The Questlove Show - QLS Classic: Elvis Costello Part 2

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Back in 2022, Team Supreme’s Suga Steve concluded his far-ranging interview with Elvis Costello. This is Part 2 of the first edition of QLS Solo Sessions. This show was recorded at legendary Electric Lady Studio A and finds Suga and Elvis continuing to explore all aspects of Elvis’ career and how it relates to his work with the Roots and his place in music history. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed human. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits,

my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, the Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated.

So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft. And we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else.

If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Questlove Supreme is a production of IHeart Radio. It's okay to meet your heroes.

It's okay to dream. It's okay to let life. float you to where you should be. In 2021, Questlove asked me to do a one-on-one interview with Elvis Costello at Electric Lady Studios for Questlove Supreme. At first, I said no. Just kidding. I jumped at the opportunity.

In this part two, you'll hear Elvis and I dissect the contents of wise-up ghost and go down rabbit holes so deep where even rabbits are afraid to go. Yes, I had to doggie paddle through this to survive Elvis and his title wave of knowledge. But I'm so grateful and pleased that this document exists for the future. This was originally aired in April 2022. Wow. I can't even believe this happened. Enjoy.

And thank you, Questlove. Sugar Steve, now I'm a legend in my own time. Sugar Steve, just a legend in his own mind. Been doing a lot of interviews, haven't you? Getting sick of it? Not this one. No, this one. This one, that we know.

This isn't even start yet. I had no sooner resolved to stop recording and just play shows, then 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's beats gave the words different air to breathe and allowed me to place fresh emphasis.

The words of Bedlam became the lyrics of the deadpan groove of Wake Me Up, with a quotation from the river in reverse as its hook. She's pulling out the pin from the Mississippi sessions became, She Might Be a Grenade. The tracks began with drums alone, over which I sketched out guitar or bass lines. The other members of the roots entered as the music demanded. Captain Kirk Douglas adding his guitar, or my bass sketch is being replaced by a souser farm,

or the roots bassist Mark Kelly. A Philadelphia horn section reworked my music. motifs from my records, a guitar riff becoming a horn line or vice versa. In the final days of the recording, Quest Summoned Brent Fisher and had the beautiful orchestrations that pulled all these threads together. Each mix that Stephen Mandel sent me got closer to the final picture. A beat dropped out here, sounds 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 catalogue had been pills and soap just some verses chanted over a spare beat with occasional musical punctuations The original pills and soap lyrics Were now reset in a dialogue with verses and lines From Invasion Hip Parade and National Ransom To become Stick Out Your Tong

Like four or five of the songs on Wise Up Ghost This number delayed leaving the first chord Until absolutely necessary The one chord song was something that I'd been working towards since writing big boys for armed forces, and this was almost it. I'd sample the Italian singer Mina's 1960s recording of Un Bacho etropopoco as the foundation for When I Was Cool 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 David Crosby to sing on that one.

Graham really wanted to do it, but when I sent it to Crosby, he didn't quite hear himself in that kind of mayhem. I ended up tracking my own voice on the parts, and in the closing bars of the track, quoted one phrase from the melody of Crosby's song, Draft Morning. Clips from our rehearsal jams recorded while preparing for my appearances on the Jimmy Fallon Show on NBC. became the foundation of new tracks, high fidelity yielding

Cinco Minutes convoce, four bars from the stations of the cross underpinning Vice Roy's row, and Quest's rendition of the intro of Chelsea, anchoring My New Horn. It was strange to walk past Dame Judy Dench, Lindsay Lohan, or the other studio guests in the studio hallway,

and then disappeared through a door into the Root's own personal Tardist, a converted technical cupboard that served as their rehearsal room in the studio, wise up ghost looked out from that windowless room at a world where one woman's freedom was another man's blasphemy, where one man's wealth was another man's bankruptcy, where security can only be preserved by unaccountable means, from eavesdropping to airstrikes. If peace and order are now like the law, and too complex to trust to anyone but professionals,

I suppose love and understanding will just have to wait out the eminent threat. How could any father not fear the world his sons will inherit? Could I muster any hope at all? Well, 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 of wise up ghost over it. Stephen and Questlove 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 Quest and Frank Knuckles laying in waves of drums and percussion. It seemed at first like a piece that could only dwell in the studio, but when we performed the song on television and later in a bowling alley in Brooklyn, it really took on a life of its own.

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 curved guitar wig out and I want you. In the summer of 2014, Steve Naive, Dennis Crouch, Kareem Riggins and I

played Wise Up Ghost with the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. When Kareem kicked into a take on his friend Quest's groove at the halfway point of the song, I felt as if we might end up hovering above the Griffith Observatory. Walkers up town and Wise Up Ghosts, were never intended to be defeated songs. 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 balance.

We had got into this thing without any rules or consultation. Little more than a word or two had passed between Quest and me. All the dialogue had been musical. Mandel 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 each other

as working musicians usually do. I now find myself writing a very detailed account of my father's last days and hours. Something that I had told myself would be too hard to visit in song. 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 Phoenician. 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. He would not let me touch it. It's funny this list, I just looked it, I had to look it up.

This, the 500 list I have looked at it for years. I pick a lot of the same records today, but some I come around to again, like when I saw a Black Messiah and it opens with Rassan. That's what I wanted to ask you about, get on the mic, though. Nobody's found a way, a context, to put that piece of music, anything that's so powerful as that. You know, nobody's put that in a context of a movie before that I ever remember.

Which piece of music? The Rossan Roland Kirk, Afflated Teer. It's the opening music of that movie. Wow. And you kind of go, well, that's kind of right, you know, that's kind of what, that's what that's what that music feels like to me, is it? DeAngelis influences 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 that. Well, sampling from our own brief kind of live library. Right. So that's ingenious in itself. And then, you know, in myself, like starting off with two ideas. 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, the lyrical side of it there's not many songs 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 a you know history repeating history repeating itself a war breaks out and then another war that seems to be the same kind of mistake so then you state it again but you have the other verse 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're hearing, oh, I wrote lots of new words, but even those ones, some of those became, to me,

like the version of that lyric, because I got a chance to lay it down 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 Quest had put down, and I, and were we in, were we in Vancouver? Well, yeah, we did, the very first thing was pills and soap. Oh, well, there was cutting up pills and soap. Yeah, there 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 bed of loops that you created from the live performances, then it was like Quest laying down those beats and me improvising song structure over them. So I was playing 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 foundation structure.

