New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Pretty self-explanatory
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And No Coffee Table
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

Amazon has a "deluxe" CD
It’s a moody, 12-track album
1. Walk Us Uptown
2. Sugar Don’t Work
3. Refuse To Be Saved
4. Wake Me Up
5. Tripwire
6. Stick Out Your Tongue
7. Come The Meantimes
8. Grenade
9. Cinco Minutos Con Vos
10. Viceroy’s Row
11. Wise Up Ghost
12. If I Could Believe
13. Can You Hear Me
14. My New Haunt
15. Puppet
the album ends with a glimmer of hope, with an open-ended yearning for faith on “If I Could Believe”
If the album ends with track 12, I hope that means tracks 13-15 are on the "deluxe" CD.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by migdd »

Sheesh I hate when they do that. :lol:

Honestly though, if the ALBUM is intended to end with If I Could Believe then that's the way I want to hear it. Wish there was a simple answer concerning the best way to present the three bonus tracks. I don't really care to have them tacked on the end. I know that I can just turn the CD off after track 12 but something just seems so wrong with that.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by docinwestchester »

A small number of test pressings were distributed as white labels on Record Store Day on the 20th of April but the full release will follow later in the year.

Does anyone actually still believe this? It's mentioned in every article about the album, but remains mysteriously absent from anyone's reality.

It would have leaked by now if it existed.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by krm »

I think it is kind of weird when they are discussing and referring to a record that noone that reads the article has heard.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

http://twitter.com/StevenMandel/status/ ... 3449990146
Steven Mandel wrote:Mastering. Again. Again. Again. Again. #version4 #wiseupghost @ImposterSpeaks @questlove
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by sweetest punch »

Amazon.com has the tracklisting for the deluxe 1 CD version: http://www.amazon.com/Wise-Up-Ghost-Del ... ostello%22

Track Listings
1. Walk Us UPTOWN
2. SUGAR Won't Work
3. REFUSE To Be Saved
4. WAKE Me Up
5. TRIPWIRE
6. Stick Out Your TONGUE
7. Come The MEANTIMES
8. (She Might Be A)GRENADE
9. CINCO Minutos Con Vos
10. VICEROY'S Row
11. Wise Up GHOST
12. If I Could BELIEVE
13. My New HAUNT
14. Can You HEAR Me?
15. The PUPPET Has Cut His Strings

... and the vinyl edition: http://www.amazon.com/Wise-Ghost-Elvis- ... ef=mb_oe_l

Track Listings
1. Walk Us UPTOWN
2. SUGAR Won't Work
3. REFUSE To Be Saved
4. WAKE Me Up
5. TRIPWIRE
6. Stick Out Your TONGUE
7. Come The MEANTIMES
8. (She Might Be A) GRENADE
9. CINCO Minutos Con Vos
10. VICEROY'S Row
11. Wise Up GHOST
12. If I Could BELIEVE
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

The non-deluxe CD is the same as the 12-track vinyl version.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

I guess the fourth time was the charm for the mastering.
Steven Mandel wrote:Oh yeah, by the way, #wiseupghost is done.
http://twitter.com/StevenMandel/status/ ... 0794503169
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by verbal gymnastics »

Here's what we've been waiting for...

Hey Steven, mind if I join you...

http://Instagram.com/p/bj9LYRiviu/
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

verbal gymnastics wrote:http://Instagram.com/p/bj9LYRiviu/
"DK" is Dave Kutch, who has mastered some previous Roots albums.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by verbal gymnastics »

My comment was about joining Steven in listening to it tonight as per his tweet.
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

I meant that as additional information, not as a correction. Can you give me a ride to Steven Mandel's place tonight for the listening party?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by verbal gymnastics »

And No Coffee Table wrote:I meant that as additional information, not as a correction. Can you give me a ride to Steven Mandel's place tonight for the listening party?
I couldn't make it in the end and he didn't call and play it over the phone.
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by docinwestchester »

Pretty funny tweet from Quest:

Questlove Jenkins ‏@questlove 54m
i NEVER EVER thought of that idea....RT: @joey__t you should get Elvis Costello on the show for a performance and to promote the album



Of course, we all know that there will be an Elvis Costello WEEK on Fallon in mid-September, right?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

The 15 news songs are listed on ASCAP's website.

They are all credited as written by Elvis Costello, Steven Mandel, and Ahmir K. Thompson with the exceptions of "If I Could Believe" credited to Costello alone and "The Puppet Has Cut His Strings" credited to Costello, Thompson, and Raymond Sebastian Angry. (Ray Angry was the one who posted this picture online a few days before Questlove spilled the beans about the album in Billboard.)

