QLS Classic: Elvis Costello Part 2

Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.

It's okay to meet your heroes, It's okay to dream, It's ok to let life float you to where you should be. In twenty twenty one, Quest Love asked me to do a one on one interview with Elvis Costello at electric Lyad Studios for Questlove Supreme. At first I said no, just kidding. I jumped at the opportunity. In this part too, you'll hear Elvis and I dissect the contents of wise up Ghost and go down rabbit holes

All right, put us all one, Uh huh, Sugar Steve, And I'm a legend in my whole time, Sugar Steve, just a legend that it is all fine.

I've been doing a lot of interviews, have you It's getting.

Sick of it, not this one, This is even.

I had no sooner resolve to stop recording and just play shows than I found myself in a three way conversation with engineer and mixer Stephen Mandel and Questlove making Wise up Ghost. These began as new bulletins collaged out of my old papers, but ended up in the company of brand new verses, all jammed together. Quest speets gave the words different air to breathe and allowed me to place fresh emphasis. The words of Bedlin became the of the dead pan groove of wake Me Up, with a

Beautiful orchestrations that pulled all these threads together.

Each mixed of Stephen Mandel sent me got closer to the final picture. A beat dropped out here, sunds distorted out of all recognition. There, voices sent out into dub orbit, new ideas appearing where others vanished. The only precedent for this kind of recording in my catalog had been Pills and Soap, just some verses chanted over a spare beat

For when I was Cruel number two.

But can you hear me, took a two bar bass figure from radio silence and told the same story on a six minute canvas. I almost persuaded Graham Nash and

Have to wait out the imminent threat.

How could any father not fear the world his sons will Inherit could her muster any hope at all? While the record does close with the song, if I could believe Mandel had looped my own string orchestrations for can You Be True? From North and I wrote the lyrical and vocal arrangement that wise Up Ghost over it. Stephen and Questlot then went to work scoring it as if it were a movie, with the horns that were doubling Kirk's guitar eventually obliterating the string loop, and questioned frank

For that Brooklyn Bowl show, Quest only.

Called a handful of songs from the record and let the roots take possession of some of my numbers, from Spooky Girlfriend to a nine minute Captain kerk guitar Wigout and I Want You. In the summer of twenty fourteen, Steve Naive, Dennis crouched, Kareem Riggins and I played Wise Up Ghost with the La Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. When Kareem kicked into a take on his friend Quest's groove at the half way point of the song, I felt as if we might end up hovering above the

The album unavoidably.

Contemplated the unthinkable, the despair at every news bulletin. But the most surprising moment came not in a cupboard contemplating oblivion, but sitting at my own kitchen table thinking about my father. It was close to midnight when a repetitive sequence of unusually harmonized music that Quest and keyboardist Ray Angry had laid down arrived over the wire.

It was clearly a ballad.

We had got into this thing without any rules or consultation. Little more than a word or two had passed between Question and me. While the dialogue had been musical, Mandell had been tireless in making his own editorial decisions and trying to satisfy those that we had independently suggested or even demanded. We had never discussed any of the lyrical content, but it had turned out to consist mostly of outward looking commentary. I suppose we had just come to trust

It did no good to push those images down if they arrived unbidden.

So I sat at the kitchen table, singing into the recording function of my computer. The breath is slow and shallow too. The sky is bright Venetian blue. The cardboard sun is all ablaze. The air is painted Clifford brown caressing. Yesterday I wrote and sang down the entire song in one pass, mixed it down as such, and hit send before I had time to take it back. The next day, I went to NBC to re record the vocal properly. When I walked in, quest was adamant that was the vocal.

Like when I saw Black Messiah and it opens with rass.

That's what I wanted to ask you about get on the make there.

Nobody's put found a weight of context to put that that piece of music. Anything that's so so powerful is that you know that nobody's put that in the context of a movie before that.

I ever remember which piece of music the Russ and Roland Kirk inflated to you, it's the opening music of that movie.

Wow, how do you kind of go, well, that's kind of right, you know, that's that's kind of what I thought.

That's what that music feels like to me.

G'angela's influences are are vast. So yeah, like I was saying, wise up Ghosts ends up becoming the ultimate flip album, you know, flipping the music, flipping the lyrics, sampling from the sampling from that, well, sampling.

From our own brief kind of live library. So that's ingenious in itself. And then you know, in myself, like starting off with two ideas. One one is to write completely new words and others to kind of do a kind of sort of cut up collage of ideas that were related. Part of it is I thought of it being in the tradition of bulletins, you know, lyrics, the lyrical side of it.

There's not many songs in the in the group that we recorded that are to do.

With matters of the heart. They're mostly outward looking. So it seemed to me that then it gave me the opportunity to think about things i'd seen or things i'd written because of the way I fell about something I saw in the world, or something happened and you'd write something and then that thing would happen again.

Like you know, history repeating history repeating.

Yourself, or war breaks out and then another war that seems to be the same kind of mistake. So then you stated again, but you have the other this that came from another time, and they kind of talked to one another a little bit. Now, some people that were skeptical about the whole endeavor just thought, well, maybe you couldn't be bothered to write new words.

But to me, you did.

You hear oh, I wrote a lot of new words. But but even those ones that some of those became to me like the version of that lyric because I got a chance to lay it down a different against a different foundation, you know. I mean, if you recall the way we began the recording was with a handful of the beats that the Quest had put down, and I and were we in Were we in Vancouver?

Well, yeah, we didn't want The very first thing was pills and soap.

Cutting up pills and soap. Yeah, that was that.

But then when it came to the newly recorded the things that weren't sampled from the catalog, and it weren't sampled from this this bed of of loops that you created from the live performances. Then it was like Quests laying down those beats and me improvising song structure over them, so I was playing like electric piano and bass. There's quite a lot of bass in the original draft where I'm playing the bass sort of so that there's a

I don't know, some chords on the piano not very much full. So why is it?

Because it's just really the sample from the from the sample is really giving the tonality.

So the sample is from North.

Yeah, it's the opening of the It's what Vince mean Doza said to me when he conducted it when I did it live, the same song, Can He be True? Live? He said, I'm going to take your human records away from you because he thought it was so sort of Germanic. Well, I was. I had written that opening, like you know, it was very that's a lot of drama.

And I heard just right for that, and I heard hip hop in that, you know, in that intro, and that's why.

I hear that a lot.

I hear a lot of Triikowskian in the synth and sometimes real string, you know, the synth strings that that that became like I hear it a lot. I hear a lot of Triikowski and a lot of borrowed in. I don't know where it's conscious. So whether it's just the tendency to be in a minor so I hear a lot of classical things. I don't know whether people

So that was that was a pretty free piece, and it built as you record.