And that's, as far as I recall, I did wise up ghost pretty much to the drums and maybe some, I don't know, some chords on the piano. Not very much forms. The song, Wise Up Ghost? Because it's just really the sample from the sample. The sample is really giving the tonality.

So the sample is from North. Yeah, it's the opening of the, it's what Vince Mendoza 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 schumann records away from you because he thought it was so sort of germanic what 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 intro and that's why i i hear that a lot i hear a lot of chikoski in in in the synth and sometimes real string you know the synth strings that that became like i hear it a lot I hear a lot of Tricorsky and a lot of Borodin. I don't know whether it's conscious or 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 are actually drawing out. It's just a coincidence. You end up with a few chords in a certain kind of ominous rhythm, you know, and then you get that.

Right. So that was a pretty free piece. And it built, as you recall, 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 at prog rock. Do you like Jethro Tull? No, I really don't like Jeth Roto. How about yes? They're the best at it. No. Well, if you don't like yes, you just don't like Prague rock. No, I really don't like prog rock.

But I did, I sort of hear, I suppose it's King Crimson Prague rock. Yes. Yes. But I mean, I never listened to any of their records, but I was aware of what... record of theirs which I liked which was a later one called Red that had Adrian Bellew on it and because I liked him because he played with Bowie and and of course frip played with Barry as well so I I liked that kind of thing when I could hear it like an orchestral instrument and that's what I heard when when Kirk was playing those that's those sustained guitars and that sound like a frip part to me You know, so like that's what it sounds like one of his sustained guitar things.

I guess I'm still a little surprised because, in my opinion, Prague Rock is, there's a lot of classical influence and there's a lot of English folk. Oh, yeah, in that Jathrow Hotel for sure. But there were groups I'd like that did that better who were different, like Fulpo Convention. And, you know, Richard Thompson is a guitar player, I really love, who came out of that group. But not so much the Emerson Lake and Palmer kind of stuff. for 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 Keith Emerson. Right. 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. Prague Rock has all that classical in it. 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 Story score, you don't, it didn't make it cooler to hear it played on the organ. But maybe somebody had, maybe it's somebody that had never heard, never really thought about what that song was about, heard that tune, that America tune played by Keith Amerson and Nice, and thought, hey, that's great.

And that's kind of subversive idea to do that in a wild way. But I think it's already wild. I think that original version is wilder. So as you were sampling your own lyrics and writing new lyrics on Wise Up Ghost, we were busy doing our version of sampling, actual sampling, including Come the Meantimes with the backing sample from Glass House? Glass House, I mean, Victor's Holland Does Your Holland label after Motown, yeah. So that beat that is Come the Meantimes, meaning the sample and the drums that the mirror plays on it,

that was five years old or something like that. He had made that five years prior to watch up ghosts, and it just always was on the drive. He never used it for anything. I was like, that's something. But, you see, that's no different to me than if we had gone into the deepest kind of library of like we were talking before about the, you know,

the sort of kitsier versions of covers of records, and you might find some quirk to the way that drum sounded or something about, or hearing even that. It was just better. Bad ass. Yeah, it's badass. And that's all that matters. Yeah.

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 Quest had laid down or whether you were taking it something that you had on. Because, I mean, I didn't see, I mean, I was taking lyrics from, there are some lyrics from the river in reverse, which, you know, was only four years old. There's others that are, that are from 1990, you know, from songs from Invasion, Hi Pills and Soapes, which is from Mighty Lagerose, that's 1990. Pills of Soap is from 83.

You know, the Pills and Soap sort of like, you know. And Phils and Soap was some kind of realization of, you know, my, you know, like Magnificent Seven was the Clash's response to, to hip, to early hip hop, pills and soap was mine. Right. 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.

Right. I didn't have a band playing on it. There's nobody else. It's just me and Steve, you know. It's me, Stephen Alindrum, you know. 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 the way, and it's orchestrated and, you know, that some of the way that it sounds. 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 squeezed right down. This is kind of like coming out of balance, you know, drum, particular drum beats, you know, one beat in a phrase being kind of process in some way.

Well, yes, you came to me at a very strange time in my life, as they say. 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 was 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. That's always seemed to be the best thing. Yeah. It never seemed to me to make sense when I was about 13 or 14, a man tried to sell my father a melaton. And he took him into this.

This guy, he lived in a house next to the church we used to go to, and he took us into the front room, and he had this melitron in his front room. And he put it on, and he tried to persuade my father it was going to put all the musicians and the band out of work. You know, and he was 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 melaton because

they hadn't yet got the action so that you could really play with any kind of swing or anything on it. Everything was, you know, there was always a delay. And of course, the way people used melitrons was much more to sound like a processed version of a flute. You know, the most famous use of it is like the beginning of strawberry fields forever, you know,

where I think, I don't even know whether the cello is a real cello that's been phased or it's a melitron cello, but do whoo-do-woo-you-no-float sound. And you would never group real flute. playing like that in that kind of harmony you just would never play them you would never voice him like that in a 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 if you hear one on any kind of record that it's the sound of that instrument's quirks right just like the Hammond organ was never really gonna replace a horn section was it you know it's it's a different instrument you know it's So I think we kind of like drew on that thing or you did in the processing and the mixing and the cutting up and the slight kind of disconnect that you get rhythmically then. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me, Cliver Taylor the fourth. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I,

ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast. It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream,

this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends.

either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed, I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.

I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar.

of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft. And we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice

podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospect. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else. If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and TikTok podcast network on TikTok. I'm John Green. You may know me as the author of The Fault in Our Stars.

and now, I guess also as the co-host of The Away End, a brand new world soccer podcast. I'm Daniel Alarcon, a writer and journalist, and John and I have known each other since we were kids. My first World Cup was Mexico 86. I was nine years old. I watched every game, and I fell in love. On our new podcast, The Away End,

we'll share with you the magic of international football, all leading up to the 2026 World Cup. For us, soccer... Football is a story we've shared for over 30 years since Daniel was the star player on our high school soccer team. Very debatable. And I was their most loyal and sometimes only fan. I love this game.

