about Trump, they
Speaker 2: were talking about brilliant mistake I did.
Speaker 4: I used to make a joke when things seem funnier,
Speaker 4: you know, when it seemed to all be like a
Speaker 4: horrible kind of delusion of a different kind that all
Speaker 4: of this. You know, when people were complaining about songs
Speaker 4: being played at political rallies, I could say, they could
Speaker 4: go on forever with my songs waiting.
Speaker 5: For the end of the world. You know, so beyond belief.
Speaker 5: You know, brilliant mistake accidents will happen. We've got a
Speaker 5: million of them.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: The point is, when I was working for five years
Speaker 5: on this version of Bud Schulberg's play Facing the Crowd,
Speaker 5: which was set in the fifties. When there was about
Speaker 5: hillbilly singer who comes up into prominence and then wants
Speaker 5: to become a man of political influence.
Speaker 4: People said, oh, that's just like the president, you know.
Speaker 5: And yeah, but you've got to remember the guy that
Speaker 5: wrote that story didn't know anything about Richard Nixon, didn't
Speaker 5: know anything about Ron Reagan. How can you see the
Speaker 5: few He wasn't Austrodamus. And the truth of it is,
Speaker 5: they'll always be another monster. I'll have a different face,
Speaker 5: they'll love a different set of clothes. You know, there's
Speaker 5: been you look back in history, it just gets repeated.
Speaker 2: Great history. So getting back to what happened after we
Speaker 2: released the record, Jimmy was nice enough to give us
Speaker 2: two nights on the show Very End of the Know
Speaker 2: with Jimmy found before we turned over to The Tonight Show.
Speaker 2: Gave us two nights where we not only played two
Speaker 2: songs a night as the music guest, but we ended
Speaker 2: up playing everything from the album over those two nights,
Speaker 2: and then and.
Speaker 4: With the set with the with the string section and every.
Speaker 2: String absolutely fleshing out some things that would later be
Speaker 2: in the Only four concerts. Yeah, that happens. That happened,
Speaker 2: so I don't know. You went on tour solo after that, But.
Speaker 4: It was just as hard to pen down.
Speaker 5: I mean it's like it's a I think I would
Speaker 5: have done it, no problem. I think it was just
Speaker 5: always so difficult. Everybody's got their world, and you know
Speaker 5: it wasn't I suppose the greatest news for the impostors.
Speaker 5: I remember being in Australia after we'd made I think
Speaker 5: we only had the rough mixes and taking the band
Speaker 5: out of the there and oh, by the way, I've
Speaker 5: made a record with the roots. You know, that didn't
Speaker 5: go down ter really well. That was not quite as
Speaker 5: bad as to have the attractions. There was nothing to
Speaker 5: play on King of America, but you know, it was close.
Speaker 5: And then I rode around in a car and played
Speaker 5: Pete the roughs, you know, and they kind of got
Speaker 5: the idea of it. And then, of course the other
Speaker 5: thing is that since then we've we've adapted several of
Speaker 5: the songs into the Imboss's repertoire. You know, Men Times
Speaker 5: was in there for a while. Secs made an appearance,
Speaker 5: you know, some of the others not so much.
Speaker 4: But trip wise been in there now and again.
Speaker 5: You know, But those four concerts, that's not what we
Speaker 5: should be talking about.
Speaker 2: Those three of them were great. Brooklyn Ball the first
Speaker 2: show obviously, the energy there was great. The Cap Theater
Speaker 2: in Portchester, they were reopening. I don't think they had
Speaker 2: the sound quite right yet, and it was a little weird.
Speaker 2: You and the roots were very much separated on the stage.
Speaker 5: I don't remember that one being as as electric as
Speaker 5: the It wasn't. Yeah, I remember the very opening was
Speaker 5: really great at the Ball. I remember being backstage and
Speaker 5: Quest laying it down and I'm coming out and I thought,
Speaker 5: this is the way to do this is now. Now
Speaker 5: we're into a different thing. Now, we're into kind of performing,
Speaker 5: not making records. Are into performing. So we've got to
Speaker 5: involve stagecraft. We've got to have other repertoire. People don't
Speaker 5: know this record yet. That's the point of his being here.
Speaker 5: I would say that with you know, you have to
Speaker 5: give Don Whil's credit. He's here with us, with me
Speaker 5: in Quest, and we did a presentation in this exact
Speaker 5: room where I was sitting, exactly where Don was. Was
Speaker 5: Don's idea to make the cover look like a City
Speaker 5: Lights cover. He wanted it to look like the cover
Speaker 5: of how by Allen Ginsburg, which was a sort of
Speaker 5: visual quote in graphic design. That he wanted it to
Speaker 5: give it the sense that these words were consequential because
Speaker 5: it was a famous book of poetry. You know, I
Speaker 5: thought that was a compliment he paid me. Whether or
Speaker 5: not it's deserved, I don't know, but I appreciated that
Speaker 5: he wanted to say this was consequential in some visual way.
Speaker 5: And the only mistake the record label could be said
Speaker 5: to have made was perhaps not seeing it through to
Speaker 5: immediately follow the remix record with the live record. But
Speaker 5: the trouble is I didn't have a long term contract
Speaker 5: with Blue Not I was only on Blue Note because
Speaker 5: they took this record.
Speaker 4: We all just took it.
Speaker 2: Kind of fun to have an album on Blue Note, though.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there isn't hardly a label in the universal group
Speaker 5: that have been and I you know, people say, oh,
Speaker 5: he started out on Stiff Records.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I also made four records.
Speaker 5: Of Deutsche Grammarphone, which is which is three more than
Speaker 5: I made for Stiff. So you never know when you're
Speaker 5: going to get to do things in music, you know,
Speaker 5: or what the label and the labels all change around,
Speaker 5: and they changed I was on Island def Jam, you know,
Speaker 5: different times. They saw something in the record I was
Speaker 5: making then and that was where to put it.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: There were those two shows in Brooklyn and Portchester, and
Speaker 2: then there were two shows in Vegas at the Brooklyn
Speaker 2: Bawl Grand opening. Yes, there's a Brooklyn ball in Vegas Nashville.
Speaker 2: And to me that was, like you said, the shows
Speaker 2: because Tarik was there, Marisol was there, and you guys
Speaker 2: had played through this set a couple of times, and
Speaker 2: we had we.
Speaker 5: Had we had those other things as well, we had
Speaker 5: those other numbers down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those shows were really great.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also in twenty thirteen, you played with the Roots again
Speaker 2: at a Prince tribute concert. Moonbeam Levels was the song
Speaker 2: you played.
