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Elvis Costello’s acclaimed collaboration with Burt Bacharach, the moody and lovelorn Painted From Memory (Mercury), inspired Costello to set aside his 6-string and compose at the piano. “Burt and I agreed these were going to be lost-love songs,” he says, “and bringing the harsher, guitar-oriented sounds of my earlier compositions to bear on this group of songs would be perverse and counter-productive. “ In fact, Costello has used the piano as his main compositional tool for the past ten years. A traitor? Perhaps, but it’s just Costello’s way of keeping his writing fresh.
“With the piano, all the possibilities are right there in front of you,” explains Costello. “Whereas when I write on the guitar, I tend to just fall into patterns. But whatever instrument I’ve used to write songs, I’ve always been able to hear melody in my head, and I’ve always been able to understand harmony instinctively. I never bothered with formal harmony lessons because I think it’s better to learn by trial and error - that way you come across things that really excite you.
“For example, it’s one thing to look at Burt’s scores after the fact and try to analyze what he has done. But when you’re actually watching him come up with something and it has these unusual quirks of meter, and this very distinctive harmonic language – and you’re trying to enter into some kind of dialogue inside the song – well you can’t help but be influenced by that. It was the experience of seeing his process that brought out the very best in me as a songwriter.”
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