I love its history, its hope, it's heartbreak, and above all, it's beauty. Together, we'll find out why, of all the unimportant things, football, soccer, is the most important. Listen to the away end with Daniel Auerkone and John Green on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I grew up on your music And the way that that music was made In fact, when I was coming up as an engineer here Yeah, we were still using tape This was in the mid-90s

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 realm for the most part The 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 Sears Beauty, the last record I'm over with the attractions. Like some of the tracks 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 a loop that big. Or something quantized versus 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 Emmerich, of course, is from an analog era, his Abbey Road Train music, you know, who was there when the Beatles kind of introduced these things that they've absorbed from the avant-garde tape loops, particularly McCartney, you know, they got enamored of these tape loop,

electronic composers, they all sort of fed into that desire to process sounds to a much greater degree. They spent the first part of the career being told not to touch the faders, you know. And they're gradually taken over the studio. We get the benefit of that revolution of them being able to experiment because everything that we've got now in a box

is something that's most of it that somebody actually physically made an analog version of and now we've got a plug-in rendition of it. But you can still experiment with that stuff. Of course you can create new stuff. But you know that the kind of edits that were possible to do with tape. Impossible, yeah. 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, you would never be able to do it. You would never hold. The tape would never hold together. No. Not every song on Wise Up Ghost is created that. way, though. There were a couple sessions

at 30 live sessions. Right, with Pino Paladino. 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 on Work is interesting because it's a rhythmic song.

And the band is Quest, Ray Angry, and Pino and me playing bass at the same time. So I'm playing up at the octave, 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. It's a weird choice of instruments. But I had that K that sounded like, you know,

it sounds like a six-string. A six-string guitar is what it sounds like, or Baraton guitar. It doesn't really have the resonance of a true bass. Right. But that was a good track to cut. I like that one. And if I could believe, which was, you know, it was obvious, an obvious end in song if it was going to be a 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. Recertive, which I can never say, which they call when they speak in opera, you know, Sprachschema, as the Germans call it, you know, it's a version of rhythmic talking. Right. But it's not versifying in the hip-hop sense. 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. Right. 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. Sing it up there. you know like that soft very soft not like anything like really virtuosic it's just the softs three-part group thing that that we you know that but a lot of a lot of rock bands imitated like think of the band that backed joe cocker what do they do on with a little help for my friends

it sounds like they're sounding trying to sound like girls singing but they don't really sound those aren't girls no it's just guys singing there oh well Yeah, he's a singer like that, yeah. I thought it was a... No, there's some great, there's some great background singers that. But on the original record, no, it's guys. Speaking of great singers and still were on Wise Up Ghost, La Marisol, and Diane Birch and Brent Fisher contributing strings.

Well, let's go back, Marisol was a really great thing because I knew already, and that was Sebastian who's ended up being, like, really a great pal and that cohort on these last four records and EP's in between those and beyond those. You guys been tearing it up for the last four years. He is really, you know, but he comes out of Miami, so he has done a lot of work in Latin artists. He has like 18 Latin Grammys.

Yeah, and producer of the year twice. So, I mean, he's really got the, you know, 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, just in making Spanish model, that's become apparent to me all the more. Because some of those things, I knew Marisol I'd sung with in the studio before,

and I'd done a track with her, and she had sung alive with us. So when I wanted to put that verse in Spanish in Cinco Minotos, which was, again, goes back to the very first high fidelity, it's that same hit, isn't it? Isn't that what we're using there? Is the high fidelity groove? For Cinco, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we're back in that.

And now we've got it really to sound like station to station. I always forget what that is going on. You don't even remember. You're not even covering your own tracks here. But I think that one there, you know, it really was funny how it came. I said, we realized this attempt to imitate Barry's kind of art. You know, he had a funk band, basically, for a lot of the 70s. He had a funk rhythm section, kill a rhythm section.

And so when we were trying to play like that in 79, we didn't really know how to get there, not so much rhythmic, but textually with the other instruments that you had to have if you were going to play the song that slowly. Now we're playing a song that's supposed to go that slowly. That new text is supposed to be over that groove. I had written just this melody that there was a little more melody to that, even though their song never varies from two chords.

It doesn't never really get off those two chords. There's no release. There's no four chord in most of these songs. It's all on the one, you know. So harmonically, it's really tricky to sustain the tension. So halfway through, as a story, was a kind of answer song, shipbuilding. It takes place in a conflict in the early 80s between England and Argentina.

And the second verse needs to be in Spanish, but it didn't need to be in Spanish-Spanish. It needs to be in the Argentine Spanish. So Sebastian and another friend of mine his family also left Argentina in those years wrote the adaptation for Marisol to sing. Marisol is Mexican-American, so she would know the different words

that are in Argentine Spanish. Hence, it's Cincominus convoce, not Cinqueamino de Comteau. Couldn't we get a real Argentinian? I mean, was it not in the budget? Not at that time. That came later. That's one of my favorites. And it's also one of the really beautiful songs.

I mean, 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 bearer than the final one. And then you told me that Quest was saying, now we're going to get Brett to do that. And I'm like from where? Like, how are we going to want this? 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 a as a each track would have worked if we had never thought of the strings on each track would have been interesting enough because of the relationship between what's going on in the rhythm and that and the accumulated instrumental parts of the the root in members of the roots added and what I was doing with the combination of new texts and and you

know these collages of lyrics bringing in 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 fine.

The way they were. Refused, to be said, was a, but it's, but it, but you can't, I can't hear it without it. Right. I think the, the, the, and the, things like having the, introduction to sugar want 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 song, I know you love Cinco, I know you love Mean Times and other songs. For me, what I was going for was Grenade. Like we're talking about the flip.

Yeah. I was trying to essentially flip one mogen from Voodoo. It's a song on Voodoo that has a... a similar vibe, a similar amount of space and within the song, you know, air. That was where I was like, okay, this is making sense to me, because I'm covering both my quest, I'm covering my Elvis, and I'm harkening back to this soul that we're all looking to have in this kind of stuff. I think everything that's references 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 that further towards what you were trying to achieve. I mean, the records that I heard in my head were not reference points that I even thought were pertinent to it. You know, I mean, I know I'm not going to sound like any of the people as I've said from the get-go. It 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 whole train. I'm not going to tell people where I get every cue, that I've written because then they're going to react to that. Right. And they're going to, if I say, well, this is such and such, that's just going to, they'll either laugh at you

and go, well, that's ridiculous. That's, you're never going to sound like that. Or they're going to try and adjust to what they think you want them to play. Right. And then you're losing the whole point of making that reference point. If you keep it to yourself,

it's like a card you can lay down. I don't know if you remember me falling to the floor in that studio in Vancouver. Shout out to Cruz Studios. 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. It was that moment where I was like, okay, I kind of achieved at this moment what I was maybe thinking about this could sound like where I'm creating something that's going to please everybody and that's going to please me and you and Quest and whoever needs to be pleased,

especially even if they don't get it at the beginning. Because in September of 2013, Wise Up Ghost was released and nobody really cared, did they? I know about that. I'm just kidding, nobody, but such a different record. Which song was it, do you think, that we were doing, that you had that strong feeling? Was it one particular song?

