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Twenty-one years ago, Elvis Costello galvanized the punk scene with his critically praised album My Aim Is True. Today, the Londoner who put the lyrics back into songwriting hasn't lost his integrity, his focus or his drive.
At 44, Costello's aim is still true, but alongside the many kudos for well over a dozen albums, he's received a lot of barbs. Costello's brazen repeated attempts to retool his musical style have cost him a few fans along the way, particularly the ones who fell for the throaty singer's early jerky melodies and venom-spewing vocals.
Costello's penchant for densely packed lyrics that weren't shy of a good pun or two made him part of the musical intelligentsia, and set him apart from the New Wave fray. Since then, he's continued to hold a unique and often misunderstood position somewhere outside the radio-friendly pack.
His most daunting and ambitious project to date had to be 1993's The Juliet Letters, a difficult song cycle he wrote with the string players of England's Brodsky Quartet.
Then there is his latest undertaking. Costello joined one of pop's greatest melody makers, Burt Bacharach, for a collaboration of love-lost and brooding songs called Painted From Memory. The two artists are performing songs from that album on a tour across North America (the shows include a half-hour each of their own solo material).
Their audiences are surprisingly young, says Costello, recalling a brief mobbing outside a Chicago theatre and the kids weren't there for Elvis.
"Burt's a babe magnet," says Costello. "He's very charming, and the ladies do love him."
The project could be slipped into the trendy lounge category if not for their smouldering, somewhat challenging sophistication. Bacharach is totally responsible for the music on only two of the songs; the remainder are musical collaborations. Costello, of course, wrote and sung the lyrics.
"We try to smoulder quite a bit," says Costello, on the phone from New York, where he and Bacharach appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. His polished London accent drips with only a hint of playful flippancy. Costello, like his work, doesn't get bogged down in easy sarcasm or irony. ("Now everybody is ironic the whole time," he quips. "It's like a lot of children learning how to swear.") He is well-spoken and intelligent, confident and humble all at once, casting off a remark about his own ingenuity with "I'm something of a dunce, actually."
Costello is serious, however, when it comes to his significant musical collaborations, which are rare. His first major collaboration was in 1987 with Paul McCartney, which spawned the 1989 hit "Veronica."
He's come away from his work with both McCartney and Bacharach with heartfelt admiration for both their instinctive abilities to sculpt intricately crafted and deeply memorable melodies and their dedication to artistic principle. When Costello tried to slip an extra syllable or two into one of Bacharach's melody lines, he learned Bacharach's music wasn't so adaptable to reshaping. Like McCartney, Bacharach resisted.
"Maybe that suggests that once they get a good tune they defend it against any kind of diluting it, and that may be why their tunes have ended up being so memorable," observes Costello. "And why people know my songs, but they don't know them for the tunes so muck."
The difference between Costello's collaborators, however, is that while McCartney has enjoyed critical acclaim, Bacharach's light and airy '6os pop style has garnered him a somewhat schmaltzier reputation. Costello, who calls Bacharach a "guiding light" throughout his career, aims to change all that.
"I think people misread him sometimes because of the gentleness of the way his music is expressed," says Costello, citing the deceivingly complex arrangements of songs written with Hal David and sung by Dionne Warwick, such as "Anyone Who Had a Heart." "That isn't to say there isn't this churning sort of feeling going through the more emotional ballads. I know now from singing them, they are very intense to perform.
"People say they are easy listening, and if they are easy to listen to, I think that would be true because they are very accessible to the ear despite being immensely complex technically. But they don't hit you in the face with that complexity. They are never showing off."
If Costello has divided his fans once again, he's quick to dismiss any criticism. Costello is too confident in his abilities to apologize for stylistic changes or writing that is too obscure — criticisms frequently lobbed at him.
"My fans who are they?" he asks. "They are the people who come to the concerts. If there are 200 people who didn't come, another 200 come in their place. The difference between my career and someone else's is that I'm not concerned about the fact that rye changed.
"I have more confidence in my ability to build a new audience, otherwise I wouldn't have done The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky Quartet. I was aware of the fact that it wasn't going to be everybody's taste, but I had enough confidence to understand what was the value in it, just like this record.
"I had nothing to lose, really, and everything to gain from going off that way. And it's been very rewarding to find new people coming in and saying this is the first record of yours I've ever bought."
The latest criticism to be lobbed at Costello is that he stretched his vocal abilities too far on Painted From Memory, that he didn't live up to the perfection of previous Bacharach singers like Dionne Warwick or Dusty Springfield.
"I've read that I'm not a good enough singer for these Bacharach tunes, which is a bit rich given that I wrote half of them," he responds. "Come on down, anybody who wants to sing them better than me, because I'd love to hear the results of them singing with a more polished tone. Whether they can get at them emotionally the way I can, I'm not so sure."
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