Speaker 4: I just knew that I was going to get put
Speaker 4: through it, you know, I knew that I knew what
Speaker 4: I agreed to do it. I'd be given the most
Speaker 4: obscure like the one that's only that's only known. The
Speaker 4: print song was only known on a on a cassette
Speaker 4: that somebody found in a drawer, you know. But it's
Speaker 4: a great song. It's a great song, it is, and
Speaker 4: we did it. We did it, didn't we do it
Speaker 4: a warm up show at the winery.
Speaker 2: At the winery, Yeah, that the show is at Carnegie
Speaker 2: on Yeah.
Speaker 5: And then we moved and I remember I got to
Speaker 5: Carnegieall and I had the I had to conduct the
Speaker 5: dressing room and it sat on the piece of paper
Speaker 5: on the on the on the door that had the axe.
Speaker 5: It said I was gonna start on Prince sharing ad
Speaker 5: dressing room were supposed to be showing a dresser, which
Speaker 5: I somehow could not imagine actually happening. And I guess
Speaker 5: there was some I don't know whether that was just
Speaker 5: being nice everybody. Was Prince ever going to be there?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: But did you ever meet Prince?
Speaker 4: I met him just once. I Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was introduced to him at an event. My wife
Speaker 5: had played a piano number. It was the Music Cares
Speaker 5: tribute to Barbas streissand and Prince was sitting a few
Speaker 5: tables away.
Speaker 4: From us. And when I came.
Speaker 5: Back out to my table after dinner played Down with Love,
Speaker 5: he kind of just looked at me and did a
Speaker 5: kind of silent movie take. He just did like a
Speaker 5: little mime of the piano oh okay, and did a
Speaker 5: little like one of his looks with his eyes where
Speaker 5: he just went, you know, like he didn't need to
Speaker 5: say it was like he that was good. You know,
Speaker 5: he knew he was saying that was He just went
Speaker 5: like this little mime of the piano and like did
Speaker 5: a little like double take kind of thing with his eyes.
Speaker 2: That's your only experienced meeting.
Speaker 5: And then and then when Diana came back to the table,
Speaker 5: then suddenly we had a couple of visitors came over
Speaker 5: to compliment her on her performance, and it was Tavis
Speaker 5: Smiley and doctor Cornell West. And doctor Cornell said, have
Speaker 5: you ever met Prince? I said no, I said, we're
Speaker 5: going to meet him now. And he took us over
Speaker 5: and really there was Prince didn't have any choice but
Speaker 5: to meet us, and he was very gracious and he
Speaker 5: complimented Diana, you know, and that was the only time
Speaker 5: we ever met. And then funnily enough, at the end
Speaker 5: of the night, he got up and everybody was watching like.
Speaker 4: Is he going to play What's he going to sing?
Speaker 4: You know? Is he going to sing Don't rain on
Speaker 4: My Parade, you know?
Speaker 5: Or is he going to sing one of the Bible
Speaker 5: strike sound songs? And in the end, when the lights
Speaker 5: came up at the very end of the evening.
Speaker 4: He was there at the microphone and he was in
Speaker 4: the musicres recipient for whatever year it was, is Barbos
Speaker 4: Rise and he introduced him. That was it.
Speaker 5: So that was that was truly surreal evening. But I
Speaker 5: got to say thanks to the doctor for taking us
Speaker 5: over there, because you know, it's one of those situations
Speaker 5: if you see somebody across the room, are you going
Speaker 5: to walk over and run the risk of them being
Speaker 5: discomforted by you making that overture?
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: But when I had a little bit of dealing with
Speaker 5: his publishing people about trying to quote one of his
Speaker 5: songs once, as you know, he wasn't always kind of
Speaker 5: very comfortable with that. I'd quote a pop life on
Speaker 5: one of my recordings and he wouldn't clear it, and
Speaker 5: or they wouldn't clear it the lyrics.
Speaker 4: Or the music I quoted.
Speaker 5: It was incorporated into a song called The Bridge I Burned,
Speaker 5: which is the last thing I ever cut from Warner Brothers,
Speaker 5: and I figured he's got it. He wasn't any happier
Speaker 5: with Warner Brothers than I was by that point, so I.
Speaker 4: Was thinking it would have appealed to a sense of humor.
Speaker 5: But I guess it didn't feel right, So I played
Speaker 5: pop life in the mid eighties. Is in the show
Speaker 5: the first time the spinning wheel was their pop Life
Speaker 5: was on the wheel. Then I incorporated it, and when
Speaker 5: I quoted it, it wasn't so comfortable, or somebody who
Speaker 5: was in charge of publisher wasn't comfortable with the quotation.
Speaker 5: So I adapted it into a different thing and it
Speaker 5: never came out in that film.
Speaker 2: A couple of very current things, and now I feel
Speaker 2: like a real journalist. As a current is today's headlines.
Speaker 2: You signed a new publishing deal with BMG. That's right
Speaker 2: for your entire catalog. What does that mean exactly?
Speaker 5: It means they administer my compositions for the next you know,
Speaker 5: for the duration of the.
Speaker 2: Contract, but you own them and they administer them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean there's a big season in people selling their rights,
Speaker 5: both in publishing and masters right now.
Speaker 2: Right, So how does this differ from Masters?
Speaker 5: Are the recordings which I also owned except for the
Speaker 5: for the for the six records I made for Warner Brothers,
Speaker 5: which they own, and they don't revert, you know, they
Speaker 5: don't they know they don't come back to the artists
Speaker 5: that they're in theirs in perpetuity as far as I understand, really,
Speaker 5: what does it mean? The difference is when you control
Speaker 5: the composition. Say, if somebody came and wanted to include
Speaker 5: one of my songs in a movie and they wanted
Speaker 5: to re record it, they would only have to pay
Speaker 5: me for the for the composition. But if they wanted
Speaker 5: to use my recording, theyd need the master as well,
Speaker 5: So that way you would benefit on two sides of
Speaker 5: the deal. So there is money as a as a
Speaker 5: both a recording artists and published.
Speaker 2: But you didn't sell your songs like Dylan or Springsteen.
Speaker 5: Did because those those calculations are based on very, very
Speaker 5: much more successful songs than mine.
Speaker 4: Those things are not done.
Speaker 5: They make a lot of speeches about about how culturally
Speaker 5: important those artists are, but in reality they have generated
Speaker 5: tremendous revenue for the people for you know, over years
Speaker 5: and those established. So if you see as somebody like
Speaker 5: a Stevie Nicks or something like that, those are monster,
Speaker 5: multimillion selling records.
Speaker 4: I've never I've never had. I've never had a million
Speaker 4: selling record in my entire career. And you know, in
Speaker 4: the initial period of release, some of my albums.
Speaker 2: Might have I've bought a million records of you.