What, that nobody cared? No, no. The one that you said we were in crew, which one was the one that was? Grenade. grenade. You felt that grenade that was... Yeah, to me that's the... Nobody knows but that's like the centerpiece for me. That's a centerpiece

for you, yeah. I guess I guess, you know, we would have different ones. I think 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 June's Day, right? Yeah. And I think that also you know because it was a song that was not very widely heard originally and again we were reinterpreting 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 a lusive song and I just had all the more feeling that that thing that mixture between the girl dancing around the pole and the and the woman walking through the market with the, you know, the hidden device, that juxtaposition 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 just kind of this join up experiences that you feel.

Otherwise, what's the hell? What's the point of doing anything if you don't feel something for it? Now, that probably leads to the most unexpected thing. 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 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 talk about Crosby,

just perverse. I mean, he's just like, 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 drum, Thrum, Thumb, Lube. My New Haunt.

Yeah, my new haunt. which it was a favorite of mine because I liked that lyric a lot. And that was an entirely new lyric. And then the one that really was the shock to me was that I didn't expect to write. And I suppose this is what happens when you get over a period of time.

The fact that we'd not spoken about anything and we didn't all have this all this shared experience on the road or playing live or we hadn't known each other for 100 years. But there was a lot of, was that final group of pieces that were put together. And one of them was that was the piano piece with Ray and Quest. And you sent that to me and I wrote the words and sang it at my kitchen counter

just on my laptop without a microphone even. you know just so it's just the vocal that's the internal microphone over the track which had the sound of like distortion like yeah but sometimes it's like when you used to record on on you know a four track cassette you would spend a million years in the studio trying to get the same distortion as the cassette naturally gave you and you couldn't understand why you couldn't get it to sound as kind of crushed and exciting everything fighting for space right you know it's like really somebody should 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 with 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.

Everything else was like, okay, you go this, I'll do this. and then this added here and then in the mix you're making it agree. But that I only mentioned because the one was unusual about it is everything else was outward looking in the whole record.

Right. Except that one song. I suppose if I could believe was a statement, but after everything that had been observed in the other songs, you could have a song called If I could believe

if you just only say the title, you know what it's about, you know? The disillusionment that you would arrive at after all the other visible observations and the rest of the record, you get to that one. But puppet was a minute-to-minute description of my father's death. It's not a song, one I would have ever imagined, I would write two that I would record. I'd written two songs about my grandmother's passing that I felt one of them was quite joyful, Veronica, and the other was quite a celebratory in its own, it was emotional song

that day has done, both a rope for McCartney. This one, in the other, you know, It wasn't like I'd written it with Steve naive. Somebody had known my dad. You know, it was Ray's cyclic kind of chord sequence over that beat that Quest was laying down. It was just all there. And I didn't have to do very much. And I just had to sing the words. And of course, I just thought the fidelity would never hold up.

Did you write the words while listening to the beat? Or did you have those words written? I don't even remember. I think I just started writing. Yeah, probably. Stream of consciousness. Yeah, it was really stream because it was like obviously something

that I'd been ready to set talk about. Well, he had just passed away recently. Fairly, fairly, well, he passed in 2011. 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 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 transposing to some other character, but not this one, which was literally describing,

you know, they're giving them these pills, and now he's leaving, and the coffin is closing the whole bit. You know, he's going in the grave. That's all in the song, and if you listen 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 every time. I didn't want to hear it every time.

I didn't. I thought that the, in any way, I thought it was kind of selfish. As part of me, well, it was because it wasn't, wasn't a collaborative experience. It was maybe something that some of us had gone through, but it was the other things we had all contributed to, the setting of the, the resetting of the words or the new words had found in this home in rhythm, and the members of the roots had come in and played their parts, the horns had played their parts, Brent had written his strings, and you had pulled it all together and it was such a ensemble piece in that way it was a collaborative piece

collage like anyway because it wasn't played by a group in the room kind of and then when we did play it it changed shape again and became a lot you know freer and then when tarik came and played that added another dimension because then you know in the end it was worked out great because he did that amazing Kareem Riggins said, that amazing remix of Think of. Wise up thought. Wise up thought.

With Blackthor on it and the shows when he came up and we did, you know, Ghost Town and we did these other songs from my repertoire adapted and Kirk played like a huge long solo and I Want You and we did John Allen's 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 out when we did the appearances on the show. because we were suddenly doing songs of my repertoire and Spooky Girlfriend, which was for, you know, 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 imposter 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 Plastogono band.

and a song about his father. I mean, we were referencing Plastikona band in a couple different ways on that record, I think, and it came out. And then it came out with him. I found out. I got a great mix of that going, by the way. Good.

I want to hear that. Rehearsal session. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care which I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Cliver Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits,

the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became big. than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show.

This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast.

It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right what you need to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either.

We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom.

My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.

I don't know what that means. means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come, look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar. of, you know, the cat, just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft. And we've got a special guest. The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects.

from hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else. If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice Podcasts on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

for wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slice of Life 12 and TikTok podcast network on TikTok. I'm John Green. You may know me as the author of The Fault and Our Stars and now I guess also is the co-host of The Away End, a brand new world soccer podcast. I'm Daniel Alarcon, a writer and journalist, and John and I have known each other since we were kids.

My first World Cup was Mexico 86. I was nine years old. I watched every game, and I fell in love. On our new podcast, The Away End, we'll share with you the magic of international football, all leading up to the 2026 World Cup. For us, soccer, football, is a story we've shared for over 30 years, since Daniel was the star player on our high school soccer team, Very debatable.

