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Words are important to Elvis Costello.
That is, of course, an overly simple way of putting it—clunky and vague. I know this because words are important to me, too. But before I get a chance to get the rest of mine out—to note that whether in early hits like “Alison” (“I don’t know if you are lovin’ somebody, I only know it isn’t mine”) and “Clubland” (“The long arm of the law slides up the outskirts of town”) or more recent tunes like National Ransom’s “Bullets for the New Born King” (“bells and hands were only there for wringing”), he plays with puns in a way few other artists do—Costello cuts in.
“Well, lyrics are a huge part of all songs, aren’t they?” he scoffs. “Otherwise they’d all be instrumentals.”
Right. Words matter. And if you’re not using yours effectively, the 59-year-old singer/songwriter isn’t shy about letting you know. There’s one in particular he bristles at—reimagination—at least when it’s used to describe his most recent project, Wise Up Ghost, a collaboration with The Roots that uses lyrics from older Costello cuts like “Pills and Soap,” “Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)” and “National Ransom” to tell a new story. New—that’s a word Costello likes.
“I didn’t think of it as older material,” he says. “I thought of it as sort of like present-day truth. I mean, there’s a game that one can play with this record, which is to simply list the component parts, as if it were some sort of jigsaw puzzle and you’ve got the picture and you have to put all the parts on the floor and then you have to assemble it. But that wasn’t what we were doing, and really that’s a very dull way to look at music, you know, simply listing things you recognize. It’s like, do you know the song ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ by ELO?”
After he gets the affirmative he’s looking for, he continues. “Yeah, you know that one, right? Everyone knows that. But what’s the first thing you notice about that? ‘The sky is blue.’ ‘Oh yeah, so this must be one of those Blue Sky Songs, then.’ And then, ‘You know, like “Blue Skies” by Irving Berlin? So it must be the same as that.’ But of course they’re not the same at all, you know? So I mean, if you’re just going to point at things like things on a shelf, then you’re not gonna get anywhere. Music really works best when both the musician and the listener engage their imagination. Many people are unprepared to do that. They’re lost without it. You know, they can go listen to some other music. I think that what we’ve done here is a fine piece of work, and obviously a lot of people really dig it, so that’s kind of what we aimed to do, put the pieces together to tell a new story both musically and lyrically, because the thing is, whether the words were written right this moment or whether I put them together in a new sequence of events, I thought the story that they told bore telling, you know? It was worth saying these things now.
“So it wasn’t about revisiting or trying to evoke the dangerous past or any such nonsense as that. It was really just a matter of having a free hand and a resource such as the studio where we could work under the cover of darkness and nobody knew we were doing it.”
It makes sense that Costello would be uninterested in retreading old ground. With nearly four decades of material under his belt, he’s reached what could be the greatest-hits phase of his career. But rather than keep pumping the Angry Young Man shtick, he has continued to seize new musical challenges—hopping from rock to vaudeville to bluegrass, from one unlikely collaboration to the next, always rising to the occasion. Whether it’s with T Bone Burnett, Burt Bacharach, Allen Toussaint or The Roots, Costello’s words seem to possess a chameleon-like ability to adapt to their surroundings; they might shift color and tone, but the overall form is still uniquely Elvis.
Wise Up Ghost came to be after The Roots backed Costello during a Late Night With Jimmy Fallon appearance, and to hear him tell it, both parties were equally eager to take the collaboration to the next level.
“It’d be a lot of fun if we were having this conversation with both of us, because you’d kind of hear the almost comical way we went into this with me wondering whether The Roots would be okay playing with me when I went on the Fallon show,” he says. “Then Steve [Mandel] and Quest had kind of cooked up this scheme where they were going to get me to walk in the door and then they were going to close it and lock it and keep the door shut until we were done doing a record.”
“We didn’t put any pressure on ourselves. We didn’t tell anybody we were making it. We had no record contract. We had no budget; we had no clocks on the wall. We didn’t take so terribly long because we were just listening to what each participant had to offer—rhythmically, sonically, musically—and hey, there’s the record.”
Perhaps that easy chemistry is due to shared experience; both Costello and Questlove grew up with the rich musical background that comes from having a professional musician for a father. (Don’t describe it that way to Costello unless you’re ready for some more wordplay, though. “I think we both actually came from relatively modest backgrounds,” he teases. “You know we’re not the sons of dukes or earls.”)
“We discovered it after the fact,” Costello says. “I made a point of not reading his book until after we’d finished work on the record because I thought I might think I knew him from reading that book. Well, now I’ve read it, and of course it’s a fascinating book about the love of music and you know, the things you remember about what other things were happening in the room with your family, what the color of the wallpaper was, all the things that make music stick in your head and your heart, you know? It’s probably the same for you, too, because anybody that listens to music avidly, whether you write about it or actually make it, you’re very liable to be able to make all sorts of associations. We’re no different in that. So for all our more obvious differences in background and generation and experience and even the areas of music that we’re perceived to be in, musical curiosity I think is something we share.”
It’s fitting, then, that it was Questlove who encouraged him to include arguably one of his most personal songs to date—“The Puppet Has Cut His Strings,” which chronicles the final hours of Costello’s father’s life—as a track on the deluxe edition of Wise Up Ghost.
