Wise Up Ghost
Wise Up Ghost is a collaborative studio album by British singer/songwriter Elvis Costello and American hip hop group the Roots. The album was released on 17 September 2013, by Blue Note Records. The album's first single "Walk Us Uptown" was released on 23 July 2013. Growing out of Costello's appearances on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, where the Roots are the house band, Wise Up Ghost was well received by critics. Background In January 2013, it was announced that the Roots and Elvis Costello were working on an album. On 29 May 2013, it was announced that the album would be titled Wise Up Ghost and would be released on 17 September 2013. In a July 2013 interview with entertainment.ie, Roots drummer Questlove spoke about how the album started, saying: "Elvis first came on the Jimmy Fallon show in 2009. I knew he was a fan of the Voodoo album I did with D'Angelo, so we asked if he would be open to the idea of "remixing" his stuff. He was into it, so we did these radical versions of "High Fidelity" and "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea", and he loved it. Then we did that a second time the next year, and then last year he was on when the show did a Bruce Springsteen tribute week. At that point, I kinda subliminally put out the idea of a larger collaboration. I was passive-aggressively suggesting it—I was too afraid to actually say, "Let's make a record together." Elvis Costello also spoke about the origins of the album, stating: "We were walking off the set of the show together after we did 'Brilliant Disguise' and Quest dropped this little code phrase to me. I don't think I ever want to tell people which band, which singer, and what record he named, but I knew what he meant right away. While I knew we couldn't make that record, I hoped that we might be able to make this record. It seemed like a good playground, a fabulous ride, to go in and play with a great band that has a broad-minded view of music. It felt like anything was possible." Costello and Questlove have both discussed the writing process for the album. Costello stated: "Somebody would lead the way, the same way as any song construction. It was done in dialogue rather than in performance—like the game Exquisite Corpse, where one person's story follows the other, or when you fold a paper doll and then draw the legs on. We had already played together, we knew what that felt like, but we wanted different perspectives. We were really about a work-in-progress, mixing from day one, and developing as the ideas came through. But we didn't need to discuss it very much. We never had one conversation about what we were trying to do, we just did it. We played and the picture emerged, and then you try to sharpen the picture." Meanwhile, Questlove remarked: "Most powerful songs first have