The titles of the bonus tracks "My New Haunt," "Can You Hear Me," and "The Puppet Has Cut His Strings" are actually shortened to "Haunt," "Hear," and "Puppet" on ASCAP's site.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2013/07/ ... ark_a.html

Elvis Costello Unveils "Stark And Dark" Wise Up Ghost
5:18 PM GMT 12/07/2013

IN A TINY SCREENING ROOM on the basement floor of a boutique Soho London hotel, Elvis Costello is pondering the genius of The Roots' workaholic drummer and ursine frontman, Amir 'Questlove' Thompson. As talk show host Jimmy Fallon's house band, The Roots operate out of what The 58 year-old songwriter refers to as a "tiny little cabin" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York.

"It's about a third of the size of this room," explains Costello, "That's where they do all their work. When I first appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon [in November 2009] The Roots had learned an arrangement that The Attractions had played once in 1978.

"Next time I came in, Quest had been in the studio all night with D'Angelo and was in the process of learning these Mahavishnu Orchestra songs because John McLaughlin was on the show. They do it all operating from this tiny cramped space, so the first thing we have to consider before talking about this album is, Is Questlove a Timelord? Could he be the new Doctor Who?"

Based on the evidence of the first press playback of Elvis Costello & The Roots new collaborative album, Wise Up Ghost, the answer is a resounding "highly probable".

Growing out of jam sessions during rehearsals for Costello's appearances with the Roots on successive Fallon shows, Wise Up Ghost certainly suggests that Questlove has an uncanny ability to time-travel throughout the musical universe.

Begun in secret, as "a gentleman's agreement" without a major label contract, the album – produced by Questlove, Costello, and longtime Roots associate Steven Mandel – combines deep muggy grooves, distorted Isley guitars, Trouble Man strings and JBs drums, initially bringing to mind the kind of socially conscious cinematic soul that soundtracked Questlove's youth: albums such as as Chairman Of The Board's Skin I'm In, The O'Jays Ship Ahoy and Curtis Mayfield's There's No Place Like America Today.

Similarly, Costello's lyrics revisit his own past. "I wanted to incorporate other verses and ideas from old songs as an ongoing dialogue," he explained. "On a number of songs I used that collage method because some of the things that were said in those [old] songs as they were originally written, well I won't say they've come true but to me they have more disturbing significance because they continue to go on, certain actions in our name. Hopefully, when you read the lyric sheet you'll see what I'm talking about."

The sinister Soul Train dance grooves of Stick Out Your Tongue reworks and repurposes the anti-tabloid lyrics from Costello's 1983 release as The Imposter, Pills And Soap, while the verses on the paranoid conspiracy funk of Refuse To Be Saved were originally written around the time of the invasion of Panama but, says Costello, still apply to the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan because "the same mistakes are still being made."

Other highlights include Cinco Minutos Con Vos, an answer record to Costello's 1982 anti-Falklands war lament, Shipbuilding with a stunning vocal turn from La Marisoul, lead singer of LA's la Santa Cecilia, and the downbeat brass-section Curtis soul of the deeply sinister title track.

Questlove has rightly described Wise Up Ghost as "a moody, brooding affair, cathartic rhythms and dissonant lullabies. I went stark and dark on the music [while] Elvis went H.A.M. on some ole Ezra Pound shit"."

What both men have done, is reach back into their pasts to soundtrack our troubled present. In the process they appear to have made a future classic.


Image

Elvis Costello interrogated by sometime MOJO scribe Dorian Lynskey, London, July 11, 2013. One of these men has much smarter shoes.

Costello on...

Wise Up Ghost's Shipbuilding answer song, Cinco Minutos Con Vos.

"The lyric came to mind because people were asking me a lot over the last eighteen months about the song Shipbuilding, which was written against the background of the Falklands War. I never really thought about writing a similar human story as if you were on the other side of that conflict. It's taken thirty years to think of something I felt right about. Rather than write about something I don't know, I simply wanted to write story about a girl who's waiting for her father to arrive home [while] he's being pushed out of an aeroplane. The only reason I raise this song now is because people are [still] being taken away in our name, taken away in aeroplanes, flown off to various places and we don't know what's being done to them. Those used to be things the bad guys did, we could point at them as say, They're the bad guys. We can't do that now. Now we're the bad guys. That was one of the reasons for writing that song and I thought it would be very beautiful to have that girl's distress, in the middle of the song, sung in Spanish, Argentinian Spanish, by La Marisoul."

Touring Wise Up Ghost in the internet age.

