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In some respects, Elvis Costello is the sum of his songs — his "oeuvre," as he once mocked a BBC interviewer for saying — but he is also a compilation of encounters with other musicians. Athletes chase wins, and bankers thrive on deals; Costello hungers after collaborations, which can then be processed into their by-products: recordings, friendships, gate receipts, ideas, and anecdotes.
Some people have him frozen in Lucite as the skinny, sneering, knock-kneed rocker with the Buddy Holly glasses and the New Wave suits who, in punk's wake, in the late seventies, unleashed a series of furious, lyrically tricky but not uncatchy albums and singles that still pop up on classic-rock radio or transgenerational playlists. Or else they are dimly aware of a restless and protean figure who amid the ripening of a career sampled, and often mastered, other genres and styles — a man of many talents and a few excesses. They may think he was authentic once and pretentious later. Among those who have paid attention the whole way, he may be best and most properly known for his stamina as a performer and his enduring prolificacy as a songwriter. "He can toss off an album in an afternoon," the producer T Bone Burnett, with whom Costello has made a few, says.
Yet his peers, if there can be said to be any, may consider him the industry's highest-ranking music nut; he's as much a fan as he is a participant, and his participation is relentless. He has evolved into one of the most spirited accomplices in tribute gigs, variety evenings, and extracurricular combinations. His enthusiasm for the work of others is now so deep and wide that his calendar strains with far-flung one-offs and barely compensated commitments. A jolly "Penny Lane" for Barack Obama and Paul McCartney at the White House, last June; a sly turn, last month, as master of ceremonies, and a warm performance of "Brilliant Mistake," in a limited-run T Bone Burnett revue featuring, among others, John Mellencamp, Ralph Stanley, Leon Russell, and Elton John; perhaps a pensive rearrangement of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" when he performs in December at the Oslo Spektrum, in honor of the Nobel Peace Prize. Costello has worked himself not just into the company of presidents and knights but also into the network of musicians' musicians and songwriters' songwriters, the confederation of lesser-known liner-note hot shots who are rarely separated by any more than two or three degrees.
He is too guileless a buff to be a snob, but he is discerning. In his younger days, he said nasty things about other acts, and still scoffs at a few that some hold dear. "I am really grossly offended by Led Zeppelin," he said in 1986. "Not only because they're total charlatans and thieves, but because it actually embarrasses me." He is unkind to the eighties. Once an avid creator of mix tapes and now a mischievous e-mailer of obscure MP3s, he's as canny as anyone at choosing songs to cover; he has a record geek's taste for the B side as well as a curator's love for the big ones. He doesn't shy away from "My Funny Valentine." Each episode of "Spectacle," his talk-and-jam cable-television program, demonstrates his pluck at taking on every section of the songbook, and in explaining why.
Conversation with Costello can veer in many directions. He knows a lot about a lot. Still, it inevitably fixes on his musical influences and alliances, and the circumstances leading up to them, and the opportunities and insights arising out of them — the recollection of each one opening, like a trapdoor, into a vast underground of other projects and encounters and innumerable chambers of musicological erudition. He'll talk your ear off. He'll drop some names. He'll say, "And Schubert, I mean, really. How great is Schubert? I mean, come on! Five hundred fucking songs!" It can sometimes seem that musicians live in a parallel universe populated only by other musicians and maybe a few alien non-musician life forms who, by virtue of their musical knowledge and interest, can breathe the air. There is no geography in this universe. There are no homes. There are just songs. You live in your own and visit others'.
One evening last spring, Costello, who is fifty-six, found himself in the wine country of Northern California, as the closing act of the Sonoma Jazz Festival, which was more or less jazzless; he was preceded by Crosby, Stills & Nash, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Neville Brothers. He was the only one with any new material to speak of. He had flown in a group that has come to be called the Sugarcanes — six of Nashville's finest acoustic players, with whom he'd released one album, in 2009, and just recorded another, out this month. He has been touring with them, off and on, for more than a year. For the Nashville guys, it was good work: they got to back an ace and play fresh, tasty material, for rock-and-roll pay. For Costello, it was a chance to perform his old songs with a crack ensemble in a traditional country-bluegrass context that had sometimes been the one in which they'd been conceived, if not originally executed. He also got to write new songs that suited the group well.
In a field backstage, there was a long, narrow tent divided into compartments, each of which, by way of a folding table, a clothing rack, a name on a piece of paper, and a plate of fruit and cheese, had become a dressing room. Costello got one, and the band got another. He had come up from San Francisco separately, in a chauffeured S.U.V. ("I am not going to talk all the way through, because of the voice, you know," he'd said, on Lombard Street, and then he'd talked all the way through.) He wandered in and out of the band's stall. Conversation bounced from bluegrassy personage to bluegrassy personage, as though from verse to verse, the unsung chorus being something along the lines of "The world has forgotten more than you will ever know." They segued from the New Lost City Ramblers ("They had sleeve garters!"), Roland and Clarence White ("Roland was there when Clarence got killed"), Spade Cooley ("Was that before or after he killed his wife?"), Richard Bennett ("He wrote 'Forever in Blue Jeans' with Neil Diamond"), and John Hughey's double-necked pedal steel guitar ("He called the country neck the 'Kroger neck,' 'cause that's what bought the groceries"). Costello soaked it all up, chiming in when he knew his business.
Robbie McLeod, his longtime tour manager, showed up and handed out cash for expenses — forty dollars a day for each musician. "Living the dream," Jeff Taylor, the accordionist, said. In the background, you could hear that the Neville Brothers had taken the stage. Costello — dressed in black jeans, a black hooded sweater, a coral-colored cashmere scarf, and what you might call a duck-hunting cap — pointed over his shoulders with his thumbs, and he and some of the guys hustled off to watch the Nevilles work their way through "Fever" and "Hey Pocky Way."
