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Elvis Costello began 2022 with a hit album. The Boy Named If made an impressive bow at No 6, his highest UK chart position since Brutal Youth almost 28 years earlier and was a resounding affirmation that one of this country's most celebrated singer-songwriters was still at the top of his game.
It was his 29th studio album in a career stretching back to 1977, when the man born Declan Patrick MacManus changed his name and debuted with My Aim Is True, a set of songs fuelled by frustration and anger but delivered with an articulacy alien to many of his contemporaries on the burgeoning New Wave scene. Recorded in fits and starts during days off from his job as a computer programmer at a cosmetics factory in West London, it signalled the arrival of a truly formidable talent.
For many observers, even today, those first five years as a professional musician, from My Aim Is True to Imperial Bedroom, represent his golden period, an unbroken sequence of classics to rival similar runs by David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and (subsequently) Prince. All but the debut were made in tandem with The Attractions, whose technical nous in the recording studio was more than matched by the ferocity of their live shows, and it's a testament to the staying power of Costello's relationship with those musicians that two of three remain an integral part of his modus operandi in The Imposters.
But Elvis has frequently ventured beyond the confines of the group dynamic, and his extensive catalogue boasts numerous intriguing detours, from a song cycle with the strings of The Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters) to eloquent pop sophistication with Burt Bacharach (Painted From Memory); from vibrant soul and R&B with New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint (The River In Reverse) to the neo hip-hop of his hook-up with The Roots. (Wise Up Ghost).
Extra-curricular activities have included writing, recording or performing with an array of artists, many of whom graced his own record collection as a teenager. He's duetted with country royalty Johnny Cash and George Jones, enjoyed a fruitful creative partnership with Paul McCartney, and at various other times he could be found rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tony Bennett, Jimmy Cliff, Roy Orbison, Carole King, Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson and Van Morrison.
The constant that distinguishes Costello's body of work is a hunger to try new things, to better himself as both a musician and writer, and to engage in anything that might provide, to use his own word, an "education." Now aged 67, he's currently at his most prolific since those heady first few years. Look Now, released in 2018, earned him a second Grammy (to add to the first he won in 1999 with Bacharach, having lost out as Best Newcomer in '79 to disco duo A Taste Of Honey!), and lockdown provided little obstacle to the making of Hey Clockface in 2020 and The Boy Named If.
It's with that latest album, and its subtle links to Costello's past, that we start our conversation, flitting back and forth between several years' models.
Numerous reviews of The Boy Named If likened its energy to your first with The Attractions, This Year's Model (1978). If we were to chart a selective timeline that takes in Blood & Chocolate ('86), Brutal Youth ('94) and Momofuku (2008), it could be argued you scratch an itch every once in a while to make an old-school noisy album.
It's not something I'm ever conscious of doing, although I can see how that would be a convenient way of categorising those particular records. I've only got this face and this voice, and the way I hear harmony and the amount to which I limit the way I explore it on each record will have some bearing on the results. I would say the one conscious decision on this last record was to largely write in major keys, which brings with it a certain immediacy, but I don't think there was a similar conscious decision on any of the others you mentioned. A couple of those are not bad records, but I'd say ...If is better than at least two of them, although it's hard for me to sit here and make comparisons because I, personally, don't see them as like and like. It wasn't always the same musicians for a start; Momofuku was a lot of fun to make, but it was largely a collaboration between The Imposters and Jenny Lewis's band. Not that Dave Grohl gave us any credit — he left us out of his movie about the studio [2013's documentary Sound City] when we were the last people to make a rock 'n' roll record there! I gave him shit about that.
But can you understand how some listeners might arrive at that shorthand, if they initially hear just a few individual songs from the new one?
Of course. You have to accept people are gonna hear specific tracks in isolation on the radio, or some other kind of furnishing of radio, ie, streaming. You can't be so arrogant to demand no one expresses an opinion before they've heard the whole album, so in some instances there are songs where people will inevitably make connections with the past.