Speaker 5: This is by part not you know, I mean, as
Speaker 5: I see it, my job, although I've been for more
Speaker 5: of my career now with a major record label. My
Speaker 5: relationship with major record corporations is pretty much like that
Speaker 5: of an independent filmmaker is with a studio. You know,
Speaker 5: independent filmmakers are not under contract to a studio. They
Speaker 5: make a production for a studio and then they might
Speaker 5: take themselves somewhere else and get the finance for a
Speaker 5: different film elsewhere, sometimes to get independent finance. And that's
Speaker 5: the model of Stiff Records, which borrows a thousand pounds
Speaker 5: to form a record label. And that's the beginning of
Speaker 5: my career. By the time I've gotten signed to Columbia
Speaker 5: and America and then later and Warner Brothers for the
Speaker 5: World and then on to what became Universal. As I said,
Speaker 5: I've been on all these imprints. But in terms of
Speaker 5: this issue, particularly of publishing, you would have to have
Speaker 5: had like the kind of major, major, multi selling for
Speaker 5: that for it to be in your interest to sell
Speaker 5: your rights. It just isn't doesn't make sense because you
Speaker 5: know why because I'm holding six hundred lottery tickets, you know, right,
Speaker 5: But that's I mean, any one of those songs could
Speaker 5: be I can imagine if you sold the rights having
Speaker 5: not had any of them be. You know, I'm not
Speaker 5: covered very often, but that could happen any day, wouldn't it.
Speaker 5: You know, all I'm trying to do is get the
Speaker 5: money to make another record.
Speaker 2: Because you're a freaking artist and you don't care more
Speaker 2: about money than you do about I.
Speaker 5: Want to get paid. I want to get paid for
Speaker 5: what I do. But I'm not trying to accrue so
Speaker 5: much wealth and I can stop working because what would
Speaker 5: I do with myself?
Speaker 4: What would be the point?
Speaker 5: I wanted to do this for as long as I
Speaker 5: can physically do it.
Speaker 4: I want to do it now. May not be that
Speaker 4: much time ahead, Let's be truthful. I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: know that.
Speaker 5: I look at people who are playing in the late
Speaker 5: seventies eighties and think, wow, there's a few people that
Speaker 5: are really exceptional that are still doing incredible work when
Speaker 5: you get up there, and a lot of our really
Speaker 5: most precious artists in the whole history of recording, when
Speaker 5: you look at when they passed they were only like
Speaker 5: three or four years old than I am.
Speaker 4: Now. You know, it's quite shocked.
Speaker 5: Right now when you look at the people that we
Speaker 5: really are offer all time, the greatest that are not
Speaker 5: with us. I mean there's not just the ones that
Speaker 5: died like at thirty. I'm talking about people that died
Speaker 5: at seventy three but still have more music than most
Speaker 5: people would ever make if they live to be one
Speaker 5: hundred and seventy three.
Speaker 2: You know, So, are you in a mindset at this
Speaker 2: point in your career where like, like you literally just
Speaker 2: put out four albums in the last three years. I
Speaker 2: know you're probably conscious of a legacy, but are you
Speaker 2: content on leaving us more and more gifts for the
Speaker 2: next hundred years as many gifts as you can? I
Speaker 2: should say.
Speaker 5: I'm not much concerned about legacy, because that's really only
Speaker 5: something that's probably considered after you're gone. Well, I care,
Speaker 5: I won't be here. I just think it's like, do
Speaker 5: the thing that you feel.
Speaker 4: Everything that I've done.
Speaker 5: That hasn't been what I was known for when I
Speaker 5: started or what made my name at the start, has
Speaker 5: caused some kind of horrified reaction when I first did it,
Speaker 5: and that ranges from what from almost Blue the country record,
Speaker 5: Native One all the way to wise up Ghost. Some
Speaker 5: people can't understand it, then penny drops like five years,
Speaker 5: twenty years, thirty years sometimes later. The records that seem
Speaker 5: to be the most challenging for some people to absorb
Speaker 5: also have their own audiences, like there are people specifically
Speaker 5: that like the Juliet Letters that didn't buy minam is
Speaker 5: True or weren't around when I made these records, are
Speaker 5: supposed to feel sentimental about when I made the record
Speaker 5: with back rack, so they got every chance just to
Speaker 5: come in the door any time you make anything good.
Speaker 2: This is kind of an Arvi's question, But you look
Speaker 2: up to a guy like Dylan for continuing to tour
Speaker 2: and make records at this point.
Speaker 4: I mean, I saw Dylan play in.
Speaker 5: Philadelphia actually just before Christmas, and it was almostly the
Speaker 5: best show I've ever seen him give.
Speaker 2: I mean, the shows now are the best shows.
Speaker 4: It was completely astonishing.
Speaker 5: I mean, is the clarity of his vocal is focus
Speaker 5: on the words his voice and his story his voice
Speaker 5: as I I've got theories about why it is. I
Speaker 5: think it's because of the the singing of other people's
Speaker 5: songs seem to kind of like put him in touch
Speaker 5: with something that he can do with his voice. Does
Speaker 5: his voice sound older, Yes, of course, because he's eighty.
Speaker 5: Does it sound Is it musical?
Speaker 4: Yes? If you know anything? Was it ever like?
Speaker 5: Was it ever like Andy Williams? Did he ever sound
Speaker 5: like Andy Williams? Did he ever sound like Eddie Kendricks No?
Speaker 5: Did he sound like Enrico Caruso?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: But he said in you know, I can sing just
Speaker 5: as good as those people, because in his own way
Speaker 5: he can. And what he's doing, you can't learn what
Speaker 5: it is he knows. You can't learn. You can't go
Speaker 5: where he is. That's like listening to Sonny Rollins or something.
Speaker 5: You can't go where he is.
Speaker 2: He's forgotten more than.
Speaker 5: Hell, you know, he has, really has the David Sister said,
Speaker 5: I've forgotten more than you'll ever.
Speaker 2: Know, speaking of Dylan type gigantic music. For years. We
Speaker 2: did a Johnny Cash remix shortly.
Speaker 4: I love that record, do you now? I do? I do?
Speaker 4: I love that record? You know that record.
Speaker 2: I'm happy we did it, and it's pretty darn cool,
Speaker 2: But I don't think it makes sense in my head.
Speaker 4: I don't know Johnny.
Speaker 2: I mean, this song makes sense in my head. I
Speaker 2: love the song, but the way we did it was really,
Speaker 2: I mean slightly bizarre but fun.
Speaker 5: But I mean I think that hey, John was john
Speaker 5: was a you know, rebellious kind of you know, he
Speaker 5: didn't have any He wasn't trying to sound like other people.
Speaker 4: When he started out.
Speaker 5: He had two guys that really couldn't play that they
Speaker 5: just had feel I mean, they weren't like virtuos and musicians,
Speaker 5: but they played exactly what he needed. When he had
Speaker 5: the Tennessee too, you know, it was just like it's
Speaker 5: not I'm gonna say they couldn't play the course it
Speaker 5: could play, but they couldn't play like you know, it
Speaker 5: couldn't play like Ray Brown or Charles Mingus or something.