As the Nevilles' set went on, the Sugarcanes drifted back to the tent and changed into their party shirts. Mike Compton, the mandolin player, put a jacket on over his overalls. Jim Lauderdale, who plays guitar and sings harmonies, stood out in the field, in a cowboy shirt, doing Tai Chi. Pete Thomas, the drummer in Costello's foundational but defunct band, the Attractions, as well as its successor, the Imposters, and now performing with the Sugarcanes for the first time, tapped on a table with his drumsticks. After a while, Costello, too, disappeared into his stall to change. He emerged in a shiny silk midnight-blue suit, black patent-leather Chelsea boots, a blue shirt with white pin dots, a black-and-blue polka-dot tie, and a Stetson Gambler — one version of his performance costume of recent years, his unabashed yet half-ironic guise as the professional entertainer and itinerant rake. He was carrying a plastic bottle connected to what looked like a yellow gas mask. He pressed it to his mouth and inhaled deeply. "This is my 'Blue Velvet' device," he said. The bottle contained a eucalyptus solution, to soothe his throat. He was fighting a cold that he feared he'd caught from his twin sons, who are about to turn four. The bug had prevented them from coming along with him to Sonoma. When people asked how he was, he replied, "I'm good, apart from not having the boys with me."
"You left them?"
"Well, I haven't left them. They're with their mum" — the jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, to whom he has been married for seven years.
Still, the fumes, the costume, and the approach of showtime had energized him. He bounced on the balls of his feet and talked fast, even with the mask pressed to his lips. Anyone nearby was like an old friend encountered for the first time in years. He talked about a visit he'd just got from an Apollo astronaut, a friend of Krall's, and then about a musical he'd worked on with the playwright Sarah Ruhl. "Sarah wrote some scenes, I wrote some songs," he said. But all for naught. "Turns out someone else had a Memphis musical. Two Memphis musicals — what are the odds?" He darted into his tent stall and came out in a different hat. He was sucking on a lemon.
Taylor, the accordionist, gave him the head-to-toe. He said, "We're trying to dress like the Imposters, and you're dressed like a Sugarcane."
As showtime approached, he and the band fidgeted like groomsmen. A few of them looked over the set list. They opened with "Mystery Train," made famous by another Elvis, and then "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," by the Beatles, and then a country lament that Costello had written, called "Down Among the Wines and Spirits": "Down among the wines and spirits / where a man gets what he merits / Once it was written in letters of nine feet tall / And now he finds how far he's fallen." There was a d.j. logic to the sequence that the festival audience would likely miss — although they'd surely go for Costello's joke about the third number being just right for a wine-country fair.
The fifth song was "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," which opens with the lyric, written with prescience when Costello was in his early twenties, "Oh I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused." Back in 1977, he lip-synched it on the BBC's "Top of the Pops" with a curled lip and jutting jaw, his forehead tilted forward and his body jerking, as he crisply attacked his guitar. The impression was of lingering disgust. This was the persona that the Village Voice, in 1979, christened "the Avenging Dork," a confection of Buddy Holly and Johnny Rotten, an angry, aggrieved square. Thirty-plus years later, he and the Sugarcanes had turned the song into a tender country waltz, with a pedal-steel filigree that brought out a certain soulfulness in the song. Costello sang the hell out of it; his octaval reaches had the heft of testimony. There was amusement, too. Toward the end, he initiated a call-and-response with the audience, mugging and pointing each time the crowd hollered out the descending refrain, "Red shoes!" He struck lightly mocking rock-star poses.
Costello is several Elvises removed from the Avenging Dork. The first thing you notice now, watching his 1977 appearance on Top of the Pops, is how thin he was. Fame brought excess, and before long he had a comfortable build. An extra layer, unless it was there to begin with, can do as much as eclecticism or pretense to subvert a rocker's aura of waspish aplomb.
In the past two years or so, he has lost dozens of pounds, mainly, he says, to be in better shape to "take part in the life of these fellows that I've had," meaning his twin sons. He looks a bit more feral again, if more weathered. He has not eaten meat since he saw a documentary called The Animals Film, which inspired the angry political song "Pills and Soap." He works out regularly on a treadmill, listening to Sonny Rollins or Bartók. He hasn't had a drink in fourteen years. "I just stopped one day, and that was it," he told me. "Some things wear out quicker than others. I used to collect stamps, you know, and I don't do that anymore."
He still has the glasses; you could sort his career according to spectacle styles. The Buddy Holly ones ("Don't fucking take them off!" his first manager, Jake Riviera, told him) gave way to the dark shades of the "assisted insomnia" years and then the bigger, rounder ones of the Imperial Bedroom era — Tweety Bird meets Bob Evans. The Punch the Clock Elvis, an aspiring hitmaker in round wire-rims and mariner's cap, was earnest, dolorous, a little soft — he wrote the book every day, and made some cheesy music videos. Irony was restored, in 1986, with the addition of a befurred and bejewelled crown on the cover of the King of America LP. The heavy oblong architect frames of the past decade suggest a reclamation of the slickness, if not the insolence, of his earlier days — "cool dad aging snazzily," as Dai Griffiths, a lecturer in music at Oxford Brookes University, wrote, in a 2008 book about Costello. Recently, Elvis has been working the Buddy Hollys again.
There are also the hats. Jerry Douglas, the Dobro virtuoso who usually plays with the Sugarcanes, had helped Costello solve the problem of travelling with so many of them. Douglas had got Costello a hatbox, a hard black octagonal trunk, like a drum case. Costello now takes it everywhere, as though lugging around his past selves. I sneaked a peek inside the box one day at the mint-green Stetson, size 7½, with a blue-and-yellow band, purchased at Meyer the Hatter, in New Orleans. Costello asked me, "Does that one have that card in there?" It did, tucked into the sweatband. The card read "Like Hell It's Yours."
