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NEW YORK — By all rights, this should have been a critic's nightmare: I was to interview Elvis Costello, a famously tough-minded pop iconoclast who had often made it plain that he had precious little use for rock journalists. It seemed reasonable to assume that I hadn't endeared myself to him with any of the several negative reviews I had written of his latest string of albums — particularly when, feeling a tad zealous, I described the British singer as an "overreaching, redundant talent"
Obviously, I had overstated things a bit. If any artist of current times has displayed a consistent willingness to tackle knotty emotional and social issues — and if any artist has attempted to enrich the post-punk song form by forcing it to accommodate a renewed brand of pop classicism — then clearly it is the 30-year-old Costello, whose recording career still spans less than nine years. With his latest album, King of America, he has now issued 12 LPs comprising an incomparably wide range of styles and sounds.
The problem, at least for my tastes, is that as Costello's career progressed from the taut and taunting music of My Aim Is True and This Year's Model, his art took on a mannered complexity that often seemed more rococo than rock 'n' roll. By the time of Imperial Bedroom, Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World, the slicing vigor of his early sound had been supplanted by cumbersome structures and overworked melodies, and his once razor-sharp imagery was now obscured by a non-stop display of garish and often senseless wordplay.
Costello himself now declares that this frantic and cluttered sound partly reflected his experiences of the last few years: his confusion over the pros and cons of pop fame, his disillusion with the rock ethos, the distemper he felt from too much drinking and drug-taking, and the fluster he underwent in an on-again, off-again marriage.
In any event, if Costello harbored any resentment over my past criticisms, he never expressed It. Sitting in a small suite in Manhattan's Parker Meridien Hotel, dressed neatly in a dark suit, black shirt, black tie and black pork-pie hat, sipping occasionally at black tea as we talked, he was a model interview: bright, generous, good-humored, helpful and unerringly polite. He seemed just the antithesis of his early image as an acerbic personality and self-styled misanthrope. When he asked me to restate some of my criticisms of Imperial Bedroom, he did so without any implied indignation, and he listened attentively to my complaints.
"I'd agree with you that some of it is quite overfussy," he said in a fast-paced but calm voice. "Actually, the problem is that there are quite a lot of interesting musical ideas on the record that almost cancel each other out because they're all going on at once, but it was really my first effort at production. You see, I had become bored with the early sound we had. It was a rootless and fairly trashy hybrid, and I came to feel it didn't carry any emotional punch for me anymore. So it seemed necessary to try expressing ourselves in new forms. As a result, I admit, some of the final work is probably very convoluted.
"Still, I thought Imperial Bedroom was a good experiment, and a record that isn't defeated by time. It was also a much more interesting record than the two that followed it. Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World owe a lot to the sounds of the year they were made, and therefore they're a bit soulless to my ears now. In particular, the songs on Punch the Clock just aren't very substantial. Nobody's ever going to get over a broken heart from listening to 'Every Day I Write the Book,' that's for sure. But these are just the mistakes you make in the process of trying to grow."
Perhaps the relaxed manner Costello displayed owes something to the fresh turns in his life. The most emblematic of these changes is his recent decision to change his name back to Declan Patrick MacManus, a decision that he says was tantamount to reasserting control over his life. (To appease Columbia Records, he will continue to be billed on records for a while as Elvis Costello.) In a similar back-to-simplicity vein, his new album, King of America, is his most straightforward-sounding record in many years, a record as genuinely fetching as it is guilelessly revealing.
"There's no question that this new album is me being as open as I'm capable of being at the moment," he said, leaning back in his chair. "Despite all the rumors that have circulated about me in England this last year — that I had writer's block, that I was alcoholic — and despite the fact that I'm now getting divorced from my wife, I'm far from being unhappy. As a result, I even took songs off the record that I thought were too negative."
Although King of America is hardly a blithe work, it does achieve a loose, rather offhand manner that is uncommon even in Costello's best early sessions. Co-produced by Costello and T-Bone Burnett (with whom Costello sometimes performs and records under the name the Coward Brothers), and supported by a remarkably diverse and capable batch of backing ensembles (Including Jazz musicians Ray Brown and Earl Palmer, and core members of one of Elvis Presley's greatest bands), the album is a spirited sampler of unadorned, fundamental folk, pop and rock styles. In fact, like much of the best post-punk music of our time, King of America seems to be a record bent on renewing some of the better folk-and-pop idioms of the past, and quickening them with the themes and temper of modern times.
"Obviously," said Costello, "this record owes less to current pop sounds than any other I've ever made. That's because most current pop music is really dreadful and soulless, and doesn't serve my purposes as a lyricist. Consequently, I'm relying on what are fairly timeless idioms, and though they're American in one respect, they're also, by this time, simply universal folk forms.