Speaker 5: On the double bassist the rhythm down and the guy
Speaker 5: playing the guitar, Luther Perkins just doing perfect stuff for
Speaker 5: Johnny and the rhythm of those early records. And then
Speaker 5: right at the end of his life he made those
Speaker 5: records and I mean a couple of those records are
Speaker 5: really great. I think it got to be a bit
Speaker 5: of a riff at the end, you know, Like I
Speaker 5: don't think the song choices were was imaginative after the
Speaker 5: first one.
Speaker 2: But the when did the term Americana appear?
Speaker 5: Well, it goes way back, but I mean I think
Speaker 5: when it started to become like people with waxed mustaches
Speaker 5: and itchy waistcoats and everything. I think that's about twenty
Speaker 5: years ago. Isn't there something I don't think that's Americana?
Speaker 5: You see, I think that it's Johnny Cash music wherever
Speaker 5: he's recording. That's why I think if Johnny Cash would
Speaker 5: you know, I mean, I bear in mind I worked
Speaker 5: with the guy who produced the original record that we remixed.
Speaker 5: That's a Billy Cheryl, and Billy Cheryl had no business
Speaker 5: ever been in the studio with Johnny Cash at that
Speaker 5: point in their respective careers. I think that Johnny was
Speaker 5: not valued by Columbia the way he should have been,
Speaker 5: given that he was. It was the founding country music
Speaker 5: artist on that record label. You know, if Columbia had
Speaker 5: dropped Bob Dylan in the same year as they dropped
Speaker 5: both Miles Davis and Johnny Cash, I think people would
Speaker 5: have had something to say about it.
Speaker 4: But that didn't happen.
Speaker 5: You know, it was a completely un inexplicable thing given.
Speaker 5: That's the changing value of companies relating to the founding artists.
Speaker 5: If you think that everything Johnny Cash did for Columbia
Speaker 5: that they could let him go, that's inconceivable in the
Speaker 5: same way as it's inconceivable that they didn't want to
Speaker 5: keep Miles Davis.
Speaker 2: It's about loyalty Columbia comm on.
Speaker 4: No, it was just nonsense.
Speaker 5: But I mean so I benefited from that in the
Speaker 5: sense that john recorded two of my songs on his
Speaker 5: first two records for Mercury after he left, after all
Speaker 5: those records he made for Columbia, but the record that
Speaker 5: we remix was on from one of the last sessions
Speaker 5: that he did, and there was a disconnect obviously between
Speaker 5: where Johnny could go and the kind of way they
Speaker 5: made records.
Speaker 4: You heard the parts. The musicians sounded like they were asleep.
Speaker 5: When they were recording. I mean, it was very, very flat.
Speaker 5: They're all great musicians, but there was no inspiration to
Speaker 5: the arrangement.
Speaker 4: So all we did was replace a bunch of.
Speaker 2: Things and took the song to outer space. In outer
Speaker 2: space because that's where it belongs.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I actually think it it Actually it's like the
Speaker 5: missing song on song Machine to my ears, it sounds
Speaker 5: kind of like what would happen to the Good, the
Speaker 5: Bad and the Queen kind of back Johnny Cash.
Speaker 2: Right, let me run through these last couple of things
Speaker 2: just in case the world blows up. I can get
Speaker 2: to the end of this list. The Hollywood Bowl in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen on my birthday, you were playing with some
Speaker 2: symphony and Kareem Riggins.
Speaker 4: The Crouch that Steve Naive, Yeah, yeah, no, that was
Speaker 4: that was with the It is actually the it's the
Speaker 4: La fil or the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and I think
Speaker 4: it's there filmonic, Yeah, but it's sort of summer La filmonic.
Speaker 5: It's not the it's not the full La Filmonic. It's
Speaker 5: like it's not you know. That's a good orchestra, yeah, and.
Speaker 4: Really great conductor.
Speaker 5: And we did a whole bunch of I mean, I
Speaker 5: worked on a I'd learned to how to write that
Speaker 5: stuff now when I worked in the nineties, when I
Speaker 5: worked with the Broski Quartet, I you know, because they
Speaker 5: only talked to one another in written notation. They didn't
Speaker 5: improvise in that sense. I had to learn to be
Speaker 5: coherent and be a good partner in our collaboration. I
Speaker 5: had to learn how to write music down. I had
Speaker 5: no need of it before then. Now everything that I
Speaker 5: had written that was a larger group, I had kind
Speaker 5: of played it to somebody who had then written it
Speaker 5: down for me, and that was a bit laborious and
Speaker 5: things would get twisted, you know.
Speaker 4: So and then of course got curious what.
Speaker 5: Would happen if I wrote bigger, for more bigger than
Speaker 5: a string or wrote for champion group, and then gradually
Speaker 5: for a big band and for a symphony orchestra, and
Speaker 5: wrote some of those things you mentioned earlier, like wrote
Speaker 5: ballet music for a company in Italy and another one
Speaker 5: for the Miami c Ballet. And I learned how to
Speaker 5: orchestrate to my own satisfaction. It's not, certainly not textbook orchestration.
Speaker 2: But orchestration is the same as arranging.
Speaker 4: Well, it's the.
Speaker 5: Actual right in each individual part, you know, like you
Speaker 5: would write for the horn section, but it's for the
Speaker 5: whole orchestra, so you've got to imagine everything, including the
Speaker 5: percussion parts and everything.
Speaker 4: So you're writing.
Speaker 5: There's not often time written for an orchestra, but sometimes
Speaker 5: I'd have the right time. But you're just writing punctuations,
Speaker 5: you know, and timpanies or snare drums and you know
Speaker 5: some little thing.
Speaker 2: Well, the reason I brought up that specific concert.
Speaker 5: Well because we played, We played wise and played it
Speaker 5: was an extraordinary to play it with Steve, you know,
Speaker 5: playing the piano introduction and then you know, with the
Speaker 5: strings and Kareem and Kareem and then Kareem just playing
Speaker 5: a sort of rendition because Kareem understanding very much what
Speaker 5: Quest was playing.
Speaker 2: On the studio recording the album version of Wyse Up Ghost,
Speaker 2: there are two Quest loves, Yeah, yeah, one in the
Speaker 2: left speaker and one in the right hardpand totally different
Speaker 2: drum takes, playing slightly different things.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I remember when you first played that to me, I
Speaker 5: thought that was that was the making of it, you know,
Speaker 5: it was the scale of it.
Speaker 4: But I mean Kareem played a pracie of that.