"I'm in show business," he told me. "If I want to wear big glasses and a hat, I will. If I want to wear a checkerboard suit, I will. That's why we're in it: it's dress-up. It's the play part of what we do. That doesn't mean there's no seriousness, no conscience, no lust, no desire, no humor. There's all of it." He cited the self-inventions of Edward G. Robinson, a Romanian immigrant who got his gangster act from the movies, and John Fogerty, of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who was born not on the bayou but in Berkeley. "Even people who we take to be the real deal did it. They made up a character for themselves. You had to have an act. There's some artistry attributed to rock 'n' roll where it's supposed to be more authentic than show business. I don't really hold to that."
Costello's current stage incarnation, in silk suit, polka dots, and hat, is that of a winking anachronism, a clever rogue who nonetheless sings his lungs out and sweats over the frets of his guitar. Some of his new Depression-era skiffles accentuate elements of the persona, without staking too great a claim. In "Sulphur to Sugarcane," from the last album and a fixture in his set, he plays the wandering roué: "If I could find a piano here in Bloomington, Indiana, I would play it with my toes until the girls all take their clothes off." In "Jimmie Standing in the Rain," off the new album, National Ransom — one of the singles he released early on a 78-r.p.m. record — he depicts the bleak wanderings of an outdated Jimmie Rodgers imitator in the rainy corners of England: "Nobody wants to buy counterfeited prairie lullaby in a colliery town / The hip flask and fumbled skein of some stage door Josephine is all you'll get now / Eyes going in and out of focus / Mild and bitter from tuberculosis." Costello is neither of these people, and, playacting aside, doesn't intend for his audience to mistake him for them, yet he can't help but have in mind the tease of comparison. "He conjures this character that's part of him, that's part of all of us," T Bone Burnett told me. "An entertainer. A song-and-dance man. He's not condescending to him, although I'm not sure he approves."
It can be hard to decipher where the act and the man meet. Costello's identity and his stature are each slippery enough to have attracted the attention even of a few academics, whose inquisitions — "Let us return to 'Pump It Up' " (see Brackett, p. 166) — conjure a character that can sound less like a person than like a piece of performance art. It's not so much that he has hidden himself from the public as that he has put forward so many versions of himself. He simultaneously rebuffs and courts interpretation. His songs are full of feints and revelations, musical and autobiographical allusions, shifting pronouns and murky antecedents. He is a serial coiner of alter egos. Among the names he has given himself are Napoleon Dynamite (nearly twenty years before the film of the same name), Howard Coward (an alleged long-lost son of Noël Coward and a brother and touring partner of Henry Coward, a.k.a. T Bone Burnett), Little Hands of Concrete (a heavy-handed mangler of guitar strings), the Beloved Entertainer (a lascivious concert-hall m.c.), Eamonn Singer, the Emotional Toothpaste, and the Imposter. In anticipation of the release of the new album, he posted a three-part interview a couple of months ago on his website, conducted by one Odile W. Husband, who is described as a correspondent for a Catholic journal called The Inquisitor but who sounds an awful lot like Howard Coward. Certainly, one way to avoid the press junket is to interview yourself.
"You can play with the distance between yourself and the persona, or the way you're perceived," he said. "And if people make certain assumptions, even the bad ones, those can keep the space around you so you can keep working." It's also true that his evasions lure people into that space, by inviting them to pay closer attention. They are at once smoke screens and peepholes.
The literature on Costello is as vast as the output that has inspired it. All told, there are ten or so books about him, not including a book-length, elliptically biographical exegesis of his album Armed Forces, or the roman à clef by the Attractions' former bassist, Bruce Thomas, about life on the road. (The portrayal in that book of Costello as The Singer, a self-absorbed and preening star, may have helped precipitate the author's exile from the Attractions.) In spite of Costello's noncoöperation in any of these endeavors, and his stated indifference to them, he has made himself abundantly available through the decades. Aside from the early years as an avatar of English punk and New Wave, when his somewhat cultivated hostility toward the press and his selective image management built up a kind of pressure cooker of curiosity, he has always been a prolific annotator and an expansive, if prickly, interviewee. He has perhaps explained himself too much; it's clear that he can't help himself. He wrote a book's worth of liner notes to accompany the rereleases, in the past decade, of his first seventeen albums; each album inspired a chapter-length account, relating the story of its creation, his contemporaneous thoughts on politics, recording equipment, self-medication, the state (vaguely) of his personal life, and the status (not as vaguely) of his ever-expanding universe of musical interests, acquaintances, and collaborators. It was essentially an autobiography, and he didn't get paid to write it. He is now working on a book about himself for Simon & Schuster.
The remark, likely first made by the comedian Martin Mull, that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," has often been attributed to Costello, probably because it conveys a suspicion of criticism that he shares. Also, he said it once. Costello doesn't think highly of most critics and journalists, even though critics and journalists, as opposed to, say, program directors or hip-hop producers, have traditionally been his biggest fans and most avid explainers. The playful complexity of his lyrics, pitched to the sneer or vigor of his voice, has always attracted a brainy, or at least a literate, audience. David Lee Roth, the lead singer of Van Halen, supposedly once remarked, "Music critics hate me and love Elvis Costello because they all look like Elvis Costello."
