Guardian 1996-05-17 EC on ATUB This Year's Models They're the ones that got away, the songs that didn't fit into the master plan. But Elvis Costello has finally recorded them and they're some of his best. Here he gives a track-by-track rundown. I wanted to draw together songs I'd written over a longer period that hadn't fitted into my plans. I waited until I got a bunch of songs I was really proud of. I like the way the album title, All This Useless Beauty, works on people's imaginations, both in terms of the song itself and it being used to describe this collection. It's better than saying "15 of my greatest songs" or something. Not many people, unhappily, are aware of June Tabor. Two of my favourite songs I've written are the two that she's recorded "I Want To Vanish" and "All This Useless Beauty". Useless Beauty is specifically a woman's song, which is obvious from the words. I Want to Vanish is written more from the point of view of a man sitting up in the woods who has been discovered by a documentary film crew. They want to make his little craft a global entertainment and he doesn't want it. It happened to Doc Watson. They made him stick to playing acoustic guitar because he was supposed to be primitive. I think I'm a ballad singer who happens to be able to play rock 'n' roll, rather than the other way round. The most enduring song of my repertoire is a ballad - Alison. We got back to very simple rock'n' roll records on Blood and Chocolate and Brutal Youth, but there didn't seem to be a necessity for them here. It's old fashioned now, it's a bit like playing traditional jazz. Complicated Shadows is a very loose verios (version?) of a rock 'n' roll framework, which we've never played before. We never played anything like Shallow Grave before either. It was written with Paul McCartney and it was mostly his doing. He wrote more of the words than I did. Even the title. It isn't very typical for him, supposedly Mr Comfortable. It's this slightly frightening idea with this pop melody. The Other End Of The Telescope was written with Aimee Mann, but we weren't in the room together. It's a bit like the song I wrote with Burt Bacharach recently; what I call mail order songs. Your partner sends you whatever part of the composition you're not writing, in this case the music. Mostly my contribution was the words. She cit (cut?) it on her record, I think it's called Everything's Different Now. I've always loved the tune and I always wanted to record it. I felt I needed to change the words because it was specifically written for her and the situation she was in at the time. I kept the intro and then wrote a whole other story, so I feel a lot more like it's my song. A lot of these songs were written in very different arrangements. Little Atoms is one example, which works well as an acoustic guitar song, but as a record it didn't sound that original in that rendition. I wanted to make it a lot more literal and find sounds that played off the fantastic nature of the words. I might not have written Why Can't A Man Stand Alone? early in my career, but it's not all that far from some of the songs on This Years Model in terms of the philosohy of it. There's not a lot of difference between This Year's Girl and what the second verse of Why Can't A Man is saying, it's just say- ing it in a different tone of voice. Both songs are quite sympathetic, but the first song was always taken to be extremely aggressive; it was taken to be a put-down song, when it isn't really. It was more exasperated than aggressive. Complicate Shadows was originally for Johnny Cash. I sent it to him in a very different form. I had him sort of like Judge Dredd in my mind, a moral lawman. It's a big responsibility once you start pulling the trigger and pressing the electric switch and dropping the gas pellets; it's a difficult choice. It had to be terrifying enough, but mock terrifying. Poor Fractured Atlas was written for a woman to sing. It's about the way men make themselves important. Obviously it's not a comedy record, but I like funny thoughts that maybe people haven't had before. There is something really pathetic about the way men make the world a burden on their shoulders that women somehow can't understand. It excuses a lot of male behaviour that is pretty sad really. You Bowed Down was released by Roger McGuinn and, while it was great to hear him sing it, the production was very timid. His producer lost his nerve. He straightened out all the quirkier aspects, which I thought was a shame, and ended up making a sub-Tom Petty record out of it, which really is ironic. I think if it had been left to Roger he would have made a record like we've made out of it, with many more ideas in it.