And I was their most loyal and sometimes only fan. I love this game. I love its history, it's hope, it's heartbreak, and above all, it's beauty. Together, we'll find out why, of all the unimportant things, football, soccer, is the most important. Listen to the away end with Daniel Alarcon and John Green on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dangerous Amusements. There's a podcast now about you. Have you been listening to that at all?

I'm aware that Mark Billingham did, the crime writer, 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, it's hard, I'm sure. 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 Ghost and these outward-looking things about society and so forth, it's almost as if you're Nostradamus. predicting things that are going to be happening in society and government. They were talking about Trump. They were talking about brilliant mistake. I did. I used to make a joke when things seemed 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, they could say they could go on forever with my songs, waiting for the end of the world, you know, sort of beyond belief, you know, brilliant mistake. accidents will happen we've got a million of them you know right that the point is when I was working for five years on this version of Bud Schuberg's play facing the crowd which was set in the 50s when there was about a 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 I went 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 Ronald Reagan And how can he see the few? He wasn't Ostradamus. And the truth of it is, there'll always be another monster. They'll have a different face. He'll have a different set of clothes. You know, there's been, you look back in history. Okay.

It just gets repeated. Right. Right. History. So getting back to what happened after we released the record, Jimmy was nice enough to give us two nights on the show. At the very end of late night with Jimmy Fallon 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 with the string section. Strings and horns. Absolutely. Fleshing out some things that would later be in the only four concerts that happened. How did that happen?

Oh, I don't know. You went on tour solo after that. You guys just as hard to pin 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 taken the band out there and said oh by the way I've made a record with the Rootsie Cino that didn't go down totally well

that was not quite as bad as down the attractions there was nothing to play on King of America but you know it was close and then I rode around in a car and played Pete the roughs, you know, and they kind of got the idea of it. And then, of course, the other thing is that since then, we've adapted several of the songs into the Impostas repertoire. You know, I mean, Times was in there for a while.

I think I mean, those was made an appearance. You know, some of the others, not so much, but Tripwire's been in there now and again, you know. But those four concerts, that's what we should be talking about. Three of them were great. Brooklyn Bowl, the first show, obviously the energy there. That 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 electric as the... It wasn't, yeah. I remember the very opening was really great at the bowl. I remember being backstage and Quest laying it down, and I'm coming out, and I thought,

this is the way to do this. Now we're into a different thing. Now we're into kind of performing, not making records, are into performance. So we've got to involve stagecraft. We've got to have other repertoire. People don't know this record yet.

That's the point of us being here. I would say that you have to give Donne Waugh's credit. He's here with us with me in Quest and we did a presentation. Oh, here. Yeah. In this exact room. We're sitting exactly where Don was. It was Don's idea to make the cover look like a city lights cover.

He wanted it to look like the cover of Howl by Alan Gensberg, which was a sort of visual quote in, graphic design that he wanted it to give it the sense that these words were consequential because it was a famous book of poetry. You know, I thought that was a compliment he paid me. Whether or not it's deserved, I don't know. But I appreciated that he wanted to say this was consequential in some visual way. And the only mistake the record label could be said to have made was perhaps not seeing it

through to immediately follow the remix record with the line. live record. But the trouble was I didn't have a long-term contract with Blue Note. I was only on Blue Note because they took this record. Right. We all just took that record. It's kind of fun to have an album on Blue Note, though. Yeah. Well, I mean, there is hardly a label in the Universal Group that I haven't been on. I, you know, people say, oh, he started out on Stiff records. Yeah, I also made four records of Deutsche Grammophone, 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 label. And the label's 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. 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 Bowl grand opening. Yes, there's a Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas. Yeah, it's one in Nashville.

And to me, that was, like you said, the shows, because Tariq was there, Marisol was there. And you guys had played through this set a couple of times previously. Yeah, by then we had those other things. as well we had those other numbers down yeah those shows were yeah yeah also in 2013 you played with the roots again at a prince tribute concert moonbeam levels was the song you play i just knew that i was going to get put through it you know i knew that i knew when i agreed to do it i'd be given the most obscure like the one that's only that's only known the prince 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 at the, didn't we do it, a warm-up show at the, the winery? At the winery, yeah. The show is at Carnegie Hall. Yeah, and then we moved.

And I remember I got to Carnegie Hall and I had the, I had the conductor dressing room. And it said on the piece of paper on the door that had the axe. It said, I was going to start on prints. Mm-hmm. I was sharing a dressing room.

We were supposed to be sharing 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 to 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 Barbara Streisand. And Prince was sitting a few tables away from us. And when I came back out to my table after Diana played Dan would love, he kind of just looked at me and did a kind of silent movie take. Yeah. He just did like a little mime at 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 just said, 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 experience 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 Dr. Cornell West. And Dr. Cornell said, have you ever met Prince? I said, no. I said, we're going to meet him now. And he took his 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 we ever met. And then, funnily enough, at the end of the night, he got up and we were, everybody was watching like, 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 Striis and songs? And it, 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 the music care's recipient for whatever year it was, is Marlis Risen and he introduced her and that was it. So that was a truly surreal evening. But I gotta 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 gonna walk over and run the risk of them being discomfited by you making that overture? Right. You know? I'd had a little bit of dealing with his publishing people about trying to quote one of his songs once as you know who wasn't always kind of very comfortable with that.

I'd quoted pop life on one of my recordings. Right. And he wouldn't clear it. Or they wouldn't clear it. Quoted the lyrics or the music? Coded it. It was incorporated into a song called The Bridge I Burned, which is the last thing 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 figured it would have appealed to his sense of humor. But I guess it didn't feel right. So I played Pop Life in the mid-80s in the show. The first time the spinning wheel was there, Pop Life was on the wheel. Then I incorporated it,

and when I quoted it, he wasn't so comfortable or somebody who was in charge of publishing wasn't comfortable with the quotation. So I adapted it into a different thing, and it never came out in that form. A couple of very current things, and now I feel like a real journalist. As current as 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. Is that 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? Well, Masters are the recordings, which I also own. Sweet. Except for the six records I made for Warner Brothers, which they own.

And they don't revert. You know, they don't come back to the artists. They're in there's 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 me for the composition.

