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It’s been ten years since Grammy-winning musician singer-songwriter Elvis Costello released a studio album with his long-time backing band The Imposters – keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas – but he’s remedying that with the release of new album Look Now.
That’s not to say Costello hasn’t been keeping characteristically busy for the past decade. He’s released two T Bone Burnett-produced albums – 2009’s Secret, Profane and Sugarcane and 2010’s National Ransom – as well as Wise Up Ghost, his 2013 collaboration with The Roots.
He has also performed hundreds of shows over the past decades – both with the Imposters and his successful, solo Detours storytelling tours – and written a memoir, 2015’s Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, but after touring with the Imposters over the past year, he realised now was the appropriate time to return to the studio.
“I’d reached a point where I realised I’d played a lot of songs I had already written and I wanted to hear (the band) showing what they could do on a group of newly recorded songs,” Costello tells U on Sunday.
“I had a head full of ideas there and I’d thought about making a record of this kind of character for about 20 years and I had a bunch of songs I’d written with Burt Bacharach and I just started to say, ‘these songs are too good to be waiting for an opportunity for them to be heard, why don’t we bring them outside, you know, into the light’,” he said.
Three of those Bacharach collaborations, He’s Given Me Things, Don’t Look Now and Photographs Can Lie, are on Look Now, and the latter two feature guest appearances from the iconic, now-90-year-old composer, who leads the band from piano for the two ballads.
Costello has said his intention for Look Now was to make an album that had the scope of his 1982 new wave/baroque-pop masterpiece Imperial Bedroom and the beauty and emotion of Painted from Memory – his 1998 collaboration with Bacharach – and it’s a goal he and his band have attained with aplomb.
“I call it ‘uptown pop’,” Costello says. “It’s not a rock ’n’ roll record with the guitars turned up loud; the rhythm section is really swinging and there’s space for the keyboards to be heard and then maybe a horn section or background noises filling in around the voice, and a story to be told.”
There are a plethora of stories being told on Look Now, including Under Lime, on which Costello continues to explore the ill-fated narrative of Jimmie, a character we first met on 2010 song Jimmie Standing in the Rain.
“There was just something poignant about Jimmie as I left him somewhat destitute and in ill-health, finding little comfort in arms of a woman who calls out the name of another man in a moment of passion,” Costello says.
“I thought, ‘well what would happen if he washed up on the shore of showbusiness 20 years later and now he’s even more disreputable and unreliable and they’re bringing him on to a panel show where they’re trying to guess his identity, because he’s sort of a forgotten figure of music hall.”
On the evocative Stripping Paper, Costello sings from the perspective of a woman ruminating on the dissolution of her marriage to her unfaithful husband. As she strips back layers of wallpaper, she recalls happier moments from their past.
“I don’t know why I imagined that idea,” Costello says, “but when I was a kid, some of the houses my family lived in were a little damp and the wallpaper would peel off and you’d discover there’s be a layer behind that and sometimes another behind that. I thought there was a way, there was a little image that could create a picture book of this woman’s life as it’s sort of unravelling.”
Costello has been a frequent visitor to Australia over the years, and says he and the band are keen to return.
“There have been some discussions about another visit and I always look forward to it,” he says. “Right now I don’t know the dates or the times that we would be visiting but the conversations continue.”
Look Now (Concord Records), out now.
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