You built it really all of those layers, when you know, with Kirk playing those sustained guitars and everything.

That was really Are you a Queen fan?

No?

You don't like any prog rock? I put them in pro Do you like Jeff Toll?

No, I really don't like Jeff.

How about yes, they're the best at it all right, Well if you don't like, yes.

Like I really don't like prog rock, but I did, and I sort of hear, I suppose it is King Crimson prog rock? Yes, yeah, But I mean I never listened to any of their records, but I was aware of one record of theirs which I liked, which was a later one called Red that had Adrian Bello on it, and because I liked him because he played with Bowie and and of course Fripp played with Bowrie as well, So I liked that kind of thing when I could

I guess someone's still a little surprised because in my opinion, prog rock is there's a lot of classical influence and there's a lot of English folk.

Oh yeah, and that jaffre Tell for sure. But there were groups i'd like that did that better, who were different, like Febal Convention and you know, Richard Thompson is a guitar player I really love who came out of that group, But not so much the Emson like em Palmer kind of stuff or.

The you just like shorter songs.

I just like shorter songs, and I just like, you know, I like Jack McDuff. I don't really need to hear Kenith Emerson. You know, he's great. I'm sure, but it's not really my thing. And you know what, I bet Keith Emerson loves Jack McDuff as well.

You know, jazz is a lot more blues and less classical. Prog rock has all that classical in.

Yeah, I mean, I love classical music, but I like actual classical music, and I like Leonard Bernstein. But you see, to me, like West Side Story Score, the original West Side Stories Score, you don't. It didn't make it cooler to hear it played on the organ, but maybe somebody had.

But I think it's already wild. I think that original versions wilder.

So as you were sampling your own lyrics and ready new lyrics on Wise Up Ghost, we were busy doing our version of sampling, actual sampling, including come in the Meantimes with the backing sample from a Glasshouse, Glasshouse.

Victius Holland does a Holland label after Motown.

Yeah, so that beat that is come in the meantime, is meaning the sample and the drums, yeah plays on it. That was five years old or something like that. He had made that five years prior to Whup Ghost and it just always was on the drive. He never used it for anything, and I was like, that's something.

But you see, that's that's no different to me than if we had gone into the deepest kind of library of of like we were talking before about the you know, the sort of kitchier versions of covers of records, and then you might find some quirk to the way that drum drum sounded or something about or hearing even that.

But it was just badass.

Yeah, it's badass, and that's all that matters when you're looking for that, you know. So it didn't really matter to me what the source was, whether it was a new beat that that that Crest had laid down, or whether you were taking it something that you would n't because I mean I didn't see I mean, I was taking lyrics from there are some lyrics from from the River Reverse, which you know, was only four years old.

To hip to early hip hop. Pills and Soap was mine.

So the Clash did it first that I'd say I was using like more authentic tools. I mean, I really only had a piano and a drum machine. I didn't have a band playing on it. There's nobody else. It's just it's just me and Steve. You know, it's me Stephen Alndrum, you know.

And not only were we sampling sampling, but we were flipping melodies and horn lines from your past into changing them into guitar lines and horn It's.

An orchestrated record in that sense and a way.

And it's orchestrated and and you know that there's some of the way that it sounds is because of the way the processing in the mixing as well and the changing of texture of things.

Things getting much.

Smaller than they actually would be if they were played in the room together, Like guitar sounds squeeze right down. This is kind of like coming out of balance, you know, drums, particular drum beats, you know, one beat in a phrase being kind of process in some way one you know.

Well, yes, you came to me at a very strange time in my life, as they say.

But all of this, all of this is attractive to me because it's sort of like literally getting It's not so much like trying to the mistake it seemed to me from the get go with using machines is to get the machines to try and imitate.

Real musicians. I want the other way around. I want musicians that imitate machines.

Well that's exactly what the roots did you know.

That's always seemed to be the best thing.

Yeah, it never seemed to me to make sense. When when I was about thirteen or fourteen, a man tried to sell my father a melotron. He took him into this This guy lived in a house next to the church where he used to go to me, and he took us into.

The front room and he had this melotron in his front room.

And he put it on and he tried to persuade my father it was going to put all the musicians in the band out of work, you know, and he's still playing in the dance band, and he said, this will replace them, because there was absolutely no way.

You couldn't play with any feel.

On a melotron because they hadn't yet got the action so that you could really play with any kind of

Kind of harmony.

You just would never play them. He would never voice him like that. In the real orchestra. You wouldn't have a flute section play like that. So, I mean, that's unique to that instrument, and that's what that instruments ended up being. If you hear one on a radio head record or you hear one on any cud of record, it's the sound of that instrument's quirks, right, just like the Hammond organ was never really going to replace a

Then you know, I grew up on your music in the way that that music was made. In fact, when I was coming up as an engineer here, we were still using tape. This was in the mid nineties, and I got to witness the turn from analog to digital firsthand, and I became a very digital oriented working in hip hop. It's a very digital for the most.

Facility of it as well.

It's very good and the speed with which you can edit is like tape phasing and things. I remember being in the time of all the Sis is Beauty their last racket any with the attractions, like some of the tracks had had loops. It was the first time I ever persuaded the band to play with a loop since green shirt. Pete would never do it. He thought it was like cheating. I said, no, this is what I want. I want the relationship of drums made small against the loop.

That's big, or something quantized or something unquantized.

Yeah, but I want this tension. And I'd written this song called Little Atoms, which was really just a folk song. You could play it on acoustic guitar, sound perfectly nice. But the minute that you did this thing, it had a tension between this repetitive loop that we constructed. Jeff Emeric, of course, is from an analogue ear or his Abbey Road train, you know who was there when the Beatles kind of introg used these things that they've absorbed from

But you can still experiment with that stuff. Of course, you can create new stuff.

But you know, you know that the kind of edits that were possible to do it with tape if you yet, if you were skilled at it, though, you could do it really impossible edits, but.

The sheer number of edits like on Wise Up Ghost would.

Never be able to do it.

No, you would never The tape would never hold together.

No, not every song on Wise Up Ghost is created that way.

Though.

There were a couple of sessions of live sessions right with Pino Paladin.

Right at the end.

I mean, that's the weirdest thing I've ever done, is I played that record is Quest.

It's live, isn't it? The back in two songs are live.

Sugar Want Work is interesting because it's a rhythmic song and the band is Quest very angry, and Pino and me playing bass at the same time. So I'm playing up with the octave and playing really a six string guitar part against Pino's bass, So I'm playing just figures, and you know, like guitar figures and he's doing all the bass playing.

There's a weird choice and instruments.

But I had that k that sounds like, you know, sounds like a six string six string guitar, that's what it sounds like. A barattar guitar doesn't really have the residence of a true bass, right.

