Video: The Roots and John Legend on Their Soul LP 'Wake Up'

Tweet

John Legend and the Roots' ?uestlove recently stopped by the Rolling Stone offices to preview their upcoming "gritty and raw" soul collaboration Wake Up! . The LP features Legend and the Roots adding some funk flavor to socially conscious songs by soul legends like Donny Hathaway, Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye while putting a modern twist to obscure cuts like Baby Huey and the Babysitters' "Hard Times," with ?uestlove calling their rendition "the funkiest song ever created in the last 10 years."

The Roots drummer says Wake Up! is "a reaction to what passes as soul music." "Black music, all forms of it, lost the emotional spirituality and realness that it once had," ?uestlove tells RS. "With hip-hop, although they sample '70s music, they dress it up with very contemporary flourishing… with this record, I get to become vicariously a member of the JB's," referring to James Brown's legendary backing band. For more on Wake Up!, due out September 21st, check out the video above and The Roots, John Legend Refresh Sixties Protest Songs on 'Wake Up.'

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES The 10 Best Zombie Movie Scenes
• 
  TV The Most WTF? Moments of 'Mad Men'
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter