Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

Pretty self-explanatory
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sweetest punch
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Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

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https://www.stereogum.com/2110439/black ... 6EAr3F1Qrc

Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello, DJ Premier, T-Bone Burnett, Nathaniel Rateliff, & Cassandra Wilson

That neurotransmitter you’re feeling is the activation of a new supergroup bridging the worlds of rap, rock, jazz, folk, and more. As Brooklyn Vegan points out, in an interview with The Crate 808 Hip Hop Podcast, lead Roots rapper Black Thought revealed the existence of Dopamine, a new project involving Elvis Costello, who once recorded a whole album with the Roots. Also on board are legendary hip-hop producer DJ Premier, Americana overlord T-Bone Burnett, roots rocker (not Roots rocker) Nathaniel Rateliff, and jazz icon Cassandra Wilson.

Regarding the sounds generated by this unlikely list of collaborators, Black Thought explained, “A really unusual sort of motley crew…it’s weird how the songs come to be. Essentially live instrumentation, Premier is right there and he sorta takes it and chops it up.” There’s no word on when we might hear this music, but Thought intimated that Dopamine is one of the projects we’ll be hearing from sooner rather than later.

In addition to a new Roots album and his long-gestating project with Danger Mouse, Black Thought says he and Premier have a whole set of music he intends to release as part of his Streams Of Thought series — and that “for the past year and some change” he’s been accumulating an album’s worth of tracks with Q-Tips. Interesting stuff! Though as anyone who read our We’ve Got A File On You interview knows, Black Thought is always up to interesting stuff. Check out the podcast interview below.
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And No Coffee Table
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Re: Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

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The Dopamine discussion starts around 47:30:

sweetest punch
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Re: Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

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Elvis talks about this project in this interview with Rolling Stone Deutschland: https://youtu.be/oW91_pghKWs (at 27:30 minutes in)
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sweetest punch
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Re: Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

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Preview of the Dopamine project at 2:33:00 (“a world premiere”): https://youtu.be/7EDvRsLdBdU
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Re: Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

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During his DJ set at Defend Vinyl in Liverpool on January 15th, about 2 hours 35 minutes in, Elvis played a track from this project called "Skeletons and Statues". - sample lyric - "The skeletons in their closets / Became the statues in their squares " The track was produced by T-Bone Burnett.

It includes a spoken vocal (rap?) by Elvis. Others playing or singing on the track include BlackThought, Kay Vincent, Rhiannon Giddens – banjo, vocals; Francesco Turrisi, accordion; Cassandra Wilson - vocals, T Bone Burnett – vocals and Nathaniel Rateliff.

No clue as to when this might be released, as it is still a "work in progress" according to Elvis.

MOOT
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Re: Black Thought Announces Dopamine, A Supergroup With Elvis Costello

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https://news.yahoo.com/hear-nathaniel-r ... Kyla4Id9dd

Hear Nathaniel Rateliff Join Forces With Rappers Jim Jones and Conway The Machine

Two years after Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats released “Survivor” on their album The Future, they are revisiting the track with help from rappers Jim Jones and Conway The Machine and producer Mike Cash. Check out a video for the new version of “Survivor” right here.

The collaboration between Rateliff and Cash goes back to 2019, when the producer began a multi-artist project called A Covenant with the aim of fusing together diverse styles of music. With help from mentor T-Bone Burnett, Cash brought together the Roots, Elvis Costello, Rateliff, Cassandra Wilson, DJ Premier, and others at a Catskills, New York studio.

“We created so much good content,” says Cash. “When you have all those people on a song, it’s fuckin’ dope. It’s genre-smashing music that we were just making for ourselves. We weren’t doing it to get any Top 40 hits or anything. We were just like, ‘Let’s go into the studio with people we really respect and make something different.'”

A Covenant was moved to the back burner once the pandemic hit and Burnett began focusing on other projects. But Ratefliff’s manager reached out to Cash in October 2022 to see if they could get back together and bring a hip-hop artist or two onto one of his recent songs. “He went, ‘Pick whoever you want,'” Cash says. “‘Here’s the song we want you to fuck with.'”

He gave him the Pro Tools file for “Survivor.” “I didn’t want to do it at first since I didn’t want to fuck with an existing piece of music,” says Cash. “I never want to mess with anyone else’s stuff. But they went, “‘Change it. Make it cool. Who do you want?’ I was doing stuff with Conway, and I knew Jim Jones forever. I was just like, ‘Do you want to do something cool?’ And they were like, ‘Fuck yeah!'”

Rateliff, Jones, and Conway convened at Cash’s studio. “I fuckin’ chopped the beat,” says Cash. “We put in spots for 16-bar verses for the guys to go in there and spit. And we hung out for like a day and a half. Everybody exchanged war stories, and talked about their background, how they got into music. They really clicked.'”

Rateliff brought his videographer in to chronicle the session. “A really cool video came out of it,” says Cash. “I was like, ‘If we’re all going to be together, let’s have a video showing us in the studio because people are going to think we just did this by bouncing files to each other. Let’s do a little behind-the-scenes video of us chilling.'”

The new version of “Survivor” is available today on Amazon Music, and it will hit streaming services in late April. There are no firm plans for future releases from Cash’s recent sessions, but he hopes people will get to hear the work in the near future. “When you work with T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, and Black Thought, the music is going to have a deep message,” says Cash. “It’s not for the faint of heart. But we’re making music as a collective. That’s my whole thing.”
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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