He can be hard to fix in the pop-star firmament. There isn't really anyone like him. To a certain crowd of people who were in school in 1977 and are now about fifty, Costello's stature can be almost Dylanesque. In some circles, he is considered to be the greatest songwriter of his generation. There are also plenty of twenty-five-year-olds and sixty-five-year-olds who have never heard of him. Maybe in high school the younger ones slow-danced to "Alison." Maybe the older ones saw him with Burt Bacharach on PBS.
"The handover from taste to value is crucial in determining whether an artist makes it to the canon," Dai Griffiths wrote in his Costello book. Griffiths attempts to collate some quantitative and qualitative measurements. In the category of "canon formation," he includes, in an appendix, a survey of Costello's positions on various all-time lists. He's had two Top Forty hits in the United States, "Everyday I Write the Book" (which he whipped off and thought very little of) and "Veronica" (which he wrote with Paul McCartney). Only one of Costello's albums, "Armed Forces," ever made the Top Ten in the States. His chart positions in the U.K. have almost always been much higher, but even there he has never had a No. 1 album. Rolling Stone, in 2004, named him the eightieth-greatest recording artist of all time.
Costello has no patience for any of it. "People question this, but I'm neither nostalgic nor do I have any particular yearning for posterity," Costello told me. He accepts that there are only so many McCartneys and Irving Berlins in the world, and that the time for a "Yesterday" or a "White Christmas" may have passed. "If you write a lot of songs, it's the same thing as having written one successful song. Some people would be happy to write one song, like the sisters who wrote 'Happy Birthday.' "
This summer, during a mixing session for the new album in Los Angeles, T Bone Burnett told me, "When you're young and coming up, you have to decide 'Where do I fit into everything — what's the pecking order?' Once you've been doing it as long as we have, that disappears."
Costello hates those all-time lists, but he has produced some lists of his own. A few years ago, he did two for Vanity Fair: the first was five hundred albums "essential to a happy life." He leaves his own off, explaining, "This is not false modesty. There are at least five hundred records better than everything that I've made." (Actually, that is false modesty.) The second was Rocking Around the Clock, music for every hour of the day (Mingus and reggae at 8 A.M.; Peggy Lee and Ray Charles at midnight). His curation is horizontal, not vertical; genre-wise, his mind works a bit like one of those impossibly complicated Pentagon PowerPoint presentations. As he wrote in his introduction to the first list, "It is my experience that music is more like water than a rhinoceros. It doesn't charge madly down one path. It runs away in every direction."
Costello has been swatting away at conceits and received opinions his whole career. "There are key quotes they keep repeating back to you," he said. One is the remark he made, to the journalist Nick Kent, in 1977 in a bar: "The only two things that matter to me . . . are revenge and guilt."
"I was kidding when I said it," he told me. He had also been drunk. That doesn't mean that there wasn't, at that moment, some truth to it, or that it didn't provide a prism through which to regard his work. What he scorns is the notion, typified by the trainspotter who seeks out the real Alison, that he left behind a remark like that as a kind of decoder ring, a key to understanding his character or his work.
"It's naturally bound to make you self-regarding, this business," he told me. "But in the assumption that everything you do is a trick, or is being done for effect, what's lost is that, actually, it's not. It's too much hard work to do some things for effect. I'm just doing things because I want to do them. Not even because I want to do them but because I am doing them. I'm not doing them thinking about how I look doing them. People who don't create anything think like that. 'What do I look like doing this?' Well, you look like a fucking idiot, actually. I'm not looking at my own reflection doing this — I'm actually doing it." This from a man in a Stetson and a polka-dot tie.
You don't have to be a trainspotter, anyway, to know that Costello's real name is Declan Patrick MacManus. He performed, as a young aspirant, under the stage name DP Costello, having reclaimed the "Costello" from his paternal great-grandmother, not so much to deëmphasize his ancestral Irishness as to give his name a lilt. When he signed his first contract, with Stiff Records, in 1977, his then manager, the Stiff co-founder and bluff Svengali Jake Riviera, persuaded him to change his name to Elvis, a bit of cheek that inadvertently became a provocation when the original Elvis died, within months of the release of Costello's début, My Aim Is True. He's used to it by now. Everyone but his family calls him Elvis. "I kind of like the fact that I've got a stage name after all these years, because it's part of the entertainer thing," he told me. "You know, Count Basie wasn't a count."
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The family name was nothing to run from. Costello's father, Ross MacManus, himself a musician's son, was a jazz trumpeter and a vocalist in the Joe Loss Orchestra, England's answer to Glenn Miller, which performed the hits of the day in dance halls and on radio and television. The acetates and advance-release singles Ross brought home each week, in order to learn his parts, became, for Costello, the foundation for a wide-ranging record collection, as well as a privileged education — Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Frank Sinatra, standards, R. & B. The Beatles would be his earliest taste of rock 'n' roll. The first record he bought with his own money was the "Twist and Shout" E.P. He was young enough, in the early sixties, to assume that "Roll Over Beethoven" was a Beatles composition.
Costello grew up in Twickenham, a London suburb. He was an only child in a household that was musical (his mother, Lillian, worked in record stores) but not harmonious; his parents separated when he was a boy. Costello's time hanging around the Joe Loss Orchestra, accompanying his father to performances and rehearsals, impressed on him the work required of a professional musician, and some of the due rewards. Ross's rendition, some years later, of the jingle "I'm a Secret Lemonade Drinker" in a television commercial for R. Whites lemonade — with Declan on bass and backup vocals, in his first-ever recording session — brought Ross a trivial but lasting kind of fame. Costello had seen his father sing "If I Had a Hammer" on the famous 1963 Royal Variety Performance broadcast, in which Burt Bacharach accompanied Marlene Dietrich, and John Lennon urged the Royals to rattle their jewelry. (You can find a delightful 1964 clip on YouTube of Ross MacManus playing a conga drum and singing "Patsy Girl," looking, with his glasses and his quizzical leer, a lot like Elvis Costello.) Costello remembers hanging around his father's band during their dance-hall gigs — "I'd sit up in the balcony with a bottle of pop and some crisps" — and learning such bits of pro wisdom as "Competition dancers don't like singers, because they pull the beat around." Sometimes, he got to meet visiting pop performers, like the Merseybeats, Graham Nash, and Engelbert Humperdinck.