But if they wanted to use my recording, they'd need the master as well. So that way you would benefit on two sides of the deal. So there is money as a, both a recording artist and published. But you didn't sell your songs like Dylan or Springsteen did. Because those calculations are based on very, very much more successful songs of mine. Those things are not done. And they make a lot of speeches 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 you see somebody like a Stevie Nix or somebody like that, those are a monster, multi-million selling records. I've never. 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 may have sold. I bought a million records of yours. Okay, so this is by far 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 different film elsewhere. Sometimes they get independent finance. That's the model of stiff records which borrows a thousand pounds to form a record label

and that's the beginning of my career. By the time I've gotten signed to Columbia and America and then later to Warner Brothers for the world and then on to what became universal, as I said, I've been on all these imprints. But in terms of the... of this issue particularly of publishing, you would have to have had like the kind of major, major multi-selling

for it to be in your interest to sell your rights. It just isn't, it doesn't make sense. Because you know why? Because I'm holding 600 lottery tickets, you know? Right. Any one of those songs could be... Can you imagine if you sold the rights having not had any of them be, you know, I'm not covered very often, but that could happen any day, wouldn't it?

You know, all I'm trying to do is get the money to make another record. Because you're a freaking artist and you don't care more about money than you do about art. Well, 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 70s, 80s, and think, wow, there's a few people who 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 shocking. Well, don't die right now, okay, not on air. When you look at the people that we really are for all time the greatest that are not with us, I mean, there's not just the ones that died like at 30.

I'm talking about people that died at 73, but still have more music than most people would ever make if they live to be 173, you know. So are you in a mindset at this point in your career where 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 intent 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. What do 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 blew the country record in 81 all the way to wise up ghost some people can't understand it Then the penny drops like five years 20 years 30 years sometimes later The records that seem to be the most challenging for some people to absorb also have their own audiences Like there are people specifically that like the Juliet letters that didn't buy my as true Or weren't around when I when I made these records that's supposed to feel sentimental about when I made the record with Bert Back, right?

So they got every chance just to come in the door any time you make anything good. This is kind of an obvious question, but do 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 almost the best show I've ever seen him give.

I mean, it was astonished. The shows now are the best shows that he's ever done. It was completely astonishing. I mean, his, the class. of his vocal is focus on the on the on the words voice sounds great 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 is it does his voice sound older yes of course

because he's he's 80 does it sound is it musical yes if you know anything was it ever like Like, was it ever like Andy Williams? Did he ever sound like Andy Williams? Did he ever sound like Eddie Kendrix? 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 we'll ever know about it. No, he has really.

As the Davis sister said, I've forgotten more than you'll ever know. Speaking of Dylan-type gigantic music figures, or we did a Johnny Cash remix shortly after. I love that record. Do you now? I do. I do. I love that record. You know what 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, his song makes sense in my head. I love the song, but what we did it was really, I mean. Slightly bizarre, but fun. But I mean, I think that, hey, John was, John was a 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, but they just had feel. I mean, they weren't like virtuoso musicians, but they played exactly what he needed when he had the Tennessee two. You know, it was just like, it's not, I'm going to say they couldn't play. the course it could play, but they couldn't play like, you know,

they couldn't play like Ray Brown or Charles Mingus or something on the double bass. It's just putting the rhythm down, and the guy playing the guitar, Luther Perkins, just doing perfect stuff for Johnny, and the rhythm of those early records. And then right at the end of his life, he made those records. And, I mean, a couple of those records are really great. I think it got to be a bit of a riff at the end, you know, like,

I don't think the song choices were as imaginative after the first one, 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 moustaches and itchy waistcoats and everything, I think that's about 20 years ago, isn't it? I don't think that's Americana. You see, I'd think that it's Johnny Cash music, whatever he's recording. That's why I think if Johnny Cash, you know, I mean, I, bear in mind, I worked with the guy

who produced the original record that we remixed. That's a Billy Cheryl. And Billy Cheryl had no business ever been in the studio with Johnny Cash at that point in their respective careers. I think that Johnny was not valued by Columbia the way he should have been given that he was the founding country music artist on that record label.

You know, if Columbia had dropped Bob Dylan in the same year as they dropped both Miles Davis and Johnny Cash, I think people would have had something to say about it, but that didn't happen. It was a completely inexplicable thing given that's the changing value of companies relating to their founding artists. If you think 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. Come 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 the first two records for Mercury after he left, after all those records he made for Columbia.

But the record that we remixed was 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? I took it to 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 backed Johnny cash. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care which I'm saying. Yep, that's me.

Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show.

This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger.

So, if you've ever supported me, or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.

And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man. a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Igor, Wood. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.

I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you. which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall

and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on the Sports Slice podcast, it's all about the NFL draft, and we've got a special guest.

The director of the NFL's East-West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else. If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice Podcasts on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slice of Life 12

and TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. I'm John Green. You may know me as the author of The Fultonar Stars, and now I guess also is the co-host of the Away End, a brand new world soccer podcast. I'm Daniel Alarcon, a writer and journalist, and John and I have known each other since we were kids. My first World Cup was Mexico 86.

I was nine years old. I watched every game and I fell in love. On our new podcast, The Away End, we'll share with you the magic of international football, all leading up to the 2026 World Cup. For us, soccer, football, is a story we've shared for over 30 years since Daniel was the star player

on our high school soccer team. Very debatable. And I was their most loyal and sometimes only fan. I love this game. I love its history, its hope, its heartbreak, and above all, its beauty. Together, we'll find out why, of all the unimportant things, football, soccer, is the most important. Listen to the away end with Daniel Alarcon and John Green on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 2014, on my birthday, you were playing with some sales. Symphony and Kareem Regins. Dennis Crouch, yeah. And Steve Naive, yeah. Yeah. No, that was with the, it is actually the, I don't know what's the L.A. Phil or the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

I think it's the L.A. Philharmonic, yeah. But it's sort of summer L.A. Philharmonic. It's not the, it's not the full L.A. Philharmonic. 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 learned to how to write that. stuff down. When I worked in the 90s, when I worked with the Brozky Quartet, 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'd had no need of it before then. Now, everything that I had written that was a larger group, I'd kind of played it to somebody who had then written it down for me. And that was a bit laborious and things would get twisted. You know,

And then I course got curious what would happen if I wrote bigger for more bigger than a string quartet, wrote for a chamber group and then gradually for a big band and for a symphony orchestra and wrote some of those things you mentioned earlier, like I wrote ballet music for a company in Italy, and another one for the Miami City Ballet. And I learned how to orchestrate to my own satisfaction. It's certainly not textbook orchestration, but orchestration is the same as arranging. Well, it's the actual write 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 timpani's or snare drums, him, you know, some little thing. Well, the reason I brought up that specific concert was... Because we played, we played Wise Upton. She was extraordinary to play it. With Steve, you know, playing the piano introduction, and then, you know, with the strings and... And Kareem.