What's markedly different from the past, however, is the method by which The Boy Named If was recorded, with you and the three Imposters each working in isolation. Did you relish the challenges the pandemic brought?
Geographical isolation, yes, but I do think too much can be made of that, as if it was some sort of magic trick, because when you're all together in the studio you routinely separate musicians anyway, so that you don't get a blur. There are some records where it's a positive advantage to being blended in the moment, and that would be true of Blood & Chocolate, where most of it was recorded live using stage monitors to get the effect of the instruments bleeding into each other. Similarly, King Of America ['86] was recorded with the musicians grouped acoustically very close around one or two mics, with just me in a separate booth. Each record presents different challenges; it's a learning process and I'm still a student.
So, were there "advantages" to how ...If was recorded?
I think it worked out very well, and I'm almost convinced it was because we didn't have to look at each other! I guess it wouldn't have been as successful for the contents of other albums of mine, but the emphatic nature of the relationship between my delivery of the words and Pete [Thomas]'s drumming became the motor and the spine. That gave both Davey [Faragher, bass] and Steve [Nieve, keyboards] freedom to play more interesting parts, to take the kind of detours they couldn't on other records where Steve's contributions were the predominant motor.
It was your third album in just over three years, a work rate we've not seen from you since the early 80s. Clearly, you've not been lacking inspiration lately.
And we're not done yet — watch this space! We're anxious to release what we can as soon as we can. I started Hey Clockface [2020] before the pandemic, not knowing what it was gonna end up being, whether it would result in an entire album, and then it became clear we weren't going back to work in what we laughingly call the normal fashion, ie touring.
The impetus was just to keep ourselves connected to each other, nothing more than that. If we were to sit around and wait for some kind of all-clear, who knew when that was gonna be? I'd approached Nick Lowe to sit in the producer's chair and he kindly said he would do that, but that would have been different record and maybe ...If wouldn't have happened because I'd have been reluctant to do yet another one so soon.
In terms of a learning process, how often does a finished album differ from whatever blueprint you might have in your head before recording begins?
They should all differ, I think, if you're working with other people and incorporating the various qualities they add to the equation. I was listening to King Of America again recently to decide which songs I might play at this year's New Orleans Jazz Festival, and it got me thinking how different that experience was to what I'd done before. Lots of different components from different types of music came together, and it was the same on Spike ['89]. A lot of the contributions were close to what I was envisioning, but they still surprised me. If it works, I'm happy; I try not to analyse it too much. Every one of my records has a different method, but they're not in competition with each other. If years from now they were discovered in the same pile by someone unaware of who I was, that someone might even ask if they were made by the same person.
How do you react to listeners, and perhaps more specifically reviewers, talking about you working outside of a perceived comfort zone? It's a phrase used time and again, especially about the country covers of Almost Blue ['81], the string quartet song cycle The Juliet Letters ['93] and the Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory ['98].
I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but when people speak of comfort zones they're usually speaking about their own, about certain forms of music they either don't understand or can't relate to. Therefore, the easier thing to do is attack them, and say of a certain record, "That doesn't rock". Really? No shit! It's not supposed to! Those records offer different kinds of moods, they tell different stories, but if you listen you to them, you can still tell what's happening. If you try measuring them against what immediately preceded each one, you're using the wrong stick! I'll take you in a room and play you something that's recognisably rock 'n' roll, but if you think that's all I ever wanted to do I don't know why you're still listening to my stuff after all this time.
I want to tell stories, reflect an attitude I might have at any given time, and I'll do it with whatever tools are available to me. I gotta say it's been an education, more than I ever got in school, to do all these damn things! I'm not Burt Bacharach, but it was fascinating to get an opportunity to share his perspective, but that thinking isn't restricted to working with someone of Burt's stature. Everyone I've ever worked with, I'm grateful for what I've learned from them, and it's made me more able to see what I wanted and what I didn't want when it came to make a record like The Boy Named If. There are moments on the new record, motifs, and harmonic leaps, that probably wouldn't have occurred to me before I'd written and recorded some other types of song. Like I said, I'm always learning.
