Interview with Elvis Costello
Interview, 2002-05-01
- Dimitri Ehrlich
Music's master craftsman shares his songwriting secrets.
Dimitri Ehrlich: In addition to your new album, When I Was Cruel
[Island Records], you recently did a short tour for the Concerts for
a Landmine Free World in Europe, you're currently the artist in residence
at UCLA Live, you're collaborating with the playwright and filmmaker
Neil LaBute, as well as with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony
Orchestra for your first full orchestral score, and you're hitting the
road for a big tour.
Elvis Costello: Yeah. I gotta lie down now.
DE: [laughs] And take a nap.
EC: You're making me tired just saying it. I was fine until you started
to list it. I've never thought about it like that.
DE: And, coolest of all, you're appearing in an episode of The
Simpsons.
EC: That's a pretty good hit, isn't it, that one.
DE: It's the best. Have you found that as the creative floodgates
open in your professional life that you're also becoming more creative
in dealing with your personal life?
EC: What personal life? [both laugh] You know where my wife is at
the moment? In Brazil, sailing down the Amazon. She went there to get
away from me. No, she went there because she wanted to see it, and I
knew I'd be working like crazy for a couple of weeks. So that's an indication--I
don't get to go on the big adventure because I couldn't fit that in.
But I never was very good at anaconda wrestling, anyway.
DE: [laughs] Right. I'd like to ask you about some of the lyrics
on the new record. In the song ". . . Dust" you say, "Now
there's a name for you but it's stuck in my throat," and it reminded
me of something I read that Bob Dylan said once about how every mean
line he ever wrote was really about himself.
EC: I absolutely agree with that. You have to be prepared to address
them all to yourself if you're going to have the temerity to address
them to anybody else, you know?
DE: One of my favorite "dis" lines is in "Episode
of Blonde": "Though she had the attention span of warm cellophane
/ her lovers fell like skittles in a 10-pin bowling lane." That
can't be about you, obviously.
EC: No. But there's a real surfeit of blondeness in the world, isn't
there? And I don't have anyone particular in mind so much as the cult
of blondeness. And it isn't even the color anymore. It's more of a frame
of mind. There is something kind of absurd about people who live in
such a comfortable, cushioned, spoiled society tattooing themselves
and piercing themselves to make them appear tribal. We're trying to
act like we're some sort of tribe that's been discovered in the mall.
DE: [laughs] In "Alibi" you say, "I love you just
as much as I hate your guts." It's one of the lines that just pops
out of the album, maybe because you encapsulate such a common emotion,
but you do it so quickly.
EC: Well, it's not so much addressed at one person. I was brought
up Catholic, so I have this terrible tendency to forgive people, you
know. A lot of those Catholic ideas are very sound. It's repressing
the women and homosexuals part of it I'm not so hot on. But the forgiving
everybody and loving everybody bit I'm quite keen about. But the song
we're speaking about contains all these excuses--alibi's another word
for excuses--and what I'm saying is, I do really want to love my neighbor,
but then I also want to hate them sometimes. Also, like anybody vain
and stupid--in other words a human--I love myself too much and also
loathe myself in equal measure.
DE: Do you consider music religious?
EC: Well, I had this extraordinary experience last year when I was
visiting Ethiopia. On Easter Saturday we spent six hours in church,
listening to this phenomenal, what I can only describe as a blues Mass,
because that's what it sounded like to my untutored ear. It was in this
stone-cut church which they cut into the side of a mountain. Nobody
knows how it was made. And there were people there who had been fasting
literally 40 days. And there were these graves, which have long since
been emptied of the first inhabitants, so now there are just these apertures
in the floor of the church and people are sleeping in them, so that
at midnight they can rise up like Jesus.
DE: Wow. That's church.
EC: That's church. It was the most hypnotic, most beautiful religious
musical experience I've had since when I was about nine, when I used
to sing the Latin Mass for three hours. And there's nothing like that
in the modern Western world. Ethiopians are living very poor, very difficult
lives, but in one essential way, there's a connection between the rhythm
of this enormously arduous life with all its deprivations and privations,
and this kind of belief and this kind of expression, and the mystery
of it. Which is certainly lost from most ceremonial music. It's amazing
to think we're only 200 years away from nearly all music being ceremonial.
DE: Pop music is so ubiquitous, it's easy to forget it was once
considered a radical idea.
EC: Remember, Beethoven was thought of as being some dangerous radical
for proposing personal expression outside the realm of music for the
great glory of a king or God. And we're only 500 years away from there
being debate in the most senior authority in the world about whether
there should be harmony in music.
DE: And astonishingly, only one year ago in Afghanistan pop music
was illegal.
EC: Yeah, and that's a very kind of crude version, as brutal as it
is, of the enormity of this idea that music should only serve religion.
DE: Because pop music serves an audience, I'm wondering how much
your listeners' expectations affect you. Are you able to create without
worrying about the result?
EC: I care what people think once the thing is created. But as I'm
trying to write, usually it comes to me in a very odd way. Most of the
time, it comes quite quickly; or if I write part of a song, and then
ages later I write the rest of it, I certainly haven't been thinking
all the time, Well, how is this gonna sit with those people out there?
That might be one small percentage that is the show biz bit of your
brain that kicks in from time to time. Bear in mind that I'm not this
pure folk artist; I'm not this pure anything artist. There's a favorite
film of mine that has a character who's a clerk in an office, and he
gives it all up to go and be a modern artist. It's like a satire of
England's middle-class modern art in the '50s. He becomes a very celebrated
artist, and at the end of it he's asked how he creates his paints, and
he says, "In a bucket with a big stick." It's such a brilliant
line, because it's the way I feel about what I do. How do I write these
songs? In a bucket with a big stick.