Succumbing to the sixties, Ross quit Joe Loss to go solo, grew his hair long, embraced psychedelia, and took up with another woman. Divorce soon followed, and Costello, now sixteen, moved with his mother to Liverpool, where she was from (his father was from Birkenhead), and whose football club he'd long favored. He found Liverpool musically barren, or alien, anyway; people were into progressive rock and heavy metal, for which he had, and still has, no taste. "Deep Purple and all that. Horrible. There was only one kid in the class who liked soul." His father turned him on to the Grateful Dead, which became Costello's band, in part because it was no one else's. (While Costello makes no apologies for his Deadhead phase, his biographers always seem to.) It was through the Dead, and subsequently the Band and Gram Parsons, among others, that he discovered the traditional American music they'd tapped into, such as Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. This in turn became the foundation, along with the likes of Van Morrison, for the kind of music he was starting to write and perform himself, in an acoustic bar band he'd joined called Rusty. The Band's Rick Danko was a major influence on Costello's style of singing.
In 1973, Costello moved to London, to live with his father and insinuate himself into the pub-rock scene. He was nineteen. Pub rock, a punchy and uncommercial amalgam of blues, soul, folk, and country, was the era's rebuke to glam rock, and a precursor of punk. He formed a band called Flip City, and began developing larval versions of songs that would later appear on the first couple of albums he recorded as Elvis.
The following year, his girlfriend, Mary Burgoyne, got pregnant, so they married and moved into a flat adjacent to the one he grew up in, in Twickenham. They had a son, Matthew, who is now a musician. (He has worked on a few of his father's albums.) Costello worked as a data-entry technician at the headquarters of Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics company, a job that afforded him time to write, and that provided the basis for the exaggerated claim, when he emerged as Elvis Costello, that he was a computer programmer. ("My duties included printing out invoices for the moustache waxes of the occasional Duchess who visited the company's West End salon," he later wrote.) Meanwhile, he kept writing and performing with Flip City (sometimes in denim overalls) and giving his demos to every record company in town. Roundly ignored, he took to wandering around with a guitar, to deliver "impromptu auditions in the offices of startled publishers," as he wrote. "They tolerated my 'have-I-got-a-song-for-you' act with fixed smiles but still found time to take calls from their wives or bookies in mid-performance."
One day, he read about Stiff Records, a new label that had taken on Nick Lowe, whose band, Brinsley Schwarz, had become his pub-scene favorite. He delivered a tape and began hanging around. Originally encouraged to write songs for others, he wound up recording a first album's worth of them himself, backed by the members of Clover, a San Francisco band that eventually mutated into Huey Lewis and the News. Lowe produced it, insuring, as Costello put it later, "that nothing unnecessarily fancy got on to the tape." Costello's earlier songs, by his own reckoning, had been attempts at imitation of American songwriters like Hoagy Carmichael, Randy Newman, John Prine, and Lowell George. By dint of his own peculiar failings and talents, they started, on My Aim Is True, to sound like his own.
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The sources sank out of earshot, even if the mode of inspiration remained in place. Input begat output. "I spent a lot of time with just a big jar of instant coffee and the first Clash album, listening to it over and over," he recalled, in his liner notes. "By the time I got down to the last few grains, I had written 'Watching the Detectives.' The chorus had these darting figures that I wanted to sound like something from a Bernard Herrmann score." "Alison," written late at night, sotto voce so as not to wake his wife and son, was modelled partly on "Ghetto Child," by the Detroit Spinners.
As for the persona, it owed a little to the Clash's Joe Strummer and a lot to the process of elimination. "There were two types of rock 'n' roll that had become bankrupt to me," he told Musician in 1986. "One was 'Look at me, I've got a big hairy chest and a big willy!' and the other was the 'Fuck me, I'm so sensitive' Jackson Browne school of seduction." It evolved in his photo shoots. "It also seemed that the squarer I looked the better the camera liked it," Costello wrote. "The rest of the session reveals how comical the whole knock-kneed stance seemed to the photographer and the subject."
Auditions culled the three players who would become the Attractions. Pete Thomas's brisk drum attack, Bruce Thomas's high melodic bass figures, and Steve Nason's lush piano and jangly Vox organ would turn out to be as essential to Costello's sound, over his first and best ten years, as any felicity he had in turning a phrase. The four men lucked into that happy accident whereby a disjointed set of playing styles gels into an ingenious and distinctive whole. They were fierce. A tour of England with a few other Stiff acts sharpened them up and earned Nason the new name of Nieve (pronounced "naïve"), coined by the singer Ian Dury, after Nason wondered aloud, "What's a groupie?"
The angry-young-man character of those early days, while partly a manifestation of an inherent cantankerousness, a reflection of the times in England, and, who knows, maybe a vestige of being an only child from a broken home, was also an act devised and delineated by him and Jake Riviera, who used to rev him up before a performance. The Attractions called that Elvis "Mr. Angry." Still, his brand of punk, which wasn't really punk at all, was more melodious and crafty than most of the punk he rode in on.