But that was a good track to cut.

I liked that one, and if I could believe which was you know, it was obvious, an obvious ending song. If it was going to be a kind of something that was more melodic after all of this recitative stuff. What would you call the vocal I don't even know there's a word for the thing I'm doing vocally on Wise Up ghost I mean.

It's on the song wise declamatory.

Restive of which I can never say, which they call when you speak in opera, you know, sprechstimo, as the Germans call it. You know, it's a version of rhythmic talking. But it's not versifying in the hip hop sense. It's but it's not singing either.

Most of the time.

There's not a lot of pitch involved in many.

Of the songs in Wise Up Ghosts.

There's not a lot of melodic information that where the singing comes in is in the background vocals, which are mostly falsetto you know. So it's again that's all inherited from my teenage memory of like not so much like American records as Jamaican records. It's that soft vocal group singing up there, you know, like that's soft, very soft, not like anything like really virtuosic. It's just the soft three part group thing that you know that but a lot of a lot of rock bands imitated, like think

Sound those aren't girls, No, it's just guys singing like that. Yeah, I thought it was.

Are's some great there's a great there's some great background singers that but on the original record though.

It's guys speaking of great singers and still were on wise up Ghost Lamarasol and Diane Birch and Brent Fisher contributing strings.

Well, let's go back.

Marisol was a really great thing because I knew were already and that was Sebastian who's ended up being like really a great pal and that cohort on these last four records and EPs in between those and beyond those.

You guys been tearing it up for.

He is really you know, but he comes out of Miami, so he has done a lot of work, and.

He has that eighteen Latin Grammys, Yeah.

Producer of the Year twice, So I mean he's really got the you know it and it goes right across the whole you know, range of everything that's in Latin music. I mean, there's at least as much variety in Southern Hemisphere music as there is Northern Hemisphere music, maybe more, you know, justin making Spanish model, that's become apparent to me all the more because some of those things I knew Marisolo had sung with in the studio before and had done.

A track with her, and she had sung live with us.

So when I wanted to put that verse in Spanish and sincamnutas, which was again goes back to the very first high fidelity, it's that same hit, isn't it isn't that? Isn't that what we're using there is the high fidelity.

Groove for Sinko. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we're back in that and now we've got it really to sound like Stations stage.

I always forget what you forget, which one.

You don't even remember you're not even covering your own tracks.

But I think that that one there, You know, it really was funny how it came. I said, we realized this attempt to imitate Barwie's kind of you know, he had a funk mat basically for a lot of the seventies, he had a funk rhythm section, killer rhythm section, And so when we were trying to play like that in seventy nine, we didn't really know how to get there, not so much rhythmic textually with the other instruments that you had to have if you were going to play

It needs to be in Argentine Spanish.

So Sebastian and another friend of mine his family also left Argentina in those years, wrote the adaptation for marisolt to sing Barsola is Mexican Americans, so she would know the different words that are in Argentine Spanish.

Hence its sincamental was convose, not sincamon contu.

Couldn't we get a real Argentinian I mean, was it not in the budget?

Not at that time. That would came later. That that's you know, that's one of my favorites, and it's also one of the really beautiful songs.

I mean, do you remember I thought we were done, I thought the record was done. I thought, you know, there's a mix of this record that is barer than the final one. And then you told me that Quest was saying, now we're going to get bread to do that, and I like from where, like how we gonna well it is, how are we going to pay for that?

It was the first thing. Yeah, but that was a genius.

Call and that call alone transformed the cohesion of it. As each track would have worked if we had never thought of put.

The strings on.

Each track would have been interesting enough because of the relationship between what's going on in the rhythm and the and the accumulated instrumental parts of the root, the members of the roots added and what I was doing with the combination of new texts and you know, these collages of lyrics bring a new meaning against this other rhythmic flow.

What was interesting to me was the songs that Quest chose to put strings on. It was the ones I wouldn't I wouldn't have chosen, you know. It was like these ones that I thought were fused.

Was refused to be said, was it was? But it's but it but you can't I caught it without it, right. I think the the and the things like having the introduction to sugar won't work integrated that song, which was lighter, lighter lyrically than some of the others into the body of these kind of much more grievous sounding lyrics.

You know.

So my joint is grenade. Okay, of all the of all the songs, I know you love Sinco, I know you love Meantimes and other songs. For me, what I was going for was grenade. Like we're talking about the flip, I was trying to essentially flip one mogain from Voodoo song on Voodoo that has a similar vibe, a similar amount of space and within the song, you know air.

So I think everything that reference it doesn't have to be said out loud. One of the strengths of it.

People have asked me about the record, and I said, I think we you know that one of the reasons that it was that it ended up being the record. It is whatever people expected it to be, or whatever they thought when they even heard about it.

My name and the roots in one sentence.

Would just put a question mark over some people's heads, whatever they thought it was. I think the strength of the record is that we didn't do a lot of theorizing about what it was going to be. And sometimes when an idea like you just expressed there, you didn't tell me that at the time, so I couldn't have reacted in a way that adjusted my performance to take

Makes no difference who's.

Playing in the studio, which musicians are playing, whether it's a collaborative record or essentially one that I'm driving the

I don't know if you remember me falling to the floor in that studio in Vancouver, A shout out to Cruise Studio. It's a great little studio out there. We made this beat out of some of the drums that Quest sent, and you added keyboards and bass, and you went in the vocal booth and you sang over it in a way that I was like, I got this

Song was it?

Do you think that we were doing that, that you had that strong fail and it was it one particular song what.

That nobody cared no, no, but the one that you said we were in crew, which one was the one that grenade grenade? You felt that grenade that was to me, that's.

The nobody knows that take the centerpiece.

That's a set apiece for you.

Yeah, I guess, I guess, you know, we would have different ones.

I think that that in.

Some ways, there's so many different things that were hit on this.

I can see grenade. I remember thinking late on.

It's got the It's hard part from Doom's Day.

Yeah, and I think that that also, you know, because it was a song that was not very widely heard originally, and again we were re interpreting that very soon after its original release because it's only five years earlier. It's from the delivery Man sessions, but it wasn't on the album, so that's why you hadn't heard it.

I have that EP.

But yeah, yeah, but it was a fairly you know, it was elusive song and I just had all the more feeling that that thing that that mixed between the girl dancing around the pole and the and the woman walking through the market with the with the you know, the hidden divine that juxtaposician was was becoming more that was becoming more frequent and more in conflict. And that's part of the reason why I say, the part of the lyrical you know, imperative is this kind of just

I mean, we worked very long.

I think we worked as long you and I in the room, worked as long on two songs.

That were not on the finished record. I mean, we worked a lot of time on can You Hear Me?