Speaker 5: I suppose you would call it like a distillation of
Speaker 5: all of that. And Dennis, of course, is coming out
Speaker 5: of like he played on the records I made in
Speaker 5: Nashville with Timom was really different bluegrass, which records he
Speaker 5: played on Sycapofore, Andy Sugarcane and National Ransom. He played
Speaker 5: the bassline that is in stations across that. And he
Speaker 5: is like he could play in any group, Dennis Crouch.
Speaker 5: You could put him in a Taylica.
Speaker 4: He could.
Speaker 2: He could hold his own Kareem.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean he's got the sort of like emphatic
Speaker 5: way though he plays. I've never I don't think he
Speaker 5: plays electric bass. I've never seen him hold an electric basse.
Speaker 5: He plays, he's a double bass player. But he played
Speaker 5: in Dinah's band for a while with Kareem, so that
Speaker 5: rhythm section became Dina's rhythm section for a while, you know,
Speaker 5: and she had she had an also Stuart Duncan, the
Speaker 5: fiddle player, along with Mark Rebo.
Speaker 4: Different times. It's good to change it, you know.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, and so after that American Tune kind
Speaker 2: of the only bonus track from Wise Up Ghost sort.
Speaker 5: Of yeah, and really really kind of the only other
Speaker 5: song from outside, you know, other than live We only
Speaker 5: other things since the Squeeze song that we had done
Speaker 5: to play.
Speaker 2: Somebody Else by Paul Simon. American Tune, Everybody. The drums
Speaker 2: are from your performance with Quest and James of Brilliant Disguise.
Speaker 4: That's right, Yeah, that's where.
Speaker 2: The drums come from and then the roots played.
Speaker 4: There's a lot more on it though. There's some great
Speaker 4: stuff from ray On there and Mark Yeah, there's really
Speaker 4: good lock together.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And that's another one of those ones where you know
Speaker 5: it's singing it and then there's sort of like vocal
Speaker 5: group stuff that I was doing as well, like vocal
Speaker 5: group stuff. Yes, I got into that kind of soft
Speaker 5: falsetto kind of vocal group stuff.
Speaker 4: It's like there's stuff like that on Hay clockfaces. Like
Speaker 4: that kind of music is always it's always somewhere.
Speaker 5: When I harmonized myself, it's a different thing because you
Speaker 5: get you get what happens when it's the same voice
Speaker 5: in different registers it it you know, it's different than
Speaker 5: a blend of three different timbres.
Speaker 4: It's the same voice, but it's doing.
Speaker 5: This sort of sort of chorusing effect and it kind
Speaker 5: of creates a siren like effect, you know. Sure in
Speaker 5: mind that, As I said, when we did Imperial Bedroom
Speaker 5: for the stage with the songs from that record and
Speaker 5: the other songs that I felt belong with it, which
Speaker 5: some before, some after, a lot of those songs were
Speaker 5: ones that had vocal group arrangements and.
Speaker 4: It led to look now, which.
Speaker 2: You never played the song Imperial Bedroom.
Speaker 4: No, I never did.
Speaker 5: That's not a great song, but the but it was
Speaker 5: written after the album, so it didn't feel like part
Speaker 5: of the album to me. But when we did those arrangements,
Speaker 5: there was four voices on stage, and you see there
Speaker 5: was at least four voices on the Imperial Bedroom record.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it would be much more than that. I'd be
Speaker 5: tracking and tracking, so you know, having the four parts
Speaker 5: covered at least between Kitten and Brianna and David Farraka.
Speaker 5: That's one thing for sure that the Attractions ever had
Speaker 5: was vocal harmony.
Speaker 2: Well, but you were able to do that stuff in
Speaker 2: the studio.
Speaker 5: In the studio, I love doing it, but that would
Speaker 5: sometimes be the difference to him were a song became
Speaker 5: a big part of the show, and that's a big
Speaker 5: part because when you get it and do it on stage,
Speaker 5: you'd really miss those vocal parts.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: One last thing, the final thing I could remember is
Speaker 2: you were nice enough to record one of my songs
Speaker 2: in this very room as well, right in this space,
Speaker 2: wishing we could as yet unreleased.
Speaker 4: Unbelievable that that is unreleased. I've listened to it again.
Speaker 5: The other day, not just because we were going to
Speaker 5: be here, but I just happened to play it. Both
Speaker 5: versions are beautiful, but I mean the band version is
Speaker 5: particularly I mean they're both great. I don't know which
Speaker 5: I like better. It depends on which day I play
Speaker 5: them on. It's like asking me about that five hundred
Speaker 5: songs list, you know. Yeah, No, it's a really beautiful
Speaker 5: record and we must see it come out. Yes, maybe,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe you should play a little bit of
Speaker 5: it here on this and that, just just enough to
Speaker 5: tease somebody to put it in a movie.
Speaker 4: I always thought it should have been in a movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, hopefully this year, 't's see that come out.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You and I have known each other for at least
Speaker 2: twelve years now, and I've asked you a lot of
Speaker 2: questions like who the fuck is Joe Borderhouse and what
Speaker 2: was going on in that house in.
Speaker 4: Bat at all?
Speaker 2: But I think overall, how do you continue to stay
Speaker 2: properly inspired or inspired enough to do another great album
Speaker 2: like The Boy named If with a book and the
Speaker 2: artwork and everything else where. It's like, you know, you've
Speaker 2: done so many records, You've been added for so long,
Speaker 2: and there are so many other things that inspire you
Speaker 2: besides music.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean the other things that you get to do,
Speaker 5: particularly like daft things like you know, walking on in
Speaker 5: a film, like wearing glasses and a hat like I
Speaker 5: might be wearing. That's kind of a bit of fun
Speaker 5: to do one day, but it's only one day and
Speaker 5: then people see it and they think that's you might
Speaker 5: be your career. But playing writing songs is what I've
Speaker 5: been doing since I was I mean it's fifty years
Speaker 5: and writing songs around that time. I was writing songs
Speaker 5: right away when I was said. It wasn't playing other
Speaker 5: people's songs. When I first played in public, I was
Speaker 5: playing my own song. So it's I don't even know
Speaker 5: how many songs I've written in total. There's lots of
Speaker 5: un published songs. I don't suppose any of them are
Speaker 5: any good, and many of them I've got the words
Speaker 5: in an old book, but I can't remember at the tune,
Speaker 5: you know, So does that really matter?
Speaker 4: Now? It's not.
Speaker 5: You know that the opportunities have all come along and
Speaker 5: I didn't go to college. I left school at seventeen,
Speaker 5: so I feel as if I got that education that
Speaker 5: I might have got in other ways from traveling, from listening,
Speaker 5: and of course from the collaborative experiences, including with the
Speaker 5: original band and this band, and including growing up to
Speaker 5: some degree or sharing a lot of your life with
Speaker 5: two guys that are in the current band. Steve though
Speaker 5: I've barely barely not a boy.