My Aim Is True came out in July, 1977. Costello's American TV début came later that year, on Saturday Night Live. He and the Attractions, filling in for the Sex Pistols, began playing the loping intro to "Less Than Zero," his single. After a few notes, Costello yelled, "Stop! Stop!" and led the band into a speedy rendition of "Radio, Radio," a not-yet-released song about corporate control of the airwaves. Infuriated as much by the impudence as by the disruption and the wasted camera setups, Lorne Michaels, the S.N.L. executive producer, vowed, as legend has it, to keep Costello off the show forever. This instantly endeared Costello to a generation of TV comedy writers, who would, over the coming decades, deploy him, with varying admixtures of irony and reverence, in dozens of shows and films. As a result, he has become a king of the cameo, as well as a deft talk-show duellist and a capable m.c. He's had a sly television career, turning up regularly in recent years — Two and a Half Men, The Simpsons, Treme — to remind people he's still here and not taking himself as seriously as his records sometimes suggest.
Eight months after the release of My Aim Is True, the second album, This Year's Model, thrust Costello into a frenzy of transatlantic rock stardom that he and his mates did not handle very well — or, perhaps, handled perfectly. "I sort of watched it spin out of control, knowing it was happening," he told me. "It had a feeling like being on drugs. I quite enjoyed the disorienting feeling for a while." By the January, 1979, release of Armed Forces, a more mannered album, with great pop ambitions — its sources of inspiration were David Bowie, ABBA, Kraftwerk, and Cheap Trick, among others — Costello had started to hate himself, as he later wrote, for "the personal attention that I was receiving and the unpleasant character that I felt I was becoming. I had left my family home and was living a totally willful life with little sense of gravity. I surrendered to temptation, committed selfish acts of betrayal, and destroyed any chance of trust and reconciliation in my marriage. ... I was looking to discourage admiration and flirting with a sort of controlled fall from grace."
Control is hard to come by. His feat of self-sabotage occurred during the hostile and turbulent 1979 "Armed Funk" tour of the United States. In the bar of a Holiday Inn in Columbus, Ohio, the Attractions and their retinue ran into Stephen Stills's band and crew, and the two gangs began an evening of heavy drinking and sharp talk. As the provocations escalated, Costello, deriding the state of American music, called Ray Charles "a blind ignorant nigger" and James Brown "a jive-ass nigger"; his opponent in the bar debate, the white soul singer Bonnie Bramlett, knocked him to the ground, touching off a mini-rumble, and then she reported the whole incident to the newspapers. The story crushed Costello's commercial momentum; radio stations stopped playing the album, and the tour went sour. He held a press conference in New York, to explain the context of ironic drunken instigation — and to assert, fairly, that he wasn't a racist. Ray Charles shrugged it off, saying, "Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper." But the damage was done, and Costello slunk back to England, having blown a shot at being the next Bowie. Never again did he come so close to megastardom. To a certain extent, he chose that fate, by confounding expectations, trying new things, and pursuing a stubborn kind of career. He says he never really wanted to play stadiums. Still, the chance passed him by.
In 2003, when he was backstage with Krall at a gala performance, Ray Charles walked by, but Costello couldn't bring himself to say anything. "There are some times when you've just got to be smaller," Costello told me. "You know when people get sober, and they come and tell you all the terrible things they did? You know, 'I stole money from you once.' 'Well, actually I felt fine until you told me.'" He added, "You also can't keep explaining."
He has applied this principle to the latest mess he has created for himself. In May, he announced that he was pulling out of a pair of planned summer performances in Israel. He issued a statement that was as hard to decipher as some of his songs, citing the risk of his appearance there being taken the wrong way. Needless to say, he came in for some criticism and abuse; to some, his singling out of Israel seemed, at best, arbitrary and, at worst, an unsavory bookend to Columbus. "You must be aware that it was a very difficult decision to make," he told me. "It's quite the opposite of what people always assume about singers, that they are grandiose and they're on a big platform and they're asserting their own ego. I'm actually trying to be humble and say I don't actually know the answer. I don't have a solution within my songs."
Returning from America after the Columbus incident, Costello and the Attractions made an album, Get Happy!!, in a style inspired by the Stax records and American soul: that is, black music. If it was somehow an act of contrition or ingratiation, he's never copped to it. Whatever the case, it was one of his best albums. "While you're failing to copy, you end up creating something different," he told me. "It's like the Rolling Stones doing Howlin' Wolf. It's not better than Howlin' Wolf, it's just different. It's kind of the secret English way." His next attempt at copying took him to Nashville to record "Almost Blue," an album of country standards, with the legendary producer Billy Sherrill. He felt free to out himself as a country-music fanatic, now that the orthodoxies of punk had eased. Although the album may not have been his finest — I've always loved the fearlessness of his country singing, but many have not — a pattern of experimentation and genre curiosity had kicked in, occasionally confounding his record company and his more fickle fans. Almost Blue is the runt in a litter of great, muscular early-middle-period albums — Get Happy!!, Trust (1981), and Imperial Bedroom (1982), the last produced by the Beatles' engineer Geoff Emerick — but it may have been the most momentous, insofar as it predicted a career-long infatuation with American vernacular music.
Not long afterward, he struck up a friendship with T Bone Burnett, who had happened to be at Costello's first concert in America, in 1977. In 1984, the two of them toured as the Coward Brothers and then decided to make an album, Costello's tenth, which became King of America. (The title, and the impetus for the cover shot of Costello in a King Vitaman crown, is from the first line of the song "Brilliant Mistake," which Costello still performs, and which he holds up as his most succinct description of America: "It was a fine idea at the time / Now it's just a brilliant mistake.") It was Burnett who introduced him to the vast confederacy of American musicians whose company and contributions Costello has so assiduously sought, and whose lineage he has so studiously absorbed. "At the time, everyone thought punk rockers were all bluffers. Because there was a lot of bluff in it. So he had a lot to overcome," Burnett told me. "Elvis knows more about American music than 99.9 per cent of American musicians. Strangely, I think Elvis is American."
