Robert Baird

"I mixed it before we recorded it."

There are a lot artists who try as you and they might, never really grab ya. Then there are those who made one single that for some odd reason touched you. No, not there! In the heart or the head or some combination of both. Most are pop artists. And most of these one track wonders fall into the category of the "guilty pleasure."

In football there's a saying to describe an unexpected outcome: "That why they play the games." The recorded music equivalent might be "That's why you have to listen to the records."

This collaboration, an inspired pairing of Costello and ?uestlove, a pair of deep tracks music historians, seemed promising in the extreme. The resulting Wise Up Ghost is just that. Extremely promising, yet not entirely memorable.

"I thought it would be really nice to have a Christmas compilation done with the highest sound quality possible."

As we all know, the focus of Stereophile's music section, and rightly so, is recorded music. But in my unsubtle opinion, music writers or just music fans who only listen to recorded music and never see anything performed live, are missing half the ballgame. If the only way you know a certain artist is through their records, then sorry to say, and yes, I know that not everyone lives in a city where they can see live music, you’re only getting half the story. I know critics who've been let go because they basically refused to go out to see live music. They were happy to stay home—hey, no traffic, no lines, no fighting the elements, sounds good to me—and listen to CDs or LPs. Unfortunately though, while they may have stayed comfy cozy at home, their opinions on music ended up having only a certain amount of value. The X factor about seeing music live versus hearing it on record is that often you have to see the music performed live to make any sense of the record. Though rare, it can also work in reverse as well: you have to listen to the record to make sense of a live show.