Which is and of course we had that incredible sort of attempt to get David Crosby to sing on it, you know, because.

Because I had quoted the birds.

In one of the background vocals, and I wanted him to sing in the background group with me.

Yeah, but you got Graham Nash to say yes. Crosby said no, why didn't we just take Graham Nash on his own?

Well, I thought it would have been I just wanted to just perverse, I mean, but it was. It was anyway, that was that was I got to do the parts. Anyway, in the end, I ended up doing the parts. And then we worked on another song that kind of had a which was the one that had the Chelsea from from Loop My New Haunt, Yeah, my New Haunt, which it was a favorite of mine because it was I liked that lyric a lot, and that was an entirely

Over the track, which had the sound of like distortion.

Like yeah, but sometimes it's like when you used to record on you know, eight or four track cassette. You would spend a million years in the studio trying to get the same distortion as the casseet naturally gave you, and you couldn't understand why you couldn't get it to sound as kind of crushed and exciting for everything, fighting for space.

You know.

It's like, really, somebody should have could have come in with a graph and just explained it to you, you know. So that was the same sort of thing. It was a total fluke. And I came to the studio the next day very much the intention of re recording the vocal with proper fidelity, and you played it to Quest and he said, that's it. And that's as much direct intervention as I think that we ever had about any song.

Did you write the words while listening to the beat or did you have those words?

I don't even remember.

I think I think I just started writing, and yeah, probably stream of car.

Yeah, it was really stream.

Because it was like obviously something that I had been ready, I'd been ready to set talk about. Well, he had just passed away recently, fairly fairly well, he passed in twenty eleven, so it was pretty soon, and I'd spent you know, I'd been writing a book, and I'd written a lot, and it was really about my grandfather and my father, both being by musicians before me, and it was a slightly romantic fantasy, and I really probably kept him in the room with me writing it.

You know.

That was the way I dealt with it, and the only song I've ever written about it. I've written several songs about my father, but always transposed into some other character, but not this one, which was literally describing you know, they're giving them these pills and he's now he's leaving, and the coffins is closing the whole bit. You know, he's gone in the grave. That's all in the song. And if you had listened to it, you know.

I remember you told me that you didn't want that on the vinyl edition because you didn't want to hear that song.

I didn't want to hear it every time.

But I didn't I thought that in any way. I thought it was kind of selfish as part of me. Well, it was because it was wasn't. It wasn't a collaborative experience.

Why thought, Why is up? Thought?

With black thought on it, and those shows when he came up and we did you know, ghost Town and we did these other songs from our repertoire adapted and Kirk played like a huge long solo and I Want You, and we did John.

Lennons I found Out and.

All these other songs that sort of all kind of sort of it was like going back to what we started at when we did the appearances on the show, because we were suddenly doing songs for my Reportie and Spooky Girlfriend, which was one of the other records that I made with machines. But I just started out with just a really cheap sample, a really cheap drum machine and a Dan electro and no band, and that was like just before the Impostor started playing together.

So the interesting thing about Puppet and the fact that it's about your dad. Recently, listening to it, I'm like, wait, this is mother from Plastic Goono Band and song of his father. I mean, we were referencing Plastic Ono Band in a couple of different ways on that record, I think, and it came out and then it came out with I got a great mix of that going by the way rehearsal session Dangerous Amusements. There's a podcast now about you. Have you been listening to that at all?

I'm aware that Mark billingh that the crime writer because I did a because I just saw that he wrote something to us and he was doing it, he told us. But I can't listen to stuff about yeah's hard.

But I was listening today and I heard an interesting point by one of the guests. And because you were talking about these headlines on wise up ghosts and these outward looking things about society and so forth, it's almost as if you're Nostradamis predicting things that are going to be happening in society. They were talking about Trump, they were talking about brilliant mistake I did.

I used to make a joke when things seem funnier, you know, when it seemed to all be like a horrible kind of delusion of a different kind that all of this. You know, when people were complaining about songs being played at political rallies, I could say, they could go on forever with my songs waiting.

For the end of the world. You know, so beyond belief. You know, brilliant mistake accidents will happen. We've got a million of them.

You know.

The point is, when I was working for five years on this version of Bud Schulberg's play Facing the Crowd, which was set in the fifties. When there was about hillbilly singer who comes up into prominence and then wants to become a man of political influence.

People said, oh, that's just like the president, you know.

And yeah, but you've got to remember the guy that wrote that story didn't know anything about Richard Nixon, didn't know anything about Ron Reagan. How can you see the few He wasn't Austrodamus. And the truth of it is, they'll always be another monster. I'll have a different face, they'll love a different set of clothes. You know, there's been you look back in history, it just gets repeated.

Great history. So getting back to what happened after we released the record, Jimmy was nice enough to give us two nights on the show Very End of the Know with Jimmy found before we turned over to The Tonight Show. Gave us two nights where we not only played two songs a night as the music guest, but we ended up playing everything from the album over those two nights, and then and.

With the set with the with the string section and every.

String absolutely fleshing out some things that would later be in the Only four concerts. Yeah, that happens. That happened, so I don't know. You went on tour solo after that, But.

It was just as hard to pen down.

I mean it's like it's a I think I would have done it, no problem. I think it was just always so difficult. Everybody's got their world, and you know it wasn't I suppose the greatest news for the impostors. I remember being in Australia after we'd made I think we only had the rough mixes and taking the band out of the there and oh, by the way, I've made a record with the roots. You know, that didn't go down ter really well. That was not quite as

But trip wise been in there now and again.

You know, But those four concerts, that's not what we should be talking about.

Those three of them were great. Brooklyn Ball the first show obviously, the energy there was great. The Cap Theater in Portchester, they were reopening. I don't think they had the sound quite right yet, and it was a little weird. You and the roots were very much separated on the stage.

I don't remember that one being as as electric as the It wasn't. Yeah, I remember the very opening was really great at the Ball. I remember being backstage and Quest laying it down and I'm coming out and I thought, this is the way to do this is now. Now we're into a different thing. Now, we're into kind of performing, not making records. Are into performing. So we've got to involve stagecraft. We've got to have other repertoire. People don't

We all just took it.

Kind of fun to have an album on Blue Note, though.

Yeah, there isn't hardly a label in the universal group that have been and I you know, people say, oh, he started out on Stiff Records.

Yeah. I also made four records.

Of Deutsche Grammarphone, which is which is three more than I made for Stiff. So you never know when you're going to get to do things in music, you know, or what the label and the labels all change around, and they changed I was on Island def Jam, you know, different times. They saw something in the record I was making then and that was where to put it.

You know.

There were those two shows in Brooklyn and Portchester, and then there were two shows in Vegas at the Brooklyn Bawl Grand opening. Yes, there's a Brooklyn ball in Vegas Nashville. And to me that was, like you said, the shows because Tarik was there, Marisol was there, and you guys had played through this set a couple of times, and we had we.

