Elvis Costello has appeared three times on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” each time enlisting Fallon’s house band the Roots to join him. The musicians have reimagined old Costello tracks, explored new ones and offered innovative interpretations of Bruce Springsteen and Nina Simone. During the past four years, these seemingly one-off performances have evolved into something far more significant.
In January, Roots drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson revealed to Billboard that the artists had been secretly recording music together, holing up in a studio with producer Steven Mandel. The sessions transformed from an experiment to an actual project, and Costello and the Roots will release a collaborative album, “Wise Up Ghost,” Sept. 17 on Blue Note.
“I wasn’t even thinking about making any records when they said, ‘Do you want to do something?'” Costello says on the phone while finishing a two-month solo trek in Europe. “I’m very glad that it did cross their minds that we might want to do more than just one song on a television show. We didn’t tell anybody we were doing it, and the next thing [you know] we’d made four [songs] and then we’d made 20.”
The idea was to re-examine the artists’ past material and plot each track as a new landscape imagined by both acts. Recording took place between August 2012 and January 2013 at “Feliz Habitat Studios and Costello’s own Hookery Crookery Studios,” according to the story that Costello and Thompson tell, but neither actually exists and the real recording locations are undisclosed. Thompson, Costello and Mandel shared the production duties and treated the project like a hip-hop album, mixing as they went along instead of tracking. The musicians constantly added new layers and invited La Santa Cecilia singer Marisoul “La Marisoul” Hernandez to guest on a track. The process was new for Costello, but had its benefits.
“In this way of working there tend not to be any outtakes,” Costello says. “You finish everything that’s of value. The 12 songs you hear in the main album tell a pretty good story and they fit together. The transitions, particularly now with the string orchestration, help the flow of the music.”
Three additional songs will appear on the deluxe version of “Wise Up Ghost.” Costello refers to the bonus collection as “an EP and a companion to the main record.” The overall process was all done in secret — so much so that Blue Note Records president Don Was only found out about the album incidentally.
“I got wind of this way before anybody did,” Was says. “I was speaking to Elvis’ manager about something else and he said, ‘By the way, this is something that’s going on.’ He sent me three rough mixes and it was amazing. The thing that struck me was that conceptually it’s so intriguing. We had to have it.”
Was was also integral in deciding the album’s visual aesthetic. Costello’s lyrics reminded Was so much of San Francisco beat poetry that he mailed him a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” and suggested the CD packaging should resemble the literary releases of the city’s City Lights Books. The album’s deluxe edition features a 68-page book modeled after the publisher.
For Was and the label, the strategy behind “Wise Up Ghost” is simple — let people know it exists. The artists will come full circle when they perform new tracks on “Fallon” during release week.
At this point touring isn’t part of the promotional strategy — the Roots’ day job and Costello’s constant solo dates make a long stint on the road impossible. But the idea of live performances, which Was says “are being discussed,” feels important to Costello, who sees these songs coming fully alive onstage.
“It would be a tremendous shame if we didn’t get to perform this music and see what happens when we do play it all at once,” Costello says.
The album aptly fuses the two artists’ styles as heard on debut single “Walk Us Uptown.” Was says there’s a benefit to releasing something so unexpectedly because it automatically drives additional interest and unites two disparate fan bases. But for Costello, who released a joint album with Burt Bacharach in 1999, this is just another entry in his catalog.
“Everything in music is a collaboration of some kind, and that [idea] is missed when the collaborators come from different worlds of music,” Costello says. “The first reaction when they saw the two names in the billing is ‘What?’ And then they hear it.”