At the end of the eighties, Burnett and Costello reunited to make Spike, his last big-budget studio album, which, in addition to "Veronica," featured elaborate collaborations with an array of musical magi, such as the New Orleans pianist and arranger Allen Toussaint. From that point forward, his albums, whatever their musical ambitions, became smaller affairs, both in conception and in commercial reach. Costello says, "I had maybe ten good years, when there was a reasonable living to be made of it. Then the game was up. It wasn't a question of me, because I'd already gone in and out of fashion half a dozen times in those ten years, with whoever was supposed to care and matter. But the actual industry started to fold in on itself in about '93. It's taking a long time to die, like big things do. Of course, it won't die. Believe me, it will remake itself. It will have to."
He has long since given up on the idea of building an audience, from one album to the next, and of playing to bigger and bigger halls. Instead, he has indulged his curiosities and whims, tending to a variety of smaller audiences. It is no longer accurate, really, to call him a rock star. He's a professional omnivore, a master, for better and worse, of eclecticism. Since Spike, he has, to name a few things, composed albums and performed with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach, written a ballet score to A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed the Meltdown Festival, in London (he was the first pop personage to do so), put out a record of duets with the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and one of jazz-tinged piano ballads, made twenty episodes of Spectacle, stood in for David Letterman while Letterman had heart surgery, performed in an opera composed by Steve Nieve, started an opera about Hans Christian Andersen, and rearranged and orchestrated dozens of his songs for performances by symphony orchestras. The results vary, and so does the reception to them. And yet some of these adventures have turned out to be more commercially successful than his rock 'n' roll albums with the Imposters.
Some people, and not all of them critics, call him a genre tourist. Seven years ago, the jazz bassist Gary Peacock refused to play with him at a gig in a Manhattan jazz club celebrating the birthday of Lee Konitz. Peacock was quoted in Jazz Times as having said, "I don't play backup for no rock star." Costello bailed out, prompting a mini-riot among the patrons who'd come to see him, as well as weeks of recrimination, back and forth, among jazz enthusiasts. I saw Costello rehearse and perform with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra this summer, and there was some snickering early on among the cellists and violinists. Some of them found his orchestrations labored, and his voice jarringly loud. But by the end a violist was telling him, "I want to thank you. This isn't gimmicky. Most people come here and treat us like a backup band."
A few years ago, after he'd released The River in Reverse, a post-Katrina New Orleans-inspired album that he made with Toussaint, Costello was so dispirited by the way the record industry worked, or didn't work, that he decided to quit making albums. "I will just write and perform," he told friends. Joe Henry, the singer and songwriter, told me that he called Costello right away and said, "Are you out of your mind? How can you let the industry decide what you do?" A few days later, Costello called him and said, "You're right. I'm making two albums." Those became Momofuku, with the Imposters, and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, with T Bone and the Nashville gang.
Frustration has again given way to a kind of bravado that has sustained him over the years. As he told me, "Now that I'm through the door, I can basically do what the fuck I want."
Some rock critics and listeners pore over lyrics. I hear lyrics in fragments, often out of context — the context, anyway, of the rest of the song's words and whatever their intent may be. My context tends to be the sound of the music and the attitude of the singer. A phrase, a couplet, or a verse will catch my ear and burrow in. The first verse of "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," for example, easy and great: "One day you're going to have to face / a deep dark truthful mirror / and it's going to tell you things that I still love / you too much to say." The beginning of the last verse: "a stripping puppet on a liquid stick gets into it pretty thick / a butterfly drinks a turtle's tears, but how do / you know he really needs it?" That one stumped me, until I learned that Costello had said he threw the butterfly-and-turtle image in there after seeing something about it on a nature program. Lyrics as cryptic as Costello's often either demand or resist close reading, depending on your cast of mind. Half the time, I have no idea what he's saying or what it means.
Thirty years ago, Costello served as producer (or co-producer) on three seminal post-punk albums: the début of the ska band the Specials, Squeeze's East Side Story, and Rum Sodomy and the Lash, by the Anglo-Irish punk-folk collective the Pogues. The Pogues had supported the Attractions on tour, and Costello, whose marriage to Mary Burgoyne was over, had fallen for the band's bassist, Cait O'Riordan. Their mooning about in the studio subjected him to ribbing from the Pogues, who took to calling him Uncle Brian. Eventually, O'Riordan left the band to be with Costello.
Costello has always written abundantly and intricately about love and lust, infidelity and betrayal, and all the tawdry pleasures and difficulties that arise out of them. The demise of his first marriage, the messing around that contributed to it, his volatile sixteen-year relationship with O'Riordan, and, to a lesser extent, the arrival, in his life, of Krall have figured in his songs in ways that critics and fans have tried to divine but that he will not discuss. Bebe Buell, a somewhat infamous rockers' consort, with whom he had a somewhat infamous affair, in the late seventies and early eighties, has claimed that many of his songs are about her — although the composition of some of them, Costello says, predates his even meeting her. He won't talk about his exes, out of deference to their privacy, and he didn't consent to my meeting or talking to Krall, much less seeing them at their home in West Vancouver, with the boys. He said that they try to keep their careers separate and the twins unexposed.
At any rate, he doesn't feel that knowing a thing or two about an artist's private life can enhance one's appreciation or understanding of the work; he claims to be a textualist, at heart. "Some songs have lines in them which have very personal meanings, and there's nothing to be gained by my sharing them," he said. "They're like an emotional anchor in the song, which means I can sing it and it has some significance to me."
