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Obvious really. A man as melancholy as Elvis Costello just had to hit the C&W bottle sooner or later.
It's always been there. The pain and the pity, the broken relationships, anguished love affairs, drink, self-destruction and death.
Happiness has never come easily to Elvis. When he hasn't been curling his lips around a couplet laced with venom, railing against life's injustices, he's carried this permanent air of sadness.
Emotionally wounded ballads have been wrung from his soul since "Alison." Isolate them and you'll find country music looking over their shoulder.
Not necessarily in the song structures — though the flirtations have existed — but in the mood. This is almost Elvis Costello's spiritual home.
And finding these songs must have made him feel he wasn't the only loser in the world.
The lyrics, simple and direct, are mostly no match for Costello's clever wordplay. But some, I'm sure, he would've been proud of.
The single for example, contains a line he could've written.
The one about the cigarette ends "lying cold as you left them, but at least your lips caressed them" or "the lip-print on a half-filled cup of coffee that you poured and didn't drink / But at least you thought you wanted it — that's so much more than I can say for me." Brilliant.
And his voice is perfect — no drawling whine from a check-shirted cowboy — this is Elvis singing more naturally than he's done before.
The rock songs, that nasal tone, the sneering, ranting, shouting, needs a concentrated effort to stretch the voice up and down the register.
On Almost Blue, his voice comes down a peg — it's richer, fuller, lingering over words he'd usually spit out.
The Attractions — no clues as to whether they shared their leader's enthusiasm for this project — are augmented by a US import, pedal steel guitarist John McFee, late of bands like Clover and the Doobies.
But it's still unmistakably Elvis and you'd have to be narrow-minded indeed not to appreciate the heartfelt rapport Elvis has with this music.
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