“I had no intention going into this to write any songs that were personal reflections whatsoever,” Costello says. “I think the cue that we took from taking apart and reassembling lyrics from ‘Pills and Soap’ and ‘Hurry Down Doomsday’ and ‘National Ransom,’ which are songs which are 30, 20 and maybe not quite five years apart from the present day, led me to the idea that we were making some sort of bulletin, looking out at the world rather than looking within the person, you know? And if you look at the lyrics of most of the songs, you’ll see that they’re mostly outward-looking to the ways of the world.
“And then Quest said he wanted to record in the room together, which is to me the more conventional way to record,” he continues. “You know, you go in a room, you turn on a red light, somebody counts it off and you play a song. We hadn’t done any of the songs like that. We’d done them piece by piece, and I think the more angular way the record sounds is a result of that. Nevertheless, it was also a good call to get in the room once we had the confidence that we’d gone somewhere, we’d headed somewhere. ... And we went in and cut ‘Sugar Won’t Work’ with Pino Palladino playing bass and Quest as a trio. Ray Angry came in like half an hour later and played the organ on it. And Ray and Quest had also cut earlier in the week this piece of music which I really thought was lovely. It was unlike anything I’d write myself. And I sat at home at my kitchen counter and wrote a lyric and sang the vocal into my computer, as a sketch, a demo. It was the first draft of the lyrics and the first take of the vocal. And when I got to the studio to rerecord it, Questlove wouldn’t let me rerecord it. He said ‘that’s the vocal.’
“Because you know, it had that late-night feeling where it was really what I was thinking and I hadn’t really edited my thoughts, but it was a description of the last few days and hours of my dad’s life, and it was painful to write it, but on the other hand, it was obviously there waiting to come out, otherwise it wouldn’t have come out so fully formed. And maybe by then I was so comfortable with the way we were working that I wasn’t about to deny myself writing something more intimate. Because I think by then we had made all the other statements on the record that needed to be explored lyrically, and the only other place to go was within yourself, you know?”
Now that Wise Up Ghost is out in the wild, Costello has (of course) focused his attention on a handful of new projects, this time venturing into different media.
“I’m writing, but not songs. Not at all,” he says. “I’ve been working on a sort of book for a while. I have to put it to the side now and again when I’m doing other things because obviously when you do it, you want to give it the full attention. But recently that’s become sort of my full-time job. And then I’m working on some new compositions with Burt Bacharach. We wrote an album together, about 15 years ago I suppose it is now, and it’s going to hopefully be the basis of a musical, and in order to do that, we’re using existing songs. There are some things in the story that won’t be accompanied by music, and it would be too contrived to just make it everything in this original album, make the story thread through all those songs, so in order to have the characters speak to each other, you need some new songs. So we might write as many as six new songs.”
So, okay, maybe he is writing some songs. But back to that book for a second—is it a musical appreciation, like Questlove’s? An autobiography? I still don’t really know for certain because, as you might imagine, the man who famously said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (although he wasn’t the first to do so; that’d be Martin Mull) has a few opinions about people who write about books, too.
“I guess what it’s about is it’s what isn’t in every other account of…” He pauses. “You know, there’s emphasis in the wrong place in nearly everything that’s written about anybody that’s in public life. There’s just a list of things. Literally any idiot can do that and call themselves an author. It takes a little bit of insight to interpret your research. You can have a lot of facts and they won’t mean anything, you know? People can do very complicated musical analysis of your songs, but if you check their credentials, you’ll actually find that they’re quite mediocre songwriters. The so-called criticism of the work is not really from an informed point of view. They couldn’t have actually written one of the songs that I’ve written. I write albums for anybody to hear in any frame of mind. I don’t have a mental picture of who the audience is. I do have a mental picture of who the audience isn’t. I don’t write for fetishists or obsessives. Because it’s not actually clever workings or something as perceived by somebody who didn’t do it. It’s not always the insight that they believe it to be.”
“Have you ever read any literary criticism?” he asks. “Have you ever read how seethingly horrible so much of it is and how unpleasant the tone of it is? If you want to see some grandiose, egotistical nonsense, take a little walk in the realm of academia. Then you’ll find out. It makes the insanity of rock stars seem like just a little childish tantrum.”
Then, perhaps realizing he has changed the subject, he circles back to what the book’s about—what it’s all about, really.
“I sort of was trying to avoid all that neurosis and tell something personal but joyful,” he says. “Because there’s obviously things that I can tell you about, how I got to certain songs, love of certain types of music, or how a song that I maybe heard 40 years ago made me feel and then where it lead to and why I love certain things. And as Quest told a lot of in his book as well, the strange perspective of a child who grows up in not just a musical household, but a professional musical household. You see this sort of strange alchemy or mischief of going from the most mundane thing imaginable to a sort of magical transformation. And of course it doesn’t happen all the time; we don’t get great things happening like a sacrament every time we go onstage. You just go to work, and you try your best to make it magical for you and therefore magical to the audience.”
That never-ending hunt for magic is what has kept Elvis Costello’s career fresh, and when you’re hunting, sometimes, as he noted in “Oliver’s Army,” all it takes is one “itchy trigger.” And Costello’s got one. He’s making music instead of widows, but the thrill of the pursuit and the eagerness to produce are the same.
Changing his tune seems to be his career strategy of late, so I’m not surprised when—moments after insisting he wasn’t writing new music—that’s exactly what he does:
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll write some songs.”
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