Speaker 4: You know, he was eighteen when he joined the Attractions.
Speaker 4: He's sixty two now.
Speaker 5: So you've seen things happen in all our lives, you know,
Speaker 5: getting married, get divorced, children born, grandchildren born, even those
Speaker 5: are things that have an impact and feed into the
Speaker 5: writing of songs.
Speaker 4: So what else are you doing but living?
Speaker 5: I mean, you're living if you're trying to do it
Speaker 5: to just become You know why when I get asked,
Speaker 5: as you will do as you're traveling, you know, my
Speaker 5: son of the daughter wants to be in music, what
Speaker 5: would you say to them, I'd say, do you want
Speaker 5: to be in it for music or do you want
Speaker 5: to be famous? Because certainly, if you want to be famous,
Speaker 5: there's easier ways to do that. You could become a
Speaker 5: bank robber or a venture capitalist or something, or bitcoin entrepreneur.
Speaker 5: But if you were doing it through music, you might
Speaker 5: really want to have that as a vocation. And I
Speaker 5: got to make my vocation occupation. So that's the best
Speaker 5: deal you can get.
Speaker 2: So you just look at it as a job.
Speaker 4: It's a job.
Speaker 2: Keep writing and keep it.
Speaker 4: It's a job. But it's got it.
Speaker 5: But in order to make it alive, like every show
Speaker 5: you go into, you've got to think why he is
Speaker 5: singing that song, particularly the older ones.
Speaker 4: You better have a reason for singing it.
Speaker 5: Because if you don't have a reason for singing it,
Speaker 5: like you've got something that you feel about it, still,
Speaker 5: you better leave it alone because otherwise you just they're
Speaker 5: going to applaud the first date bars, but they're not
Speaker 5: going to applaud the last date bars because people can
Speaker 5: see that or hear it at the centre. Everything else
Speaker 5: is just luck, isn't it? That what you comes to
Speaker 5: you And the collaborations are so sort of mind begging
Speaker 5: to me that they ever happened. You know, the big
Speaker 5: ones are the big names like Paul McCartney, but backrack,
Speaker 5: how could I've ever imagined that when there was a
Speaker 5: little kid listening to their songs on the radio, Yeah,
Speaker 5: or Alan song the same. But you know the fact
Speaker 5: that we got to do that record with alt some
Speaker 5: when he was, you know, his life was being turned
Speaker 5: upside down like so many people in New Orleans. I
Speaker 5: went went to see him at Joe's Pub and he's
Speaker 5: playing his songs on stage. It wasn't something he commonly
Speaker 5: did outside of New Orleans. You never used to see
Speaker 5: him performance. You went there for jazz Fest very occasionally.
Speaker 5: He'd only been on the road twice in his whole life.
Speaker 5: He'd been in New Orleans making records all his life.
Speaker 5: So to get to share the beginning of what became
Speaker 5: the last ten years of his life and career, some
Speaker 5: of it with him, seeing him actually get that reaction
Speaker 5: on stage, the things that I'd loved since I was,
Speaker 5: you know, teenager, and hear him sing those songs and
Speaker 5: take the mic sometimes from me was unbelievable, you know.
Speaker 5: And that all of the things that he did in
Speaker 5: the studio, you know, he'd say if he had some
Speaker 5: doubt about something that had been played or song, he'd say, well,
Speaker 5: what do you think about that? And you knew the
Speaker 5: minute you said that you were completely fucked, you know,
Speaker 5: like you knew you hadn't got it right. He was
Speaker 5: so gentlemanly, but he always allowed you to arrive at
Speaker 5: the decision.
Speaker 4: It wasn't good enough. You know, he didn't dictate.
Speaker 5: So all of that is why there's still another one, hopefully.
Speaker 5: I don't know whether there's another one. I make everyone
Speaker 5: as if it's the last one.
Speaker 4: I think it's.
Speaker 5: Since we've been able to make records song it's why
Speaker 5: some of the records classically speaking, are too long. Some
Speaker 5: of the records have sixteen songs on him or something
Speaker 5: like that, because I just think I better record these.
Speaker 5: They're going to find me out in a minute, stop
Speaker 5: me from doing this.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, you have had this thing from the very
Speaker 2: beginning of recording a lot of songs and putting out
Speaker 2: almost everything that you can in one way or another.
Speaker 5: We grew up with the idea of singles not necessarily
Speaker 5: being tracks off albums. Yeah, they you know, we that
Speaker 5: the sixties there were a lot of records that just
Speaker 5: you know, they might have you might be just singles.
Speaker 5: Artists they never made albums, or the Beatles had a
Speaker 5: lot of songs that weren't on albums. They were put
Speaker 5: on the albums in America, So the idea that a
Speaker 5: song just existed as a single was really made. It
Speaker 5: really exciting. So we held to that even into basically
Speaker 5: until we signed it an American record label for the
Speaker 5: whole world, right, our releases were all out of sync
Speaker 5: with American releases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll never truly understand why Strawberry Fields and Penny
Speaker 2: Lean is that Sergeant peppernink.
Speaker 5: They seem to be long, but the record album would
Speaker 5: be better with them on.
Speaker 4: It would just be longer.
Speaker 5: You know, those two songs were supposed to be heard
Speaker 5: that they were either side of a seven inch.
Speaker 2: How do you have the guts to stand up on
Speaker 2: stage at the White House in front of Paul McCartney
Speaker 2: and Obama and built out Penny Lean a performance that's
Speaker 2: going to continue to get all kinds of crazy accolades.
Speaker 2: Also thanks to the trumpeterer.
Speaker 5: Oh, the marine trumpet. Yeah, I played that high trumpetar
Speaker 5: was incredible. I mean, you know, that's very tricky, that's
Speaker 5: out of the register of that instrument. But he's you know,
Speaker 5: you do a lot of things one off things TV.
Speaker 5: That's one of the joyful things I think, not a
Speaker 5: sentence because I'm here, but one of the things about
Speaker 5: our work together. You know, I did a lot of
Speaker 5: performances on the other channel. You know, as you mentioned
Speaker 5: at the beginning. I hosted the Lessonman Show one time
Speaker 5: when Dave Brazil and I played thirty two appearances on
Speaker 5: that show in many, many different configurations. There's some of
Speaker 5: them where I look at them and it goes something
Speaker 5: makes you tighten up.
Speaker 4: When you got to do one song. Quite often you
Speaker 4: don't get it right, when it's.
Speaker 5: Just from a standing start and you've got to hit
Speaker 5: it because you're overthinking or trying too hard or something,
Speaker 5: you know. And the two occasions that are sort of
Speaker 5: funny enough they Lennon and McCartney. One is Live eight
Speaker 5: because I had nothing to lose. I was on my own.