So what have you learned from The Boy Named If that you can carry into the next step of your career?
Well, this is a lesson from promoting the record, rather than making it, but I had the horrible experience twice at the BBC of going into a studio and singing live over a pre-recorded track, and I'll never do it again — I'd rather lip-synch. It's taking a professional singer and reducing the flexibility of the music to the level of karaoke. It's a very peculiar feeling, because nothing in the music yields like it does in live performance, and you get a sense of being disassociated from your own song. That was a good thing to learn, at my age — finally!
After your first five albums with Nick Lowe producing, presumably you learned a lot when you co-produced Imperial Bedroom ['82] with Geoff Emerick, given his history as engineer on numerous Beatles sessions. There was the added bonus of him introducing you to George Martin, of course.
Geoff was a cut above most engineers of his time, in that he could also read music. I don't think he'd ever orchestrated anything before, but he asked George to look over the string arrangements Steve had done, which was a talent of Steve's we'd not exploited before. He was working with Paul McCartney in the studio next door, and he very kindly gave us his time; it was mainly a kind of insurance, really, to have someone with that experience. I think pop musicians, for want of a better word, run the risk of trying to be too ambitious, and assume anything is possible at the click of a finger. I guess what George was doing, first and foremost, was looking for any hurdles we might have to negotiate, to help Steve find solutions to anything he'd written that could be deemed unconventional or unworkable. It was lovely to see, especially because Steve had made a few blink-and-you'll-miss-'em allusions to George's orchestrations for The Beatles. He didn't do anything obvious like nicking the cello riff from "I Am The Walrus" wholesale, they were much more subtle and witty. The second time I was in a studio with George was for an album by [veteran harmonica player] Larry Adler, and I could have just hung out all day listening to their stories. Fuck recording anything!
Was it difficult to rein in the fan boy when you found yourself working with heroes like Martin, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Paul McCartney or Bacharach? Can it distract you from the job at hand?
It's something you have to get over quickly and accept that you're working at a very high level. The first song I wrote with Burt was "God Give Me Strength" [for the 1996 film drama Grace Of My Heart], and what some people don't know is that the first real statement in the song is my composition, it wasn't a straight music-and-lyrics division of labour like his work with Hal David. The changes Burt made were essential to the coherence of it and it taught me well, but it was a proper full-blooded collaboration. We were working to a deadline and there was really no time to be awestruck; it was written for someone else to sing in the film and then we had to find time for me to record a vocal to be played over the end titles.
Once it was done, I said to him it would be insane not to write more songs together, so once we got started on a full album there was more time and opportunity to indulge in fandom. There would be something in an arrangement we were working on that reminded me of an old song of his, so I'd bring in a tape or CD of it and occasionally he'd say, "I don't remember that one." It became almost a gag! It would be some fantastic B-side by, say, Dionne Warwick that he'd struggle to remember recording, let alone why a particular instrument was doing something that had caught my ear. I became fascinated by those songs, the ones that got away and aren't anywhere near as celebrated as the hits. It still amuses me that he's not as famous, broadly speaking, as he should be, because not everybody checks the credits. People know all the songs, they're so ubiquitous, but don't necessarily associate them with Burt because he didn't actually sing them.
There's a line in your autobiography where you liken the ambition and expense of recording Spike to Lawrence Of Arabia. It seems a throwaway remark, but just for fun we asked some of your most devoted fans to suggest other parallels between your albums and films — with suitably respectful intentions, of course.
Ha-ha! I'm sure they're not. I'm absolutely sure they're not all respectful! Okay, what have you got? I'm assuming you want to know if I agree with any of them.
A couple of people suggested This Year's Model as Blow-Up [Swinging London murder mystery from 1966], and then there's Trust as The Big Heat [film noir, '53], and Blood & Chocolate as Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia [savage western, 74].