Had we had those other things as well, we had those other numbers down.

Yeah, those shows were really great.

Yeah.

Also in twenty thirteen, you played with the Roots again at a Prince tribute concert. Moonbeam Levels was the song you played.

I just knew that I was going to get put through it, you know, I knew that I knew what I agreed to do it. I'd be given the most obscure like the one that's only that's only known. The print song was only known on a on a cassette that somebody found in a drawer, you know. But it's a great song. It's a great song, it is, and we did it. We did it, didn't we do it a warm up show at the winery.

At the winery, Yeah, that the show is at Carnegie on Yeah.

And then we moved and I remember I got to Carnegieall and I had the I had to conduct the dressing room and it sat on the piece of paper on the on the on the door that had the axe. It said I was gonna start on Prince sharing ad dressing room were supposed to be showing a dresser, which I somehow could not imagine actually happening. And I guess there was some I don't know whether that was just being nice everybody. Was Prince ever going to be there?

No?

But did you ever meet Prince?

I met him just once. I Yeah.

I was introduced to him at an event. My wife had played a piano number. It was the Music Cares tribute to Barbas streissand and Prince was sitting a few tables away.

From us. And when I came.

Back out to my table after dinner played Down with Love, he kind of just looked at me and did a kind of silent movie take. He just did like a little mime of the piano oh okay, and did a little like one of his looks with his eyes where he just went, you know, like he didn't need to say it was like he that was good. You know, he knew he was saying that was He just went like this little mime of the piano and like did a little like double take kind of thing with his eyes.

That's your only experienced meeting.

And then and then when Diana came back to the table, then suddenly we had a couple of visitors came over to compliment her on her performance, and it was Tavis Smiley and doctor Cornell West. And doctor Cornell said, have you ever met Prince? I said no, I said, we're going to meet him now. And he took us over and really there was Prince didn't have any choice but to meet us, and he was very gracious and he complimented Diana, you know, and that was the only time

Is he going to play What's he going to sing? You know? Is he going to sing Don't rain on My Parade, you know?

Or is he going to sing one of the Bible strike sound songs? And in the end, when the lights came up at the very end of the evening.

He was there at the microphone and he was in the musicres recipient for whatever year it was, is Barbos Rise and he introduced him. That was it.

So that was that was truly surreal evening. But I got to say thanks to the doctor for taking us over there, because you know, it's one of those situations if you see somebody across the room, are you going to walk over and run the risk of them being discomforted by you making that overture?

You know.

But when I had a little bit of dealing with his publishing people about trying to quote one of his songs once, as you know, he wasn't always kind of very comfortable with that. I'd quote a pop life on one of my recordings and he wouldn't clear it, and or they wouldn't clear it the lyrics.

Or the music I quoted.

It was incorporated into a song called The Bridge I Burned, which is the last thing I ever cut from Warner Brothers, and I figured he's got it. He wasn't any happier with Warner Brothers than I was by that point, so I.

Was thinking it would have appealed to a sense of humor.

But I guess it didn't feel right, So I played pop life in the mid eighties. Is in the show the first time the spinning wheel was their pop Life was on the wheel. Then I incorporated it, and when I quoted it, it wasn't so comfortable, or somebody who was in charge of publisher wasn't comfortable with the quotation. So I adapted it into a different thing and it never came out in that film.

A couple of very current things, and now I feel like a real journalist. As a current is today's headlines. You signed a new publishing deal with BMG. That's right for your entire catalog. What does that mean exactly?

It means they administer my compositions for the next you know, for the duration of the.

Contract, but you own them and they administer them. Yeah, that's the idea.

Yeah.

I mean there's a big season in people selling their rights, both in publishing and masters right now.

Right, So how does this differ from Masters?

Are the recordings which I also owned except for the for the for the six records I made for Warner Brothers, which they own, and they don't revert, you know, they don't they know they don't come back to the artists that they're in theirs in perpetuity as far as I understand, really, what does it mean? The difference is when you control the composition. Say, if somebody came and wanted to include one of my songs in a movie and they wanted to re record it, they would only have to pay

But you didn't sell your songs like Dylan or Springsteen.

Did because those those calculations are based on very, very much more successful songs than mine.

Those things are not done.

They make a lot of speeches about about how culturally important those artists are, but in reality they have generated tremendous revenue for the people for you know, over years and those established. So if you see as somebody like a Stevie Nicks or something like that, those are monster, multimillion selling records.

I've never I've never had. I've never had a million selling record in my entire career. And you know, in the initial period of release, some of my albums.

Might have I've bought a million records of you.

This is by part not you know, I mean, as I see it, my job, although I've been for more of my career now with a major record label. My relationship with major record corporations is pretty much like that of an independent filmmaker is with a studio. You know, independent filmmakers are not under contract to a studio. They make a production for a studio and then they might take themselves somewhere else and get the finance for a

Because you're a freaking artist and you don't care more about money than you do about I.

Want to get paid. I want to get paid for what I do. But I'm not trying to accrue so much wealth and I can stop working because what would I do with myself?

What would be the point?

I wanted to do this for as long as I can physically do it.

I want to do it now. May not be that much time ahead, Let's be truthful. I mean, I don't know that.

I look at people who are playing in the late seventies eighties and think, wow, there's a few people that are really exceptional that are still doing incredible work when you get up there, and a lot of our really most precious artists in the whole history of recording, when you look at when they passed they were only like three or four years old than I am.

Now. You know, it's quite shocked.

Right now when you look at the people that we really are offer all time, the greatest that are not with us. I mean there's not just the ones that died like at thirty. I'm talking about people that died at seventy three but still have more music than most people would ever make if they live to be one hundred and seventy three.

You know, So, are you in a mindset at this point in your career where like, like you literally just put out four albums in the last three years. I know you're probably conscious of a legacy, but are you content on leaving us more and more gifts for the next hundred years as many gifts as you can? I should say.

I'm not much concerned about legacy, because that's really only something that's probably considered after you're gone. Well, I care, I won't be here. I just think it's like, do the thing that you feel.

Everything that I've done.

That hasn't been what I was known for when I started or what made my name at the start, has caused some kind of horrified reaction when I first did it, and that ranges from what from almost Blue the country record, Native One all the way to wise up Ghost. Some people can't understand it, then penny drops like five years,

This is kind of an Arvi's question, But you look up to a guy like Dylan for continuing to tour and make records at this point.

I mean, I saw Dylan play in.

Philadelphia actually just before Christmas, and it was almostly the best show I've ever seen him give.

I mean, the shows now are the best shows.

It was completely astonishing.