Speaker 5: I was an intermission act. You know what that is,
Speaker 5: you know, the sick one while they make putting the
Speaker 5: other man up. I mean that's the third really bad
Speaker 5: piece of news for the attractions was like when Geldoff
Speaker 5: called me in Australia and said, I want you to
Speaker 5: do Live Aid.
Speaker 4: I said, I'm sure we'll do.
Speaker 5: It, and he said, the bad news is the band
Speaker 5: can't come.
Speaker 2: It's just you because of money or whatever.
Speaker 5: No, not money, because they didn't they they didn't think
Speaker 5: we were successful enough. And he was having me on
Speaker 5: for sentiment and he needed he needed to have the
Speaker 5: time to.
Speaker 2: Set up like I love the boomtown Rats.
Speaker 5: No, but it was between Spander Balley and Nick Kersher
Speaker 5: or something. You know, they were like couple of bands
Speaker 5: that were really in the charts. But you know, when
Speaker 5: you're trying to raise money for people and a family
Speaker 5: and you don't need some guy that nobody remembers.
Speaker 2: Was it really that long of a time period.
Speaker 4: Is in England? Yeah, it was like five minutes and
Speaker 4: they've forgotten you, you know, so, I mean it was
Speaker 4: like it was it was like, oh, who's that guy?
Speaker 4: It was like it looks a bit weird.
Speaker 5: And then I started singing the song everybody knew and
Speaker 5: everybody sang along, so it was fine. And the same
Speaker 5: is true when Paul got their Gershwin thing, because he
Speaker 5: you know, to be honest, everybody there that day had
Speaker 5: been very nervous, and the producer said to me, have
Speaker 5: you got anything to say because nobody's saying anything. And
Speaker 5: I did have this thing to say because my mother
Speaker 5: does come from just a mile from Penny Lane, or
Speaker 5: less than my mile from Penny Lane. So I made
Speaker 5: this thing up about how we heard it on the
Speaker 5: radio and everybody in the family listened. It was just
Speaker 5: sort of true because my parents did listen to the
Speaker 5: Beatles and appreciate them, and the fact that there were
Speaker 5: local lads, made good people that didn't really like that
Speaker 5: kind of music, liked the idea of their success. It
Speaker 5: was a very different world, very class beyond world then,
Speaker 5: you know. So there was a pride in them coming
Speaker 5: from Liverpool, even though they quickly moved out of Liverpool,
Speaker 5: and I just the fucking I'm just going to enjoy myself.
Speaker 4: I mean, this won't come again. To do this. I'll
Speaker 4: never be in the White House again. You know. Turned
Speaker 4: out to be a good choice, actually didn't it really
Speaker 4: really think about it in a good choice of song
Speaker 4: and good choice, but I mean a good choice of
Speaker 4: like I'll just be here this one time.
Speaker 5: I've been there once since with my wife and she
Speaker 5: played the Christmas party. But I mean, it was it
Speaker 5: was it was really threwnant.
Speaker 4: It was looked down and there's Paul and there's the President,
Speaker 4: and it was it was really incredible, you know.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I've asked you this question before, and the
Speaker 2: question is why were you not on? Do they know
Speaker 2: it's Christmas, you responded, because I was dreadfully unpopular at
Speaker 2: the time and wasn't called I'd find that story simply
Speaker 2: not believable.
Speaker 4: No it is. It is believable.
Speaker 5: It is believab It's the pop success in England was
Speaker 5: seventy seven to eighty and then this fluke hit with
Speaker 5: Goodie for the Roses, and by the time we got
Speaker 5: to the time of eighty five.
Speaker 2: We were but you had every day I read the book.
Speaker 5: Wasn't a hitt ing, not really just scrape the charts,
Speaker 5: but it was very much like that guy again, no
Speaker 5: done things. So you know shipbuilding was a bigger hit
Speaker 5: than ship Building, but not my version, Robert Ware's version.
Speaker 5: You know what they needed they needed everybody who was
Speaker 5: in the charts that week because it was about recognition
Speaker 5: and those sort of things.
Speaker 2: Bro, you would have killed that. You would have killed that.
Speaker 5: And also it was a gang of people that wrote together.
Speaker 5: I didn't know any of those people, you know, It's
Speaker 5: like I didn't know Midge and these people.
Speaker 4: And you Bob Geldof.
Speaker 5: He was the kind of guy that would come backstage
Speaker 5: and tell you were shite, you know. After he could
Speaker 5: always be first in the dressing room when he came
Speaker 5: off and be with phill Line from Tinderzy and drink
Speaker 5: all your beer and everything. But he was mouth eat dub,
Speaker 5: you know, and he's a good fellow. But it was
Speaker 5: it was just different churches. That's the only way I
Speaker 5: can describe it. We weren't in the eighties and England.
Speaker 5: We were going at the time that that was all happening.
Speaker 5: We were playing to like ten thousand people, you know,
Speaker 5: places in Chicago and things like that. We were playing
Speaker 5: to big audiences at that time because of every day
Speaker 5: I write the book built everybody that has sort of
Speaker 5: vaguely heard of us in the late seventies and then
Speaker 5: woke up to our existence. The broader audience that didn't
Speaker 5: follow us from day one. That one little minor hit
Speaker 5: and we've got on like what was it, solid gold,
Speaker 5: that kind of thing. That's the only time we were
Speaker 5: ever on mainstream kind of music television other than SNL,
Speaker 5: and at that time we began the Card of Run
Speaker 5: from about eighty two onwards of being appearing on late
Speaker 5: night television, and that was nearly all on the Lessonans Show.
Speaker 5: I did the Tonight Show once what with Carson or
Speaker 5: it was during the Carson era, but it was John
Speaker 5: Rivers and then I did you know Jay a couple
Speaker 5: of times, but twice or three times when you were
Speaker 5: compared with with stuff in New York, nothing so much,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess I just I was in America during
Speaker 2: the eighties, so I guess I had a different experience.
Speaker 5: Totally different timelines. And it's something you come to terms with,
Speaker 5: and it's like it's something that's pointed out when I
Speaker 5: do a record like this one, where it sort of
Speaker 5: seems to have caught people's noses in a few different places.
Speaker 5: And I've been doing interviews with all sorts of European countries.
Speaker 5: They all have a different song.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's countries in the world where the only
Speaker 4: song they'd ever mine is She because it was in
Speaker 4: a big movie. But in Holland it's I Want You,
Speaker 4: so that would have never gotten the radio in America.
Speaker 4: It's too long. You know, I was.
Speaker 2: Rocking Good Bride, Cruel World, Windows Down, You're the only one,
Speaker 2: You're the only one.