And Kareem. And then Kareem just playing a sort of rendition. Because Kareem understanding very much what Kest was playing. On the studio recording, the album version of Wise Up Ghost, there are two Quest loves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One in the left speaker and one in the right, hard-panned, two totally different drum takes,

playing slightly different things. Oh, yeah. I remember when you first played that to me. I thought that was the making of it, you know, it was the scale of it. But, I mean, Kareem played a pracy 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 those records I made in Nashville with T-Bomb. He's really from Bluegrass.

Which records? He played on Secret Proferferferferior Cana National Ransom. He played the baseline that is in Stations of the Cross. that do do do do do and he is like he could play in any group Dennis Crouch you could put him in Metallica he could he could hold his own seen with Karima yeah I mean he's got the sort of like infantic way although he plays I've never I don't think he plays electric bass I've never seen him hold on electric bass he played he's a double

bass player but he played in Diana's band for a while with Kareem so that rhythm section became Diana's rhythm section for a while you know and And she had also Stuart Duncan, the fiddle player, along with Mark Rebo. Different times, it's good to change it, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And so after that, American tune. Kind of the only bonus track from Wise Up Goes Sort of.

Yeah. And really, really kind of the only other song from outside, you know, other than live. We're the only other things since the squeeze song that we had done by somebody else. By Paul Simon, American tune, everybody. The drums are from your performance with Quest. than 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. That's like, there's stuff like that on Hey, Clockface. There's like that kind of. music is always, it's always somewhere. When I harmonize with myself, it's a different thing. Because you get what happens.

When it's the same voice in different registers, it's different than a blend of three different timbers. It's the same voice, but it's doing this sort of a chorusing effect. And it kind of creates a siren-like effect, you know? Sure. Bear 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 is- You never played the song Imperial Bedroom. No, I never did. No, no, no, that's not a great song. 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 Davy Farragher.

That's one thing for sure that the attractions ever had was vocal harmony, you know. Well, but you were able to do that stuff in the studio, which is not live. I love doing it, but that would sometimes be the difference to Envara's song became a big part of the show and not so 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 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 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 500 songs list, you know. Yeah, no, it's a really beautiful record, and we must see it come out. Yes. Maybe, you know. Maybe you should play a little bit of it here on this, and that's just enough to tease somebody to put it in a movie.

I always thought it should have been in a movie. Yeah, well, hopefully this year we'll see that come out. You and I have known each other for at least 10, 12 years now, and I've asked you a lot of questions, like, who the fuck is Joe Porterhouse, and what was going on in that house in Battle of Borough? 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 your might be your career.

But playing, writing songs is what I've been doing since I was, I mean, it's 50 years and writing songs around that time. I was writing songs right away when I was said it wasn't playing other people's songs when I first played in public. play my own song. So I don't even know how many songs I've written in total because there's lots of unpublished songs. I don't suppose any of them are really good, and many of them I've got the words in an old book, but I can't remember the tune, you know.

So does that really matter now? It's not, you know, that the opportunities have all come along, and I didn't go to college. I left school at 17. 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 and I, he barely not a boy, you know. He was 18 when he joined the attractions. He's 62 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, when I get asked as you will do as you're traveling, you know, my son-a-dors who 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 can become a bank robber or venture capitalist or something or Bitcoin, entrepreneur but if you were doing it through music you might really want to have that as a vocation and i got to make my vocation so that's the best deal you can get so you just look at it as a job it's a job but it's got to keep writing and keep it's a job but in order to make it alive like every show you go into you've got to think why you're 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 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 center. Yeah. Everything else is just luck, isn't it? That what comes to you,

and the collaborations are so mind-bending to me that they ever happened. You know, the big ones are the big names like Paul McCartney, Bert Bacrack. How could I ever imagine that when I was a little kid listening to their songs on the radio. Tucson, yeah. Yeah, or Alan Toussaint, the same.

But, you know, the fact that we got to do that record with Alan Toussum, when he was, you know, his life was being turned upside down like so many people in New Orleans. I went to see him in Joe's pub and he's playing his songs on stage. It wasn't something he commonly did outside of Norlands. You never used to see him perform unless he went there for jazz fest. Very occasionally, he'd only been on the road twice in his whole life. He'd been in New Orleans making records all his life.

So to get to share the beginning of what became the last 10 years of his life and career, some of it with him, seeing him actually get that reaction on stage, the things that I'd love since I was a teenager, and hear him sing those songs and take the mic sometimes from me was unbelievable. You know, and all of the things that he did in the studio, you know, he'd say if he had some doubt about something

that had been played or sung he'd say well what do you think about that and you knew the minute he said that you were completely fucked you know like you knew you hadn't got it right he was so gentlemanly but he always allowed you to arrive at the decision 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 on it. It's why some of the records, classically speak, and are too long.

Some of the records have 16 songs on them or something like that. Because I just think, I better record these because they're going to find me out a minute and 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 our hands. albums. Yeah. They, you know, we, the 60s, 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 really exciting. So we held to that even into, basically until we signed with an American record label for, for the whole world. Right. Our releases were all out of sync with American releases, you know, right. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'll never truly understand why strawberry fields and Penny Lane is not on Sergeant Pepper. No, they seem to be long, but the record album wouldn't be better with them on. It would just be longer. You know, those two songs were supposed to be heard the way. 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 belt out Penny Lane, a performance that's going to continue to get all kinds of crazy accolades? Also, thanks to the trumpeteer. Oh, the marine trumpet, they played that high trumpet power. It 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 just setting us 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 at the beginning, and I hosted the Letterman show one time when David was ill. And I played 32 appearances on that show

in many, many different configurations. There's some of them where I look at them and I go, something makes you tighten up 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 have sort of, Funny enough, they're Lennon and McCartney. One is live aid, because I had nothing to lose. I was on my own. I was an intermission act. You know what that is? You know, the shicky one while they make putting the other man up.

I mean, that's the third really bad piece of news for the attractions was like when Geldorf called me in Australia and said, I want you to do live aid. I said, 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 think we were successful enough.