I mean, is the clarity of his vocal is focus on the words his voice and his story his voice as I I've got theories about why it is. I think it's because of the the singing of other people's songs seem to kind of like put him in touch with something that he can do with his voice. Does his voice sound older, Yes, of course, because he's eighty. Does it sound Is it musical?

Yes? If you know anything? Was it ever like?

Was it ever like Andy Williams? Did he ever sound like Andy Williams? Did he ever sound like Eddie Kendricks No? Did he sound like Enrico Caruso?

No?

But he said in you know, I can sing just as good as those people, because in his own way he can. And what he's doing, you can't learn what it is he knows. You can't learn. You can't go where he is. That's like listening to Sonny Rollins or something. You can't go where he is.

He's forgotten more than.

Hell, you know, he has, really has the David Sister said, I've forgotten more than you'll ever.

Know, speaking of Dylan type gigantic music. For years. We did a Johnny Cash remix shortly.

I love that record, do you now? I do? I do? I love that record? You know that record.

I'm happy we did it, and it's pretty darn cool, But I don't think it makes sense in my head.

I don't know Johnny.

I mean, this song makes sense in my head. I love the song, but the way we did it was really, I mean slightly bizarre but fun.

But I mean I think that hey, John was john was a you know, rebellious kind of you know, he didn't have any He wasn't trying to sound like other people.

When he started out.

He had two guys that really couldn't play that they just had feel I mean, they weren't like virtuos and musicians, but they played exactly what he needed. When he had the Tennessee too, you know, it was just like it's not I'm gonna say they couldn't play the course it could play, but they couldn't play like you know, it couldn't play like Ray Brown or Charles Mingus or something. On the double bassist the rhythm down and the guy playing the guitar, Luther Perkins just doing perfect stuff for

But the when did the term Americana appear?

Well, it goes way back, but I mean I think when it started to become like people with waxed mustaches and itchy waistcoats and everything. I think that's about twenty years ago. Isn't there something I don't think that's Americana? You see, I think that it's Johnny Cash music wherever he's recording. That's why I think if Johnny Cash would you know, I mean, I bear in mind I worked with the guy who produced the original record that we remixed.

But that didn't happen.

You know, it was a completely un inexplicable thing given. That's the changing value of companies relating to the founding artists. If you think that everything Johnny Cash did for Columbia that they could let him go, that's inconceivable in the same way as it's inconceivable that they didn't want to keep Miles Davis.

It's about loyalty Columbia comm on.

No, it was just nonsense.

But I mean so I benefited from that in the sense that john recorded two of my songs on his first two records for Mercury after he left, after all those records he made for Columbia, but the record that we remix was on from one of the last sessions that he did, and there was a disconnect obviously between where Johnny could go and the kind of way they made records.

You heard the parts. The musicians sounded like they were asleep.

When they were recording. I mean, it was very, very flat. They're all great musicians, but there was no inspiration to the arrangement.

So all we did was replace a bunch of.

Things and took the song to outer space. In outer space because that's where it belongs.

Yeah, I actually think it it Actually it's like the missing song on song Machine to my ears, it sounds kind of like what would happen to the Good, the Bad and the Queen kind of back Johnny Cash.

Right, let me run through these last couple of things just in case the world blows up. I can get to the end of this list. The Hollywood Bowl in twenty fourteen on my birthday, you were playing with some symphony and Kareem Riggins.

The Crouch that Steve Naive, Yeah, yeah, no, that was that was with the It is actually the it's the La fil or the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and I think it's there filmonic, Yeah, but it's sort of summer La filmonic.

It's not the it's not the full La Filmonic. It's like it's not you know. That's a good orchestra, yeah, and.

Really great conductor.

And we did a whole bunch of I mean, I worked on a I'd learned to how to write that stuff now when I worked in the nineties, when I worked with the Broski Quartet, I you know, because they only talked to one another in written notation. They didn't improvise in that sense. I had to learn to be coherent and be a good partner in our collaboration. I had to learn how to write music down. I had

So and then of course got curious what.

Would happen if I wrote bigger, for more bigger than a string or wrote for champion group, and then gradually for a big band and for a symphony orchestra, and wrote some of those things you mentioned earlier, like wrote ballet music for a company in Italy and another one for the Miami c Ballet. And I learned how to orchestrate to my own satisfaction. It's not, certainly not textbook orchestration.

But orchestration is the same as arranging.

Well, it's the.

Actual right in each individual part, you know, like you would write for the horn section, but it's for the whole orchestra, so you've got to imagine everything, including the percussion parts and everything.

So you're writing.

There's not often time written for an orchestra, but sometimes I'd have the right time. But you're just writing punctuations, you know, and timpanies or snare drums and you know some little thing.

Well, the reason I brought up that specific concert.

Well because we played, We played wise and played it was an extraordinary to play it with Steve, you know, playing the piano introduction and then you know, with the strings and Kareem and Kareem and then Kareem just playing a sort of rendition because Kareem understanding very much what Quest was playing.

On the studio recording the album version of Wyse Up Ghost, there are two Quest loves, Yeah, yeah, one in the left speaker and one in the right hardpand totally different drum takes, playing slightly different things.

Yeah.

I remember when you first played that to me, I thought that was that was the making of it, you know, it was the scale of it.

But I mean Kareem played a pracie of that.

I suppose you would call it like a distillation of all of that. And Dennis, of course, is coming out of like he played on the records I made in Nashville with Timom was really different bluegrass, which records he played on Sycapofore, Andy Sugarcane and National Ransom. He played the bassline that is in stations across that. And he is like he could play in any group, Dennis Crouch. You could put him in a Taylica.

He could.

He could hold his own Kareem.

Yeah, I mean he's got the sort of like emphatic way though he plays. I've never I don't think he plays electric bass. I've never seen him hold an electric basse. He plays, he's a double bass player. But he played in Dinah's band for a while with Kareem, so that rhythm section became Dina's rhythm section for a while, you know, and she had she had an also Stuart Duncan, the fiddle player, along with Mark Rebo.

Different times. It's good to change it, you know.

So yeah, yeah, and so after that American Tune kind of the only bonus track from Wise Up Ghost sort.

Of yeah, and really really kind of the only other song from outside, you know, other than live We only other things since the Squeeze song that we had done to play.

Somebody Else by Paul Simon. American Tune, Everybody. The drums are from your performance with Quest and James of Brilliant Disguise.

That's right, Yeah, that's where.

The drums come from and then the roots played.

There's a lot more on it though. There's some great stuff from ray On there and Mark Yeah, there's really good lock together.

Yeah.

And that's another one of those ones where you know it's singing it and then there's sort of like vocal group stuff that I was doing as well, like vocal group stuff. Yes, I got into that kind of soft falsetto kind of vocal group stuff.