"Well first I'll have to sneak The Roots out of the freight elevator at NBC. That proves to be a tricky proposition but we are discussing the prospects of playing. There's the hope that when the record comes out, it generates some interest. To promote the record the week it comes out seems so old-fashioned now. When I first played with the Roots on Jimmy Fallon I would hear about it weeks later because everything goes out on the internet now. I don't think people are gathered around a television set at 12.30 at night anymore. In the main people are hearing about it a day, a week, a month later. Recently I got an email from somebody saying, Did you see Pulp on Jimmy Fallon? Of course, I missed it. This was fairly recently, when they reformed, and they hadn't really been seen in America before and there was this... Shock. Jarvis was like this Elvis Presley, only from Sheffield. It was startling and you would have missed if it wasn't available to you on the internet. That's how it works. You get the word out, and if people want to hear it then you'll eventually hear back. I hear The Roots are big in Switzerland. Maybe we'll go there."

Performing Tramp The Dirt Down in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death. [Following a question from an Independent journalist on whether Thatcher's death had "met your expectations"]

"I didn't feel vindicated. I didn't personally kill her. If you've seen any of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook shows recently we have a big vaudeville wheel which we encourage people to spin and then select the repertoire but on this tour we've made a point of setting it aside at some point and choosing the next song. Now this is linked together by the fact that I lost my father recently to dementia and having seen what misery that was, I really genuinely don't wish that on my worst enemy and that's approximately what I say every night. On the other hand, the things that Tramp The Dirt Down speaks about? Well, I thought when I was younger that we would all have jet-packs, and it would be a great future. It hasn't worked out that way and I do feel that the Thatcherite revolution, a bit like the Glorious Revolution, is one of those things that many people regard as a great cleansing thing, and it's not. And it's still the same bunch of swines in there, so that's why I want to revisit the song, regardless of the offense it might cause. I haven't shot anybody. It's just music. It can't harm you."

Writing a musical with Burt Bacharach.

"You get back from a three-hour show at Blackpool Opera House, it's 12.30 at night and the phone rings and it will be Burt, wanting to know where the lyrics are for the new songs. It's fantastic. We are working on an adaptation of [1998 Costello and Bacharach collaboration] Painted From Memory for the stage. The book is nearly complete, the first act is written, the second is in draft and Burt and I are working on six new songs. It's wonderful to hear his melodies and I'm happy to be the lyricist. Some of the original songs from the album will be adapted into the story. And hopefully it will be ready for the stage next year."

Andrew Male
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

Wow, more interesting by the minute. Can't wait!
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by johnfoyle »

From the same session as the Mojo piece

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 06270.html



Tramp The Dirt Down: Elvis Costello defends decision to continue singing anti-Thatcher songs


Singer: 'I don’t feel vindicated. I didn’t personally kill her'

Adam Sherwin



Friday 12 July 2013

Elvis Costello has defended his decision to perform a song celebrating the death of Baroness Thatcher by arguing that the “same bunch of slimes” are governing Britain once again.

Since Margaret Thatcher’s death in April, the singer has revived Tramp The Dirt Down, a vitriolic attack, first released in 1989, in which he anticipated the then Prime Minister’s death so that he can stamp on her grave.

Costello, 58, performed the controversial song at last month’s Glastonbury Festival, where it was broadcast as part of the BBC’s online coverage.

Thatcher supporters said Costello’s decision to revive the song, which he regularly aired during his recent Spectacular Spinning Songbook UK tour, was insensitive and in poor taste.

But Costello, who this week unveiled a hip-hop inspired album which revives his politically-charged songwriting, said his anger over the ideals Thatcher represented had not abated and he will continue to sing the song.

“The Thatcherite revolution is looked at historically as a great cleansing moment but it was not. A lot of things that belonged to us all communally were sold out from under us,” he told The Independent.

“They weren’t sold to private interests in England that enriched the country, they were sold to people in other countries. And it’s still the same bunch of slimes sitting there running it all.”

Costello, who now lives in Vancouver with his Canadian jazz singer wife Diana Krall and their children, continued: “I felt I wanted to revisit the song regardless of the offence it gives to people who deify her. We sing the song from our point of view and other people have another view. Nobody shot anybody because of it. I don’t feel vindicated. I didn’t personally kill her.”

Costello added that he took no pleasure from Thatcher’s struggle with dementia before her death, aged 87. His own father, musician Ross MacManus, suffered from the illness before his death in 2011. “ I genuinely don’t wish that on my worst enemy and that’s what I said every night when I introduced the song.”

He has revisited two of his most famous anti-Thatcher protest songs, Shipbuilding and Pills And Soap, on his new album, a collaboration with US hip-hop/funk group The Roots, called Wise Up Ghost.

Costello has written a South American response to Shipbuilding, his poignant ballad about the Falklands War, which reflected on the killing of young British solidiers as an unintended consequence of renewed work for struggling shipyards.