None of those are that far off, I'd have to admit, although I wouldn't have necessarily thought of any of them myself. I spent quite some time listening to This Year's Model again for the record that came out last year [various artists singing the words in Spanish] to help the translations make sense, and there's certainly a 60s element to a lot of the lyrics. I made that record in '78, so a lot of the songs came from my stock of memories stretching back a decade or more. Blow-Up is understandable, considering the image of me on the sleeve with a camera and the fact the film stars David Hemmings as a photographer, but it could just as easily be other Swinging 60s things like The Knack or Georgy Girl or Smashing Time, they were all part of it.
The Big Heat is a good one, I think that rings true, although again it could be any number of movies of that ilk; film noir featured quite a bit as a source of imagery in those songs. But I think the thing about that record is that it's less about moving pictures than it is still pictures, snapshots, so you're kind of looking in the wrong gallery. I'm guessing the Blood & Chocolate suggestion is purely based on it being quite an aggressive, angry record, and because it's got blood in the title.
Care to suggest some of your own?
Ha-ha! You're putting me on the spot with this, unfairly I might add, so I'd need more time to think about it. I think any record with The Attractions could be The Bad And The Beautiful [backstabbing Hollywood mogul melodrama, '52] — but I'm not saying which is which!
Speaking of fans, what do your 15-year-old twin boys make of your catalogue? Have you discovered much in the way of new music through their tastes?
Well, they know my stuff, obviously, but absolutely, yes, I've been introduced to other things through them. That happened with my eldest son [now in his forties] as well; he'd discover, say, a jazz record that I wouldn't know, or he'd come at something I was aware of from a different angle. It's funny you ask this, because only last night we did a trade with our boys, in that Diana [Krall, jazz pianist wife] and I would watch 10 minutes of cat memes if they'd listen to five Charlie Parker records. We told them they'd thank us for it later, and you know what? They loved them.
It's not like that they don't know who Miles Davis or any of those guys are, and that's the great thing about awareness and the availability of music in the 21st century. Through them I've listened to whole albums of people I wasn't familiar with, to understand what's going on in their worlds, and I've found some really great music. But I think at their age tastes can change from day to day, so it would be unfair of me to mention anything specific, because this time next year they may have grown out of it or have moved on to something entirely different. Things you like when you're coming up to 16, let alone when you reach 25, shouldn't define you. You might like "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies — which is a great record, by the way — but then think it's goofy nonsense and embarrassing if you go on to become obsessed with Dark Side Of The Moon. Personally, I'd stick with "Sugar, Sugar" —it's a way better record, and better for humanity.
For some now time now, for the majority of your career, in fact, you've been a highly visible presence across an incredibly broad cultural spectrum, from the subject of serious academic study to the more frivolous world of TV sitcoms. Have you actively nurtured any of that, away from your "day job" as a musician?
Well, I've done some TV and film work when I've been asked and I like the people involved, but I think "nurtured" is a bit strong!
Let's discuss the academia first. A quick Google search reveals weighty tomes with titles like Elvis Costello And Thatcherism: A Psycho-Social Exploration, and A Complete Loser: Masculinity And Its Discontents In My Aim Is True And This Year's Model.
Ha-ha! They sound like a lot of laughs, don't they? Real page-turners. I don't know if I would ever read either of those books, from the titles, and neither author is doing themselves any favours in terms of attracting readers. I think I know which specific songs the first one might focus on, but the point in writing about things in songs is that they have the carriage of music and rhythm, and the excitement of rock 'n' roll, or the accompaniment of an orchestra or whatever. That's where the beauty lies for me. I think if I'd wanted to write something that detailed and of that length I'd have been working on a thesis of my own. But somebody else's opinion is just that, and I'm not sure either writer can accurately define me. I couldn't say if the books you mention are just gimmicky conceits, or if their interest in my work is totally sincere and they've seen depths in it that I've not been aware of myself. I've never seen myself as that much of an intellectual, and certainly not an academic.
You do have honorary degrees from a couple of universities, though.