"It's too bad for the people who want to know, 'cause they ain't gonna know," he said. "They can't be there when whatever happened between those people happened. They don't know when you started loving them, or when you stopped loving them, or if you stopped loving them. And songs don't tell the truth."
The songs, and my conversations with his friends, nevertheless suggest that his romantic life is more stable than it has ever been. Gone, it seems, are the old deceptions and the blowups that inevitably followed, and that made for such vivid songwriting. He and Krall, who met at the Grammys, as co-presenters, in 2002, have an apartment in Manhattan as well as the house in West Vancouver. They try always to have at least one of them home with the boys, or, failing that, to have the boys along. When he is alone on the road, he calls Krall as soon he gets offstage. Otherwise, he channels his post-performance endorphin surges into maintaining e-mail correspondence with other musicians and friends, who marvel at the cogent and well-punctuated BlackBerry communiqués, thumbed in from backstage dressing rooms. "It's very Oscar Wilde," Rosanne Cash said. "I told him I'd bind his e-mails and give them to his publishers." He and Eddie Gorodetsky, a TV writer and the producer of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, trade obscure recordings: Costello sends along a Senegalese pachanga track, and Gorodetsky responds with an accordion virtuoso from Barranquilla.
Costello no longer embarks on long and arduous tours. He performs in microbursts with different ensembles. He has to be careful how many sidemen he brings along, to insure that he is not the only guy on the stage who is not getting paid. He makes a good living, but he isn't Billy Joel or Sting rich. "There's not enough for me to stop today," he told me. "No way. Well, I could stop if I wanted to go live in a hut." Krall more than holds up her end. She sells a lot of records; she does ads for Rolex. Costello told me that he couldn't abide the idea of not working while his wife travelled the world. It wouldn't be fair. "And, anyway, I like doing this," he said.
Costello has a firm, Jaggeresque hand in the management of his own career. So it seemed odd to see him, the night after Sonoma, playing a solo gig in Dallas, at a private fund-raiser that was part of a wind-power conference, at which the keynote speaker was George W. Bush. The concert was at the House of Blues. The floor slowly filled with engineers and entrepreneurs in golf shirts and nametags. Longtime Costello fans — a few had registered for the conference just to see this show — gathered near the stage, while most of the other attendees hung back by the bar, chattering away about turbines. A wind-industry official took the stage and began her introductory remarks. In the greenroom, within view of the stage, Costello, in his polka dots, sucked on a lemon and twitched with nervous excitement as she parcelled out thanks to various donors. "She's going to name every single person in the crowd," he muttered.
When that was done, he darted onto the stage, shouldered a guitar, and ripped into "Red Shoes," a brisker version than he'd played the night before. Rearrangements or changing circumstances or new settings have revivified his old songs, in his ears. "Neil Young does it. Tom Waits does it really well," he told me one day. "I've tried to learn how to do it. How to keep moving, not out of perversity or some desire to impress but because this is the material I've got, you know?"
Next came "Either Side of the Same Town," written when he was nearly fifty: "Now it's hard to keep ignoring someone you recognize — and if I seem contented that's only my disguise." And then "Veronica," played fast and a touch rough, again quite different from the version of the previous night. Despite the gift of an old favorite, a din of inattention spilled past the soundboard toward the stage, where Costello, sweating and gesticulating, beat it back. A setlist taped to the soundboard had already been abandoned. "He hardly ever does the setlist," the soundman said.
Costello did, however, hew to his standard vaudevillian patter. He relayed a piece of advice his father had once given him: "Never, ever look up to a note. Always look down." (Pause.) "I have no idea what it means either." To introduce "Jimmie Standing in the Rain," he said, "I'd like to introduce my special guest for the evening. It's me." His setup to "A Slow Drag with Josephine," another new number, was the same as it had been in Sonoma and the same as his description of the song to me in the car: "It's the way rock 'n' roll sounded in 1921." It ended with him whistling the melody, into a full breeze of indifference from the back of the room.
He had sensed the diffusion of interest. "I told myself, Just play for the people who are listening," he said later. This had become a principle of his, a way to approach every performance, as well as writing and recording. "You're not making the records for people who are not listening." He narrowed his attention and shrunk the hall. A wicked and angular rendition of "Watching the Detectives," on a blond Gibson Super 400 guitar, which he thrashed with his little hands of concrete into a long, not always tonal discursion that owed something to Neil Young, seemed to bring the House of Blues to order. When the song was over, he stood with his arms outstretched, guitar held out by its neck, a habitual gesture of his that seems to combine a sincere appetite for applause with half-ironic self-congratulation and a taskmaster's impatience for the guitar technician: it was time to swap out the Gibson. By now, the clump at the front had thickened and deepened, and had become a small throng reaching out to touch his knees. He gave them a taste of 1978: "Alison" and "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" and, finally, instead of the encores listed on the set list, a furious and crude version of "Pump It Up."
He ran offstage, a sweaty imp, and hurried along the corridor behind the back curtain and into his dressing room. He shut the door. He called his wife. Then he reëmerged, having changed out of his silk suit and back into his shades, scarf, and duck-hunting cap. "That was a honky-tonk rock show," he said. "That was a honky-tonk audience. Playing 'Pump It Up' was a way to go, 'Can I get a good night?' "
The V.I.P.s and sponsors came in, sheepish and beaming. He made his way around to them. They called him Mr. Costello and snapped pictures, and praised the performance. "Thank you, thank you," he said gently. "These compliments are too much." The woman who had introduced him onstage asked, "Can I give you a wind pin?" He stood still for her as she fastened it onto his sweater. "Jesus," he joked. "It's no wonder you didn't have a career in magic." The where-you-froms burbled on. A mention of Spokane soon had him talking about getting ill in a motor lodge in Boise, Idaho.
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