And he was having me on for sentiment. And he needed to have the time to set up like... I love the Boomtown Rats. No, but it was between Spander Ballet and Nick Kircher or something. You know, there were like a couple of bands that were really in the charts. But, you know, when you're trying to raise money for people in a famine, you don't need some guy that nobody remembers. Was it really that long of a time period?

Yeah, well, it 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, oh, 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 was true when Paul got the Gershman thing, because he, you know, to be honest, everybody there that day had been very nervous. And the producer said to me, have you gotten 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 less than my mile from Penny Lane So I made this thing up about how we heard it on the radio And everybody in the family listened Which was sort of true because my parents did listen to the Beatles And appreciate them And the fact that there were local lads made good People that didn't really like that kind of music

Like the idea of their success It was a very different world, very class-bound world Then you know So there was a pride them coming from Liverpool even though they quickly moved out of Liverpool and I just thought fuck it I'm just going to enjoy myself 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 you know good choice of song and good choice might have been a good choice of

like I'll just be here this one time I've been there once since with my wife when she played the Christmas party so the but I mean it was it was it was really threatened It was looked down and there's Paul and there's the president. And 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 believable. It's the pop success in England was 77 to 80. and then this fluke hit with Goodyear for the Roses and by the time we got to the time of 85 we were But you had every day I write the book? It wasn't a hit in England, not really,

just scraped the charts but it was very much like That guy again, no, don't think so Shipbuilding was a bigger hit than every day. Shipbuilding, right? Not my version, Robert Wyatt'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. row 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. I knew Bob. Geldof, he was the kind of guy that would come backstage

and tell you you were shite, you know, after. He'd always be first in the dressing room when he came off and be with Phil Linnet from Thin-Dizzy and drink all your beer and everything. But he was mouthy 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 80s in England. We were gone. At the time that that was all happening, we were playing to like 10,000 people in places in Chicago and things like that. We were playing to big audiences at that time. Because of every day I write the book, built everybody that had sort of vaguely heard of us in the late 70s then woke up to our existence,

the broader audience that didn't follow us from, day one, that one little minor hit. And we've got on like, what was it, solid gold, that kind of thing. That's the only time we were ever on mainstream kind of music television other than SNL. And at that time, we began the kind of run from about 82 onwards of being appearing on late-night television. And that was nearly all on the Letterman show.

I did the Tonight Show once. What, with Carson? Or Leno? It was during the Carson era, but it was John Rivers. Okay. And then I did, you know, Jay, a couple of times, but twice or three times. Compared with stuff in New York, nothing so much, you know? Yeah, I guess I just, I was in America during the 80s,

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 up 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 know of mine is she because it was in a big movie. But in Holland, it's I want you. So that would be never got on the radio in America. It's too long, you know. I was rocking good, bright, cruel world. I know, no, no.

Windows down, blasting it. You're the only one. You're the only one. 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, sort of flag-waving numbers with all this stuff in the mid-80s. I mean, you should have the people that get the money over the counter.

That's what you needed to do is raise the money. So get all the people they recognize that were 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 write. My favorite one is I want to be loved. Yeah, that's a good record. So, Teacher's Edition. Is that the name? The teacher's edition, yeah. It's on high. It's a Willie Mitchell production, yeah.

Did you feel abandoned at that point by your fan base or by any? No, no, I mean, I think there's people that, you know, the band wasn't really, you know, we went in to make that first record with Clive Langer. And, you know, out of that, there were two really. great records, you know, that have nothing to do with the main thrust of those records that are pills and soap, which was recorded before it, which I produced, and shipbuilding, which Clive and I wrote for Robert Wyatt, but I wanted to, more people in the world to hear it, and Robert's version didn't seem to travel outside of England, so we cut it and we got

Chek Baker and that was amazing, 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, and when you chase a hit record like that, maybe that's why I don't. A hit single or a 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 horn-driven, but it wasn't. He had so many hits at that time, Clive and Alan and 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 lack of cohesion and the band by the second record because we were falling apart. You know, we were all singing a different tune. Right, but if you look at those two records.

Hold on, I'm making a case. 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 accrued. acoustic guitar on a lot of those songs, which is what connects the listener directly to the song,

despite the production. Oh, yeah. 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 what 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 there isn't an acoustic guitar. I know, but it's still, but it's fine. But it's fighting the bass and keyboard. 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, cruel world, thinking this is the end. Oh, yeah. You did? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was definitely out at that point, yeah.

Oh. I was out. By the time you titled the album, you felt you were already out. I didn't even want the record to come out. I went on the road as solo before the record even came out. I already knew it was a dud. But we were already committed to the release by then. But there were hits, only Flaming Town.

Here. A little bit, yeah. Because Darrell was hang on it. Darrell was good about you. That was fun. That video was fun to do. Yeah. Win a date, right?

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 not going to look that great standing next to Darrell, you know. You want to go watch and play drums? I got to go. I'm going to get up and what time is it? I don't know. About 1 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.

Wherever it is. Let's go down and ask him a couple of questions down in the booth now. Okay. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your music. Thank you for everything. It's pretty 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, we should. You two can talk for 20 hours. That was pretty funny. We'll set up a marathon, talkathon for you guys. But thank you for including me in your catalog. Oh, man. Are you kidding? This is great.

There's always 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 room, actually. Yeah, you've never done a full record here, right? No. No, no, we did a little bit of those.

work on look now in here. Right. A couple of things. You've got to get electric in here now. I bet. Yeah, we'd never done that. All right. All right, man. Thank you, Elvis. Thank you. Bye, bye.

Thank you. It's probably 2 o'clock in the morning. Say, Lovie. 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, and we've lost. And we're going to be taken over.

Hey, oh, let me hit here. Whoa. This is my radio station now. Someone at the door. Let me end. Now, we're going to have 24 hours with Elvis Costello. That's the new 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 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. West Love Supreme is a production of IHeart Radio.

For more podcasts from My Heart, Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media.

Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to the Clifford show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed.

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The director of the NFL's East West Shrine Bowl, Eric Galco, joins the Sports Slice podcast to break down what really matters when evaluating draft prospects. From hidden traits teams look for to the biggest mistakes franchises make, to the players flying under the radar. This is the insight you won't hear anywhere else. If you want to understand the draft like an insider, you don't want to miss this episode. Listen to the Sports Slice podcast on the Iheart Radio app,

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