“I’ve written a similar human story from the other side of a conflict,” Costello said of the song Cinco Minutos Con Vos. “I wanted to write a story about a girl waiting for her father to arrive home in Montevideo. But he’s snatched off the street, put on a plane and pushed out of it in mid-air, down into the River Plate. People are being taken away to places in our name and we don’t know if they are guilty or innocent.”

Pills And Soap, a 1983 general election song describing the social impact of Thatcher’s policies, has been given a hip-hop undercarriage on the new track, Stick Out Your Tongue. “Some of the things I sung about have come true or they have a more disturbing significance now,” Costello said.

“Actions are being taken in our name. We used to be the people who did the things the good guys do, we’re the bad guys now. In Iraq and Afghanistan it’s disturbing to see the same mistakes being made as the (1989) US invasion of Panama.”

Social commentary has played a major role in the Liverpudlian artist’s songwriting since Oliver’s Army, his breakthrough hit, backed by the Attractions in 1979. “I still sing the songs that matter to me over 35 years,” said Costello, whose musical explorations have encompassed classical, jazz, country and bluegrass before his first foray into hip-hop. “There has to be a real reason to play everything, old and new.”

Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, leader of Grammy-winning band The Roots, described the album, which marks Costello’s return to politically-charged songwriting as “a moody, brooding affair with cathartic rhythms and dissonant lullabies.”


Elvis Costello's lyrics - then and now

Tramp The Dirt Down (Spike album, 1989)


When England was the whore of the world

Margaret was her madam….

Because there’s one thing I know, I'd like to live

Long enough to savour

That's when they finally put you in the ground

I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

From Wise Up Ghost – Elvis Costello & The Roots:

Refuse To Be Saved


The Liberation Forces make movies of their own

Playing their Doors records and pretending to be stoned

Drowning out a broadcast that wasn't authorised

Incidentally the revolution will be televised

Cinco Minutos Con Vos

Now the sirens wail

There is a fever in the winding sheets

And the bullets hail

And they pull you right off the streets

Our chances are slim but the searchlights will dim in five minutes for you
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

I love the song title 'Cinco Minutos Con Vos' [5 Minutes With You] because of the use of the 'voseo' instead of the 'tú' form used for the 2nd person singular in Spain, which is absolutely the norm in 'Rioplatense' use in Argentina and also in other parts of Latin America, whereas in Spain it's archaic sounding. I once spent an evening with a couple in Buenos Aires talking Spanish, and by the end of the evening I was almost there using it (bear in mind the verb conjugation is different with the stress on the last syllable).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voseo

Good to see the first entrance of the voseo into the Costello cannon.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by The Gentleman »

And No Coffee Table wrote: Similarly, Costello's lyrics revisit his own past. "I wanted to incorporate other verses and ideas from old songs as an ongoing dialogue," he explained. "On a number of songs I used that collage method because some of the things that were said in those [old] songs as they were originally written, well I won't say they've come true but to me they have more disturbing significance because they continue to go on, certain actions in our name. Hopefully, when you read the lyric sheet you'll see what I'm talking about."
I wonder if "The PUPPET Has Cut His Strings" draws from "Puppet Girl?"

"Hey Little Puppet Girl/
Now it's time to dance and sing/
We built your reputation to fade away the very day/
You cut cut cut cut your string?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by supplydavid »

Small interview piece on the BBC radio 6 Radcliffe and Maconie show Friday, approx. 51minutes in the music news segment


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036ll62
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by And No Coffee Table »

ELVIS COSTELLO IS HIP IN A TARDIS
13th July 2013
By Kim Carr

LEGEND Elvis Costello felt like Doctor Who recording his new album with hip hop group The Roots.

Wise Up Ghost, out September 16, is a seriously funky collaboration with the acclaimed US band led by drummer Questlove, 42.

Elvis revealed: “You have to be a Time Lord to work in a studio they have, it’s absolutely minuscule. It makes the Tardis look like a ballroom.

“Questlove should be the next Doctor Who. He is a Time Lord.”

And The Rock ’n’ Roll Hall Of Famer, 58, says he was chuffed that Elton John, 66, pulled out of his free BST Hyde Park gig yesterday.

He joked: “I’ve been promoted up the bill and there will be more people than ever before, that’s what happens when you give away tickets.”
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by verbal gymnastics »

And No Coffee Table wrote: He joked: “I’ve been promoted up the bill and there will be more people than ever before, that’s what happens when you give away tickets.”
As well as fans who wouldn't pay £59.50+fees to see you 3rd on the bill to two others who they're not fussed about...
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by The Gentleman »

Nice find, Dave. Thanks!

Also, this is the first time I've seen a critic fess up to David Lee Roth's famous dismissal of EC as someone critics like because they look like him.
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