|
While many fortysomething artists are resting on their laurels or seeking a hip-hop transfusion from some young hotshot producer, Elvis is moving forward as he always has — boldly, with an air of unpredictability and little regard for current formats or trends. He embraces all kinds of music, and it shows. A recent three-night stand at Lincoln Center in New York was a virtuoso display of his tastes and talents. Each performance featured a completely different setlist. Big band brass, orchestral avant-garde, hard-hitting rock 'n' roll — whatever the context, Elvis flexed his creative muscles and found fresh ways to present his songs. A New York Times review of the shows was a flood of appreciative adjectives: "rhapsodic," "courtly," "sweeping," "visceral" and "shimmering."
A little history: He was born Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus on August 25, 1954, in Paddington, England. He comes from a musical family: his grandfather a traveling musician, his dad a big band leader, and his mom a record store manager. At 18, Declan left school and started to write the songs that would introduce him to the world four years later. Renamed by his manager (Costello is his great-grandmother's maiden name, Elvis is just pure punk audacity), he was tagged the angry young man of the British new wave movement. He went along with it, playing the part with bigmouthed bravado (which landed him in some infamous squabbles). But behind the sneer and the Buddy Holly glasses was one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation.
Like most of America, I first became aware of Elvis through an unforgettable appearance on Saturday Night Live. A few bars into "Less Than Zero" Elvis stopped his band, The Attractions. He apologized to the audience. "There's no reason to do this song." Then he tore into "Radio, Radio." By the time he reached the first chorus, it felt like what I was hearing was indeed a "sound salvation." I went out and bought My Aim Is True that week. I was a fan on that night back in December 1977 and I'm a fan now. So it was with great anticipation that I traveled to New York City to meet the man on the eve of his album release blitzkreig.
In conversation, Elvis is articulate, humorous, opinionated and given to high enthusiasm for the music of others. I'm sure there has never been a single interview in this magazine that has included references to Cole Porter, the Sex Pistols, Dan Penn, the Escorts and Charles Mingus — but that's exactly the kind of musical palette that colors Elvis' songs.
In talking to some of my songwriter friends about you, one of things that comes up over and over is that we all admire how prolific you are, and how we would kill for your B-sides. Do you think of yourself as prolific?
I don't really. I go for long periods where I don't write anything. I love B-sides, I have to say. B-sides were a great thing for me, because they were a place you could put those songs that didn't fit anywhere else. There was something about flipping over the heavily promoted track and finding some gem. I loved it when I was a kid, and I love it still. B-sides have pretty much disappeared now. I suppose what's happened is that at the same time the single disappeared, the CD appeared, and all it did was encourage you to make it more like a compendium form to records. People are very critical of records being too long. I'm of the method that some records are anthologies, but they're anthologies of new material, and they shouldn't be thought less of because they don't have the thematic structure of a classic vinyl album. There are albums of mine that I wish would flip out of the tray halfway through and force you to turn it over in some way (laughs), because I think you would hear the shape and structure of the record better. But as you can't do that, I don't want to then necessarily say, "Well, I'm just going to make the record much shorter because of some arcane idea about structure." I want to take advantage of the compendium form.
Another admirable thing is your versatility. I think of a song like "Unwanted Number" that is so convincing in that '60s girl group vein, then "Almost Blue," as a classic torch ballad. When you started writing, did you set out to be fluent in all styles?
No, I've always been curious about different forms of music and I think it comes from that. It was an exposure to music during childhood. There was no music that I heard that I didn't feel potentially belonged to me. Like some people say classical music isn't for them because it belongs to some other part of society or another generation — I never felt like that.
There are different times in your life when different things excite you. I never felt like it was anything to do with a self-conscious desire to learn or a self-conscious desire to improve yourself or to make yourself appear grander. Being taken seriously has never been a problem for me (laughs). I don't need to do anything complicated in order to have that. That's always been there, because of the density of the words and the amount of them in my songs. There's just a huge amount of material, and that intimidates certain people. None of it has been conscious. It's just that one thing leads to another. Simple as that. The opportunities to work with different people open doors to you, but they are a provocation to learn.
At the outset of making The Delivery Man, did you have a blueprint of what you wanted to create as a songwriter?
I had all the songs, and maybe had another five or six that could've been on this album. I also had one or two songs that weren't actually related. It seems odd to say that you would call the album The Delivery Man and have these loosely connected narrative songs and then not include some of them. But that's the case. The thinking behind that is that while preparing for it, I made the decision that I didn't want to present the story in chronological order, and I didn't necessarily want the success or failure of the album to be predicated upon the audience following that narrative. When you think of all the great songs that have come out of shows over the years, we don't remember the original shows that they came from at all. They're rarely revived. Yet the songs that come from them are timeless. So I'm skipping a whole page of the process (laughs).
What inspired the story of The Delivery Man?
I've had it rolling around my head for a long time. It's sort of a 19th century idea, this idea of three women living in a community isolated enough that their options are limited by those who come into their life and to their world rather than them going out into the world. As you can probably take out of the song "The Delivery Man" they are Vivian, who is the kind of person who wants you to believe she's having a wilder life than she actually is, and is kind of disappointed with life. And her best friend, who she tortures with all of these confidences — which are mostly invention — is Geraldine. Geraldine is a pious widow, whose husband has gone off to war and has been killed by his own side by accident. She's trying to bring up her daughter not to be in the image of Vivian. And Ivy is the girl who hasn't yet decided her path in life. Into their world, which is a self-contained, suspended world, comes Abel, the delivery man. He's something different to each of them. An object of desire for one, an object of fear for another, an object of curiosity, perhaps, for the third.