It's like there's stuff like that on Hay clockfaces. Like that kind of music is always it's always somewhere.

When I harmonized myself, it's a different thing because you get you get what happens when it's the same voice in different registers it it you know, it's different than a blend of three different timbres.

It's the same voice, but it's doing.

This sort of sort of chorusing effect and it kind of creates a siren like effect, you know. Sure in mind that, As I said, when we did Imperial Bedroom for the stage with the songs from that record and the other songs that I felt belong with it, which some before, some after, a lot of those songs were ones that had vocal group arrangements and.

It led to look now, which.

You never played the song Imperial Bedroom.

No, I never did.

That's not a great song, but the but it was written after the album, so it didn't feel like part of the album to me. But when we did those arrangements, there was four voices on stage, and you see there was at least four voices on the Imperial Bedroom record. Sometimes it would be much more than that. I'd be tracking and tracking, so you know, having the four parts covered at least between Kitten and Brianna and David Farraka.

Well, but you were able to do that stuff in the studio.

In the studio, I love doing it, but that would sometimes be the difference to him were a song became a big part of the show, and that's a big part because when you get it and do it on stage, you'd really miss those vocal parts.

You know.

One last thing, the final thing I could remember is you were nice enough to record one of my songs in this very room as well, right in this space, wishing we could as yet unreleased.

Unbelievable that that is unreleased. I've listened to it again.

The other day, not just because we were going to be here, but I just happened to play it. Both versions are beautiful, but I mean the band version is particularly I mean they're both great. I don't know which I like better. It depends on which day I play them on. It's like asking me about that five hundred songs list, you know. Yeah, No, it's a really beautiful

I always thought it should have been in a movie.

Yeah, well, hopefully this year, 't's see that come out.

Yeah.

You and I have known each other for at least twelve years now, and I've asked you a lot of questions like who the fuck is Joe Borderhouse and what was going on in that house in.

Bat at all?

But I think overall, how do you continue to stay properly inspired or inspired enough to do another great album like The Boy named If with a book and the artwork and everything else where. It's like, you know, you've done so many records, You've been added for so long, and there are so many other things that inspire you besides music.

Well, I mean the other things that you get to do, particularly like daft things like you know, walking on in a film, like wearing glasses and a hat like I might be wearing. That's kind of a bit of fun to do one day, but it's only one day and then people see it and they think that's you might be your career. But playing writing songs is what I've been doing since I was I mean it's fifty years and writing songs around that time. I was writing songs

Now? It's not.

You know that the opportunities have all come along and I didn't go to college. I left school at seventeen, so I feel as if I got that education that I might have got in other ways from traveling, from listening, and of course from the collaborative experiences, including with the original band and this band, and including growing up to some degree or sharing a lot of your life with two guys that are in the current band. Steve though I've barely barely not a boy.

You know, he was eighteen when he joined the Attractions. He's sixty two now.

So you've seen things happen in all our lives, you know, getting married, get divorced, children born, grandchildren born, even those are things that have an impact and feed into the writing of songs.

So what else are you doing but living?

I mean, you're living if you're trying to do it to just become You know why when I get asked, as you will do as you're traveling, you know, my son of the daughter wants to be in music, what would you say to them, I'd say, do you want to be in it for music or do you want to be famous? Because certainly, if you want to be famous, there's easier ways to do that. You could become a bank robber or a venture capitalist or something, or bitcoin entrepreneur.

So you just look at it as a job.

It's a job.

Keep writing and keep it.

It's a job. But it's got it.

But in order to make it alive, like every show you go into, you've got to think why he is singing that song, particularly the older ones.

You better have a reason for singing it.

Because if you don't have a reason for singing it, like you've got something that you feel about it, still, you better leave it alone because otherwise you just they're going to applaud the first date bars, but they're not going to applaud the last date bars because people can see that or hear it at the centre. Everything else is just luck, isn't it? That what you comes to you And the collaborations are so sort of mind begging

It wasn't good enough. You know, he didn't dictate.

So all of that is why there's still another one, hopefully. I don't know whether there's another one. I make everyone as if it's the last one.

I think it's.

Since we've been able to make records song it's why some of the records classically speaking, are too long. Some of the records have sixteen songs on him or something like that, because I just think I better record these. They're going to find me out in a minute, stop me from doing this.

Right. Well, you have had this thing from the very beginning of recording a lot of songs and putting out almost everything that you can in one way or another.

We grew up with the idea of singles not necessarily being tracks off albums. Yeah, they you know, we that the sixties there were a lot of records that just you know, they might have you might be just singles. Artists they never made albums, or the Beatles had a lot of songs that weren't on albums. They were put on the albums in America, So the idea that a song just existed as a single was really made. It

Yeah, I'll never truly understand why Strawberry Fields and Penny Lean is that Sergeant peppernink.

They seem to be long, but the record album would be better with them on.

It would just be longer.

You know, those two songs were supposed to be heard that they were either side of a seven inch.

How do you have the guts to stand up on stage at the White House in front of Paul McCartney and Obama and built out Penny Lean a performance that's going to continue to get all kinds of crazy accolades. Also thanks to the trumpeterer.

Oh, the marine trumpet. Yeah, I played that high trumpetar was incredible. I mean, you know, that's very tricky, that's out of the register of that instrument. But he's you know, you do a lot of things one off things TV. That's one of the joyful things I think, not a sentence because I'm here, but one of the things about our work together. You know, I did a lot of performances on the other channel. You know, as you mentioned

When you got to do one song. Quite often you don't get it right, when it's.

Just from a standing start and you've got to hit it because you're overthinking or trying too hard or something, you know. And the two occasions that are sort of funny enough they Lennon and McCartney. One is Live eight because I had nothing to lose. I was on my own. I was an intermission act. You know what that is, you know, the sick one while they make putting the

I said, I'm sure we'll do.

It, and he said, the bad news is the band can't come.

It's just you because of money or whatever.

No, not money, because they didn't they they didn't think we were successful enough. And he was having me on for sentiment and he needed he needed to have the time to.

Set up like I love the boomtown Rats.

No, but it was between Spander Balley and Nick Kersher or something. You know, they were like couple of bands that were really in the charts. But you know, when you're trying to raise money for people and a family and you don't need some guy that nobody remembers.

Was it really that long of a time period.

Is in England? Yeah, it was like five minutes and they've forgotten you, you know, so, I mean it was like it was it was like, oh, who's that guy? It was like it looks a bit weird.