"But more important, this was the first time in quite a while that I didn't worry the material to death. If I began to lose my nerve about a song, began to think I should change it around or add some fancy chords to it, T-Bone would say, 'Remember why you wrote this song in the first place.' He kept dragging me back to what the feeling of the tune was about, rather than worrying whether I had a good hook or a proper sound on the bass drum. The song was the thing, and he never let me forget that. By approaching it that way, we let the arrangements grow from the material, so that everything would be in service of the song.
"That's what was most satisfying about doing this record: All the various groups had their own way of supporting the song — or, more accurately, supporting the vocal. For example, playing in front of that old Elvis Presley band (guitarist James Burton, drummer Ron Tun and bassist Jerry Scheff) was unbelievable. They're like a punk band: They're very wild in the way they play, and it can almost be frightening to be in the same room with that much power. But even so, they never stepped on a song or a vocal; they have a much more supportive way of playing than modern bands have. Also, it was the authority these players brought to the sessions that gave the record whatever true American taste it has."
Beyond its musical resonance, Costello's new album has another connection to American values: It is, at least in part, a meditation on the nation's hopes and disillusions; but, in contrast to the pain-filled work of such American observers as Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp and Jackson Browne, Costello examines the country's allure and veneer from the perspective of a critical but admiring outsider.
"If anything," said Costello, "I think the album offers a very oblique statement about America. In fact, while it isn't exactly intended as a love letter, it is an attempt to inject a little love into the situation.
"I think it's embodied mainly in two of the songs: 'Brilliant Mistake' and 'American Without Tears.' Somebody asked me what I thought of Los Angeles when I was there. I said I thought it was a brilliant mistake, and I came to recognize that as a fairly good description of America as a whole. It's a country with great intentions, founded on noble principles, and it very rarely lives up to it all. But having said that, I also recognize that there's a lot about the place that remains great, and there's a lot of ambitions and dreams that America is still made up of. There are people still coming here looking for a new world, hoping there's going to be something for them: a living, a fair hearing, a fair deal, maybe sanctuary. But they don't all arrive wise to how complex the place is, and that's what 'Brilliant Mistake' is all about.
"The other song that comments directly on the theme is 'American Without Tears.' It's something of a love song because it's about these two Englishwomen who had come over here a long time ago with complete trust, and were accepted by this country. This is the song where I tried to redress this awful, mindless racism that is going on in England at present toward America. Many people there have this attitude, 'Take your foreign policy and your president and go to hell,' and they just damn millions of people here, without really thinking about it.
"But the song is just a small observation, based on a certain private story. Really, there are no heavy or wild generalizations about America in this record, and there are no political statements intended. I wanted to avoid pompous generalizations and just describe my own personal journey over here. That's all I have the right to talk about."
I asked Costello whether, in this season of renewed social activism in pop, he had felt tempted to make music that was more politically overt. "No," he replied without hesitation. "Certainly, there are some noble causes that people are taking on at the moment, but I'm not sure there's really any good music that's come of it yet. Worse I'm not sure it truly changes anything in the long run, other than that a lot of pop stars get to wear political halos for a bit. I mean, isn't it just going to end up like in the late '60s and early '70s where everybody was singing 'We can change the world,' but all they really changed were their bloody bank accounts? What did a record like Volunteers do except make some more money for RCA and for the Jefferson Airplane?
"It's all just a big charade. It doesn't change anything. It's the individual moments that matter far more than all this sitting around, patting ourselves on the back."
I told Costello I had to disagree — that I thought the grand gestures had some real merit. Costello seemed bemused. "You want to know what the best political song of last year was? 'Material Girl.' You want to know what the most political film was? Beverly Hills Cop. Here were examples of people seizing real power, in their own ways. I mean, who's going to be affected by Rambo who isn't already an idiot? Really, I don't think you should worry so much."
Still, King of America does include one rather biting piece of satire: a lusty cover of J.B. Lenoir's "Eisenhower Blues," with its rollicking warning that, though the times may seem carefree, rough days are lurking around the corner. "You must be able to see the joke in why one would do that song in this year," said Costello, smiling, "especially with the way so many Americans seem swept back into the ideal of some imagined past. But actually, the song bought its way on the record because of the spirit of the musicianship behind it.
"When we were finally assembling the album, 1 realized we needed to hold onto some of the lighter, more humorous pieces, otherwise the whole record would just end up arch and claustrophobic. You can't just keep piling on the agony, as it were. Life isn't like that."
Costello paused to sip at his tea, then glanced for a moment at the Manhattan skyline, turning dark against a snowy sky. In this moment, this one-time tough guy looked positively halcyon. "You know," he continued, "some journalist asked me the other day what I thought the headline of an article about me should be right now, and I said, 'Try this: "Life's Great: It's Official."' I mean, if you can't laugh with it all, what's the use? That's really why I call this record King of America. I think it's just the funniest title I've ever come up with."
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