Is the character related to the one in "Hidden Shame," a song you wrote for Johnny Cash?
Yes. That song was based on a true story, so I can't say I invented him completely. I sort of transplanted him out of this older song into this new narrative. "Hidden Shame" was about a man who was in prison for one crime, then 30 years after the event confessed to killing his childhood friend. So in the case of The Delivery Man, Abel is someone who committed murder as a child, was institutionalized and was released as an adult with a new identity. Which is why when he appears to the women, they can't quite place him.
In your liner notes for the reissues of your back catalog, there are many references to songs by other artists being direct inspirations for your own. Is that a way you still like to write?
Oh yeah. There's no point in pretending. None of them are actionable legal problems — they were just the guiding light. I don't know whether he'll be flattered or insulted by this, but there's a thank you to Dan Penn on this record, just for existing (laughs). Because if he hadn't written the songs that he's written, I wouldn't be there in Mississippi making this record. In some key way, he's a leading light. I don't know whether any of my songs on this record are equal to his best songs, but I wouldn't be trying to write some of these type of songs if he hadn't existed. There's a certain kind of country-soul collision that's best embodied in him and his songwriting.
When you started in 1976, punk was happening in England. It was kind of anti-everything in terms of other musical styles. As someone who was obviously very open-minded, how did you deal with this?
Punk pretended that it was wiping everything away and starting fresh, like a Year Zero of music. That was bullshit. Punk was based on the Stooges and the New York Dolls. It just had a short memory. It didn't invent it all again. It wasn't atonalism. It wasn't that radical. The radical aspect of it was to dispense with all the pomposity of stadium rock as it had become in the mid '70s. That was a radical and a welcome, refreshing change. But to pretend that it was radical musically, in the sense that it completely swept everything away, there were very few bands that attempted to do that. I would say that the Pistols were not musically radical at all. A group I would have more time for would be the Slits, who actually did sound like they'd never played instruments before and did something really vivid with it. That was brilliant. Or Pere Ubu, who were coming from a much deeper tradition of Dada and all these underground places. And then the Clash, when the sounds of their first record ran out of steam, mysteriously, out of nowhere, the Joe Strummer record collection comes into play (laughs), and suddenly they're playing New Orleans songs. They're coming off rock steady (style of music), they're coming off dub, then they're into "The Magnificent Seven" and early hiphop. And that's the way it should be. You should be looking to renew yourself from whatever source. So I never bought this idea that we had to blow away everything. It's bullshit. You don't have craven respect the past that is paralyzing. You just have a love of the past. You don't want to recreate it and you don't want to live in it, but it can be the foundation of something new. Pop music is just intelligent stealing.
Along with The Delivery Man, you're also releasing an instrumental classical record, Il Sogno. How did that come about?
My ability to write music down obviously has a lot to do with my ability to write something like (this album), and have real control over those characters. I did some TV soundtrack work in the early '90s. I worked with a film composer called Richard Harvey, who did the arrangements. I was trying to write with the idea of orchestral sounds, but all I could do was sketch them out on some sort of keyboard. And then somebody else would have to transcribe them, and they would be orchestrated by Richard. Inevitably, some of the intentions would be transformed or bent out of shape. But we got the job done. We wrote a lot of music and we won a British Academy Award. I thought this might lead to another career for me as a film composer. Then, around the same time, I started working with the Brodsky Quartet, and I had the same frustration of not being able to communicate with them accurately. That motivated me to learn to write music down. Then, opportunity after opportunity came my way. There's a pleasure in exploring all these different shapes of song. Because I've listened a lot, it doesn't mean I can write as well or be the equal of any of the people that trigger you to attempt another form. But what happens is that your sense of the mystery of music is enriched.
I was very impressed with the songs that you wrote with your wife (Diana Krall) for her latest record.
One of the things that I think is interesting about how people respond to her new songs is that some people can hear them and some people can't hear them. I'm going to make a bold, provocative statement here: 99.9 percent of all modern lyrics for jazz songs are complete bullshit. There are no good lyricists working in modern jazz composition, in my opinion. It's all terrible new age poetry, or phony attempts to rewrite Cole Porter. We don't need that. If Cole Porter had lived longer, don't you think he would have taken advantage of the confidentiality and the invention that the '60s brought? Think about the ground that Gershwin covered in his life, between writing "Fascinating Rhythm" and writing Porgy and Bess. Don't you think if these writers had lived into another era that they would've kept moving? Don't you think Hank Williams would've kept moving? This is where the jazz police who defend what is and isn't jazz defeat themselves. They want music to fail, because they can keep it decently obscure where they have power. They can bestow credibility on obscure artists, like a gift. I think it's despicable to not consider the continuum of music. And a music like jazz or rock 'n' roll, which is founded on a principle of freedom, that's the one where you should embrace innovation the most of all. Everything that's ever been great about it has been from the next surprise. It doesn't matter whether it's happening in the most obscure underground indie record or the biggest-scale popular success. You can have innovation in both places. The sadness in my heart is that people who embrace the musical complexity of the form cannot see that Lorenz Hart wasn't the definitive lyricist of all-time any more than Cole Porter was. He was just among the best in his time. They worked with the romantic conventions of the day. If they'd lived into a different time, where the confidentiality and the nakedness of a Joni Mitchell was possible and admissible, they would've moved forward. You have to continue to renew. You mustn't ever stop. If you stop, you're dead. There must be new ways to write and think. To say that a song form is clearly defined by one era's version of it is so incredibly negative and lacking in joy. There are no rules about what can be in a pop song or a jazz song or any other kind of song. It is about freedom.
|