I do, yes, but interestingly the two degrees I have were awarded on the basis of musical composition, rather than the lyrics that presumably provide the thrust of those books. That seems amazing to me, because I don't know a crotchet from a quaver a lot of the time. I have to try harder to communicate through music, whereas words are something I do know about, and how to compress them into the confines of a song. I honestly don't know why anyone would want to write a thesis about me, but by the same token I'm intrigued by what others do with my actual music. The Juliet Letters has been translated into two languages [Polish and Italian], and it's pretty great for a piece of music to be taken somewhere new by professional musicians, students, whoever. Also, if you add up the various covers of songs from The Juliet Letters it's about the same number as "Alison," outlandish as that may seem.
I'm interested in the journeys my music takes, not that I'm necessarily always part of it. The songs exist, and people pick them up or put them down as they deem fit. It's a constant surprise to see what registers high with the wider world, and what doesn't. I think most musicians, when they're young and just starting out, convince themselves that certain songs are going to be smash hits, and I was probably quite guilty of that. It doesn't last long, though, because you quickly learn that the hardest thing to predict is what's going to lay the golden egg. It works both ways, because as much as it's foolish to think something's gonna be big it's just as foolish to dismiss something out of hand, thinking it's got no chance of taking off.
That was the case with "Oliver's Army" during the recording of Armed Forces, wasn't it? You very nearly left what was to become your most successful single on the studio shelf.
Well, I knew it was a good song, and I played it live in various forms for about a year before we came to make the record. I did it with just an acoustic guitar at some shows, but it took a little time to get it right with The Attractions, until Steve came up with the piano part that's since become the most identifiable thing it has to offer.
But the notion of what constitutes a hit is fairly woolly anyway. There are songs I've been playing for decades that, with the passage of time, everyone assumes were chartbusters, but if you check back at where they reached in the charts at the time of release, you'll find they made very little impact at all.
But even during times when your records haven't been in the upper reaches of the charts you've remained a cultural icon. You've got an impressive profile on IMDb (Internet Movie Database) with guest spots on the likes of The Larry Sanders Show, Frasier, Third Rock From The Sun, Two And A Half Men, 30 Rock, and as a stand-in host of David Letterman's talk show.
It's not something I've ever actively pursued, but the invitations come my way because I have a lot of friends who write for television. The Letterman thing was especially interesting, and I had a really good opening monologue written for me, with lots of gags. As for the sitcom cameos, what only laughably can be called acting, they're just a bit of fun. I did a couple of things in the UK in the 80s that were written by my friend Alan Bleasdale [TV comedy drama Scully, feature film No Surrender], neither of which revealed any thespian talent to speak of, but very little's been expected of me when I've turned up on American shows. When I did Two And A Half Men [created by Chuck Lorre, with whom Costello worked on a since shelved Broadway adaptation of the Painted From Memory album] I just had to pretend to smoke cigars with Sean Penn and Harry Dean Stanton — and who wouldn't want to play pretend with those guys!
When you do these things they're just one day out of your life, sometimes only half a day. You think of it as a one-off funfair ride, but what you forget is those shows go into syndication and end up being shown somewhere in the world year after year. They follow you around forever — I still get asked questions about the lemonade commercial I did with my dad [big band singer Ross MacManus] in the 70s. It becomes part of your cultural footprint, whether you like it or not!
You appear to have a healthy attitude to it all; no regrets and little thought of any of it being a blot in your copybook or a skeleton in the closet.
You can't be churlish about any of these things, because somewhere down the line some good can come from them. There are countries I've been able to visit purely on the strength of a hit with the theme song for a movie that might have baffled some people [the Elvis cover of Charles Aznavour's "She" from Notting Hill made him a hot ticket in Belgium]. When I'm there I get to state my own case for the other songs I've recorded, songs which completely bypassed that nation's radar first time round.
Bearing that in mind, do you have any overall philosophy gleaned from where your music career has taken you thus far, and where it might lead you next?
None at all! Philosophical is far too fancy a description for what I think of what I do at any given time, but I'd like to think I'm always thoughtful about the next step, the next lesson to be learned.
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