ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ROOTS WISE UP GHOST

A strong set of new songs made in collaboration with Jimmy Fallon sound tracking hip-hop troupe Having told myself (and anyone else who’d listen) that I was happy to take my songs directly to the stage, I was taken willing hostage to a scheme by Questlove and engineer Steven Mandel to keep me in a Tardis-like cupboard at NBC until we made a record together. At the turn of the century, in what seemed like the last game of musical chairs, I was briefly signed to Deutsche Grammophon and Def Jam-Island at the same time, then to the Nashville quasiindependent Lost Highway, then to Verve Records for our trip to New Orleans to complete The River In Reverse with Allen Toussaint. Now we were working without a label or a budget, building tracks up from Questlove’s beats, Mandel’s samples of “Can You Be True?” from North or “Radio Silence” from When I Was Cruel, and slices from our own rehearsal jams on songs as widely spaced in time as “High Fidelity” and “Stations Of the Cross”. Those broadcast references were fitting, as the words were initially cut-ups of my own lyrics, written in reaction to events on a news-ticker, 25 years long, from “Pills And Soap” and “Invasion Hit Parade” to “Bedlam” and “The River In Reverse”. “Say something once, why say it again?” as David Byrne once proposed, to which I would reply, “Say something twice, maybe you’ll hear it this time.” So “Cinco Minutos Con Vos” viewed the same events as “Shipbuilding”, only from another hemisphere, and among these outward-bound views – in the last days before we delivered the record to Blue Note – Quest went back into that little cupboard with Ray Angry and Pino Palladino to cut the music for “The Puppet Has Cut His Strings”, a deeply upsetting series of images about my father’s last breath, which I could only let myself utter in the company of new friends.