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Rock star Elvis Costello proposed an unusual ice-breaker, when the time came to marry his sneering pop voice with the sweet classical strings of the London-based Brodsky Quartet.
He asked the Brodskys to write suicide notes.
"Obviously, not everyone in the Quartet has considered suicide, literally," Costello, 38, deadpans on the line from London, explaining how the arresting new album, The Juliet Letters, was born.
"But on one early occasion during our workshop sessions, we went home, wrote suicide notes and then came in and read them to one another.
"That in a way sounds very awkward and stiff, but it's a terrific way of breaking down your inhibitions to show each other unfinished work."
They must have been good notes. Costello and Quartet members Paul Cassidy, Michael Thomas, Jacqueline Thomas and Ian Belton worked together so well, they wrote and set to music not only the farewell missive, "Dear Sweet Filthy World," but also 19 other letters in a song sequence covering a range of human emotions, including lust, longing, sadness and annoyance.
The album title refers to real-life letters sent to the mythical Juliet Capulet, Romeo's love from Shakespeare's romantic tragedy, Romeo And Juliet.
It was inspired by a small story clipped from a newspaper by Costello's wife Cait, about a professor in Verona, Italy — Juliet's hometown. The professor had taken it upon himself to become Juliet's personal secretary, answering letters sent from around the globe addressed to the famous sweetheart.
"I don't know how he got them," Costello says, adding that he's never met or spoken with the professor. "Perhaps they went to the dead letter office."
Costello's match-up with the Brodsky Quartet is almost as romantic as Juliet's with the professor — or with Romeo.
It turns out that Costello, the original angry young man of rock's new wave movement of the late '70s, had for years admired the work of the Brodskys, who are internationally celebrated for their classical interpretations, especially the work of the late Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
In between his pop music projects, Costello says he would often slip away to hear the Brodskys play their violins and cello, even if it meant travelling to Paris or Dublin.
For their part, the Brodskys — all of whom are still in their early 30s, despite having performed together for 20 years — had long been secret fans of Costello's iconoclastic guitar rock.
"We sent him a boxed set of our Shostakovich, explaining how much we liked his work," says viola player Cassidy, in a separate interview. And by return post, he sent us all his albums."
Work on The Juliet Letters began in November, 1991, and Costello and Cassidy both describe the search for common ground between the pop and classical worlds as a broadening experience.
"When we had our first sessions, I was still playing things at the piano, singing them ideas, and sometimes members of the Quartet would write things down so we wouldn't forget them," Costello says.
By the next session, I was bringing in piano copy and by the last compositions I was writing them out in the full four-part form. But then, in the reverse of that, the Quartet members adapted to some of the oral tradition used by rock 'n' roll and jazz musicians."
Costello also absorbed a lot of classical music terms, words like "color" and "shading" which now pepper his conversation in a way he'd never have used for describing his own pop songs, such as "Watching The Detectives" and "Alison."
He also found that his vocal range is greater than he'd imagined: "Until recently, I thought my voice only went to B-flat. I've discovered I can get it up to B."
Costello dislikes doing interviews. But he's talking up The Juliet Letters both because he's proud of it, and also because he's worried that cynics in both pop and classical music will dismiss the album as an ill-advised lark.
"It's very easy for people to say, 'Oh, who the hell does he think he is? He's done all these other kinds of music, now he thinks he's a classical writer,' " Costello says.
"There's a tremendous amount of fear (about the album), some of which is being wilfully instilled in the potential audience by some small-minded people in the media: the classical people protecting their position, and some of the rock people who think they know better than I about how my career should be run."
Costello bristles about some British press reports that suggest he's following in the footsteps of his most famous musical collaborator, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.
The two have been penning tunes together for several years; two more appear on McCartney's new album, Off The Ground, and McCartney made the leap into classical music ahead of Costello in 1991, when he co-wrote Liverpool Oratorio with American composer Carl Davis.
It's just silly," Costello says. "It's like trying to compare Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. Both played the trumpet and they were both great, but it's just completely different structures of playing."
Costello and the Brodsky Quartet are eager to tour with The Juliet Letters. They'll be performing a few dates in the United States in March, and a Toronto performance later in the year is possible.
All Costello asks is that people don't try too hard to pigeonhole him, or his new pals in the Brodsky Quartet.
"It doesn't much matter whether you call it classical, call it rock, call it pop or call it vanilla — it's just stuff, you know?"
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