Speaker 5: But then you know, I'm not making it sound like
Speaker 5: a sad story, but that's really what it is. And
Speaker 5: it was like these big you know, sorts of flagwave
Speaker 5: and numbers with all this stuff in the mid eighties,
Speaker 5: I mean, you should have the people that get the
Speaker 5: money over the counter. That's what you needed to do,
Speaker 5: was raise the money. So get all the people they
Speaker 5: recognize on the pop magazine last week, not somebody from
Speaker 5: five years before.
Speaker 2: You know, Screw everybody who doesn't like Goodbye Cruel World.
Speaker 2: I hate you. You're wrong, you suck. You have no
Speaker 2: idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 4: My favorite one is I Didn't right. My favorite one
Speaker 4: is I Want to Be Loved. Yeah, that's a good record.
Speaker 2: So teacher's addition is that the Namer's Edition.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's on high it's a Willie Metro production. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Did you feel abandoned at that point by your fan.
Speaker 4: Base or by no?
Speaker 5: No, I mean I think those people that that we,
Speaker 5: you know, the band wasn't really you know, we went
Speaker 5: we went in to make that first record with Clive Langer,
Speaker 5: and you know, out of that there are two really
Speaker 5: great records, you know that have nothing to do with
Speaker 5: the main thrust of those records. That are Pills and Soap,
Speaker 5: which was recorded before it, which I produced, and Shipbuilding,
Speaker 5: which Clive and I wrote for Robert Wyatt, but I
Speaker 5: wanted it more people in the world to hear it,
Speaker 5: and Robert's version didn't seem to travel outside of England,
Speaker 5: so we cut it and we got Chet Baker and
Speaker 5: that was amazing.
Speaker 4: You know. The rest of it was, you know, a
Speaker 4: really you know, sort of determined.
Speaker 5: Mission on Clive's part to make a hit record, you know,
Speaker 5: I mean, and when you chase a hit record like that,
Speaker 5: and maybe that's why I don't.
Speaker 2: Hit single or hit record well both, because you end
Speaker 2: up when you're trying to have a hit single, you
Speaker 2: end up screwing up the album as a whole.
Speaker 4: I guess every day.
Speaker 5: Right, The book wasn't terribly representative of the rest of
Speaker 5: the record, which was mostly Hauned driven, but it wasn't
Speaker 5: he had so many hits at that time. Clive and
Speaker 5: Element Stanley with Madness, really great records of Madness, and
Speaker 5: there's I can't find any fault with either of those
Speaker 5: records from anything they did. I think it's all in
Speaker 5: the in the in the lack of cohesion and the
Speaker 5: band by the second record, because we were falling apart,
Speaker 5: you know, we were all playing singing a different tune.
Speaker 2: Right, But if you look at those two records and
Speaker 2: hold on, I'm making a cass because the thing that
Speaker 2: ultimately holds them together is what ultimately holds a lot
Speaker 2: of songs and music and albums together. Despite all the
Speaker 2: pop production, you still included an acoustic guitar on a
Speaker 2: lot of those songs, which is what connects the listener
Speaker 2: directly to the song, despite the production, the element within her.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a good song, charm School.
Speaker 4: That's two songs going on at the same time. That's
Speaker 4: the one I wrote and the one we're playing. You know.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's like, but I think they're both attractive,
Speaker 5: but they're not always cohesive when I listen to them. Now,
Speaker 5: you could play it the acoustic guitar way and it
Speaker 5: would be a different It's like a but they're guitar,
Speaker 5: I know, but it's still that it's fighting the base
Speaker 5: and keep.
Speaker 2: Right right, well, you know, live and learn right.
Speaker 4: I know. That's why you get to make a second
Speaker 4: another record.
Speaker 2: But you didn't name it Goodbye crul World, thinking this
Speaker 2: is the end. Oh yeah you did.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah. I was definitely out at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I was out.
Speaker 2: That by the time you titled the album you felt
Speaker 2: you were already I was.
Speaker 4: I didn't even want the record to come out.
Speaker 5: It's like I went on the road as solo before
Speaker 5: the record even came out. I already knew it was
Speaker 5: it was a dud, but we were already committed to
Speaker 5: the release by then.
Speaker 2: So but there were hits, only Flaming Town here a
Speaker 2: little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Darrell's hang On it was Yeah, that was fun.
Speaker 4: That was that. That video was fun to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, win a date?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, Well, you know, if you're in a video
Speaker 4: with him, it's pretty hard. You know, like he's so handsome,
Speaker 4: you know, it's like he's You're not gonna look that
Speaker 4: great standing next to Daryl.
Speaker 2: You know, you want to go watch and play drums.
Speaker 4: I gotta go. I'm gonna get up. And what time
Speaker 4: is it? I don't know, about one o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 2: Punch the clock, bro, is it?
Speaker 4: I better go home?
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let me do a fancy ending. Yeah,
Speaker 2: QLs listeners, this has been an incredible night. I'm sure
Speaker 2: we'll make two episodes out of this. Thank you to
Speaker 2: Questlove wherever you.
Speaker 4: Are, a couple of questions down on the mooove now,
Speaker 4: okay to be thank you for your time and thank
Speaker 4: you for your music.
Speaker 2: Thank you for everything.
Speaker 4: Thank you for fun. I didn't I didn't I knew
Speaker 4: we'd have fun doing this, but this has been we'll.
Speaker 2: Do it again. Yeah, you two can talk for twenty hours,
Speaker 2: so we'll set up very funny, set up a marathon
Speaker 2: talkathon for you guys. But thank you for including me
Speaker 2: in your catalog. And you know this is great.
Speaker 4: You know there's almost another thing down the road. That's
Speaker 4: the way to look at it.
Speaker 2: Well, let's come in here and do uh yeah, I
Speaker 2: love this Roe mutually. You've never done a full record
Speaker 2: here right, No, no.
Speaker 5: We did a little bit of the work on look
Speaker 5: now and here right, a couple of things, and.
Speaker 4: We've got to get electric in here now I'll be yeah,
Speaker 4: we've never done that.
Speaker 2: All right, all right man, thank you, Elvis, thank you,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 4: That's fucking wild. It's probably two o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 4: Love it. We'll work on the fact that that's a
Speaker 4: fade out. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, we have sad news.
Speaker 4: We've been fighting a long legal battle. End we've lost
Speaker 4: and we're going to be taken over. Oh whoa, this
Speaker 4: is my radio station. Now, someone at the door let
Speaker 4: me now, we're gonna have twenty four hours to Elvis
Speaker 4: Costello absute format. The end, I mean, that's the weirdest
Speaker 4: thing I've ever done. The end. I mean that's the
Speaker 4: weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I mean that's
Speaker 4: the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I mean
Speaker 4: that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I
Speaker 4: mean that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end.
Speaker 4: I mean that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end.
Speaker 4: I mean that's the weirdest thing I've ever done.
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