Review of Painted From Memory
New Yorker, 1998-10-19
- Nancy Franklin


DEPT. OF GIVE AND TAKE

A Master and a maverick make beautiful music together.

        The secret is out:  Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello have given birth
to a love child.  The baby's name is "Painted from Memory," and, although it is
only two weeks old, it already seems to have qualities that you just don't see
in most babies.  Sure, all babies are cute, but this one is unusually engaging.
The obvious question is:  Who does the baby look like?  Well, in some ways it
resembles Burt, and it may remind you of a few of his older children by a
previous marriage, such as "Walk on By" and "Anyone Who Had a Heart." 
      But Elvis is in there, too.  That pained quality?  That intelligence?  That
exquisite sense of loss? That's Elvis.  But mainly this baby looks like itself:
familiar but completely new, not a simple sum of its parts but something
indivisible and unique.  You can see this golden child yourself this week, when
the proud parents present it in public for the first time, at Radio City Music
Hall.  Bacharach will play piano and conduct a twenty-four-piece orchestra, and
Costello will sing.  You don't have to bring a present, but you do have to buy a
ticket.  And it wouldn't kill you to dress up a little bit for a change.
        A couple of months before the due date, Bacharach and Costello were in
New York to talk about their collaboration.  Costello sat at a large table in
the headquarters of Mercury Records, the OB-GYN, and Bacharach appeared
to sit inside a video monitor on top of the table.  Such is the miracle of
videoconferencing; in reality, he was in Del Mar, California, in a rented beach
house, with his wife, Jane, and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Raleigh.
A few years ago, Costello and Bacharach were asked to contribute a song to the
Allison Anders move "Grace of My Heart."  They wrote the song "God Give
Me Strength," a beautifully aching ballad, without ever being in the same
room together: never have fax and answering machines been put to better use.
        "It's always like a blind date," Bacharach said of collaborating.  "The
first time you go out, you don't know how it's going to be to sit in a room with
them."  Even after they'd written the song, he said, the real test of the
partnership didn't come until they were in the recording studio.  "It really
felt good," he said.  "We didn't have a hard moment in the whole process.  We
thought, Maybe we should do this again.  Maybe we should go out on another
date."
        During the next two years, they got together for four- or five-day work
sessions every few months.  Both of them wanted to create a feeling of
simplicity--a process that turned out to be far from easy.  "This idea of
keeping the words simple was quite frightening to me," Costello said. "I'm used
to hiding behind mannerisms and gestures and rhyme schemes."  At the beginning
of their work on one of the songs, "This House Is Empty Now," Bacharach sang the
word "remember" while playing a passage on the piano; that single utterance
stayed with Costello and virtually determined the lyrical outcome of the song.
In addition to being a story about people breaking up, Costello said, the song
reflected his own fears of not measuring up:  "I was afraid that at the most
exciting prospect in my life musically, there would be no answer lyrically.
That's why the song means so much to me, because when I worked it out that
solved the problem, and then everything flowed."
        Bacharach, for his part, said that he tried to make his melodies a
little easier for mere mortals to sing.  "In the past, I've made things more
complicated than I should have.  In 'Promises, Promises,' say--I made that
really hard on singers.  Maybe Dionne could get through it, but other singers
were under duress the whole way.  I like to challenge listeners, but I don't
want to wear them out."
        Costello said he's noticed that women have responded to the new album in
a more emotional way than they have to his other music.  He thought that might
have something to do with the Bacharach aura.  He said, "There's an elegance and
a gentleness to the way the music is expressed that comes out in his presence."
Costello's aura is a little different:  "I do seem to scare people.  I don't
know why.  I always have, since I was a kid.  People react to Burt in a much
more affectionate way."  He wasn't bothered by this, though, and he said he'd
be glad if Bacharach's appeal expanded his audience:  "If a consequence of
working with Burt is that the Burt love vibe brings in the babes, that's fine."

--NANCY FRANKLIN