And then I started singing the song everybody knew and everybody sang along, so it was fine. And the same is true when Paul got their Gershwin thing, because he you know, to be honest, everybody there that day had been very nervous, and the producer said to me, have you got anything to say because nobody's saying anything. And I did have this thing to say because my mother does come from just a mile from Penny Lane, or

I mean, this won't come again. To do this. I'll never be in the White House again. You know. Turned out to be a good choice, actually didn't it really really think about it in a good choice of song and good choice, but I mean a good choice of like I'll just be here this one time.

I've been there once since with my wife and she played the Christmas party. But I mean, it was it was it was really threwnant.

It was looked down and there's Paul and there's the President, and it was it was really incredible, you know.

Okay, Well, I've asked you this question before, and the question is why were you not on? Do they know it's Christmas, you responded, because I was dreadfully unpopular at the time and wasn't called I'd find that story simply not believable.

No it is. It is believable.

It is believab It's the pop success in England was seventy seven to eighty and then this fluke hit with Goodie for the Roses, and by the time we got to the time of eighty five.

We were but you had every day I read the book.

Wasn't a hitt ing, not really just scrape the charts, but it was very much like that guy again, no done things. So you know shipbuilding was a bigger hit than ship Building, but not my version, Robert Ware's version. You know what they needed they needed everybody who was in the charts that week because it was about recognition and those sort of things.

Bro, you would have killed that. You would have killed that.

And also it was a gang of people that wrote together. I didn't know any of those people, you know, It's like I didn't know Midge and these people.

And you Bob Geldof.

He was the kind of guy that would come backstage and tell you were shite, you know. After he could always be first in the dressing room when he came off and be with phill Line from Tinderzy and drink all your beer and everything. But he was mouth eat dub, you know, and he's a good fellow. But it was it was just different churches. That's the only way I can describe it. We weren't in the eighties and England. We were going at the time that that was all happening.

Yeah, I guess I just I was in America during the eighties, so I guess I had a different experience.

Totally different timelines. And it's something you come to terms with, and it's like it's something that's pointed out when I do a record like this one, where it sort of seems to have caught people's noses in a few different places. And I've been doing interviews with all sorts of European countries. They all have a different song.

I mean, there's countries in the world where the only song they'd ever mine is She because it was in a big movie. But in Holland it's I Want You, so that would have never gotten the radio in America. It's too long. You know, I was.

Rocking Good Bride, Cruel World, Windows Down, You're the only one, You're the only one.

But then you know, I'm not making it sound like a sad story, but that's really what it is. And it was like these big you know, sorts of flagwave and numbers with all this stuff in the mid eighties, I mean, you should have the people that get the money over the counter. That's what you needed to do, was raise the money. So get all the people they recognize on the pop magazine last week, not somebody from five years before.

You know, Screw everybody who doesn't like Goodbye Cruel World. I hate you. You're wrong, you suck. You have no idea what you're talking about.

My favorite one is I Didn't right. My favorite one is I Want to Be Loved. Yeah, that's a good record.

So teacher's addition is that the Namer's Edition.

Yeah, it's on high it's a Willie Metro production. Yeah.

Did you feel abandoned at that point by your fan.

Base or by no?

No, I mean I think those people that that we, you know, the band wasn't really you know, we went we went in to make that first record with Clive Langer, and you know, out of that there are two really great records, you know that have nothing to do with

You know. The rest of it was, you know, a really you know, sort of determined.

Mission on Clive's part to make a hit record, you know, I mean, and when you chase a hit record like that, and maybe that's why I don't.

Hit single or hit record well both, because you end up when you're trying to have a hit single, you end up screwing up the album as a whole.

I guess every day.

Right, The book wasn't terribly representative of the rest of the record, which was mostly Hauned driven, but it wasn't he had so many hits at that time. Clive and Element Stanley with Madness, really great records of Madness, and there's I can't find any fault with either of those records from anything they did. I think it's all in the in the in the lack of cohesion and the band by the second record, because we were falling apart, you know, we were all playing singing a different tune.

Right, But if you look at those two records and hold on, I'm making a cass because the thing that ultimately holds them together is what ultimately holds a lot of songs and music and albums together. Despite all the pop production, you still included an acoustic guitar on a lot of those songs, which is what connects the listener directly to the song, despite the production, the element within her. Oh that's a good song, charm School.

That's two songs going on at the same time. That's the one I wrote and the one we're playing. You know.

I mean, it's like, but I think they're both attractive, but they're not always cohesive when I listen to them. Now, you could play it the acoustic guitar way and it would be a different It's like a but they're guitar, I know, but it's still that it's fighting the base and keep.

Right right, well, you know, live and learn right.

I know. That's why you get to make a second another record.

But you didn't name it Goodbye crul World, thinking this is the end. Oh yeah you did.

Oh yeah, yeah. I was definitely out at that point. Yeah, I was out.

That by the time you titled the album you felt you were already I was.

I didn't even want the record to come out.

It's like I went on the road as solo before the record even came out. I already knew it was it was a dud, but we were already committed to the release by then.

So but there were hits, only Flaming Town here a little bit.

Yeah, Darrell's hang On it was Yeah, that was fun. That was that. That video was fun to do.

Yeah, win a date?

Yeah? Yeah, Well, you know, if you're in a video with him, it's pretty hard. You know, like he's so handsome, you know, it's like he's You're not gonna look that great standing next to Daryl.

You know, you want to go watch and play drums.

I gotta go. I'm gonna get up. And what time is it? I don't know, about one o'clock in the morning.

Punch the clock, bro, is it?

I better go home?

All right, Well, let me do a fancy ending. Yeah, QLs listeners, this has been an incredible night. I'm sure we'll make two episodes out of this. Thank you to Questlove wherever you.

Are, a couple of questions down on the mooove now, okay to be thank you for your time and thank you for your music.

Thank you for everything.

Thank you for fun. I didn't I didn't I knew we'd have fun doing this, but this has been we'll.

Do it again. Yeah, you two can talk for twenty hours, so we'll set up very funny, set up a marathon talkathon for you guys. But thank you for including me in your catalog. And you know this is great.

You know there's almost another thing down the road. That's the way to look at it.

Well, let's come in here and do uh yeah, I love this Roe mutually. You've never done a full record here right, No, no.

We did a little bit of the work on look now and here right, a couple of things, and.

We've got to get electric in here now I'll be yeah, we've never done that.

All right, all right man, thank you, Elvis, thank you, thank you.

That's fucking wild. It's probably two o'clock in the morning. Love it. We'll work on the fact that that's a fade out. Yeah.

Well, we have sad news.

We've been fighting a long legal battle. End we've lost and we're going to be taken over. Oh whoa, this is my radio station. Now, someone at the door let me now, we're gonna have twenty four hours to Elvis Costello absute format. The end, I mean, that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I mean that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I mean that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I mean that's the weirdest thing I've ever done. The end. I

One I What's Love Supreme is a reduction of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.