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A decade ago, having just released his twenty-third album National Ransom, Elvis Costello announced that he was finished making albums. It wasn't profitable, the music industry was changing, he had other priorities. For the most part, he kept to his word for the next eight years with just a few collaborations, extensive touring and completing his voluminous memoir. Then in 2018, Look Now signalled his return to recording, followed by Hey Clockface two years later.
Now, The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Stories) follows an absolutely feverish eighteen months of activity during which he has also released The Spanish Model (This Year's Model in Spanish), a French language EP, a comedic Words & Music podcast (How To Play Guitar & Y), and the Armed Forces box set. Prior to the end of 2021 he also completed a US tour with his band featuring guitarist Charlie Sexton (guesting while Dylan was off the road). At the age of 67, Costello is busier than ever!
"That's not all of it either. There's more," says Costello when I mention that he has been phenomenally busy in the past two years. "It's just a period where we weren't on the road. But I had all that music, and I had to make sense of that when we were forced to come home. Then I had a stack of ideas more than finished songs, and then I finished those.
"I suddenly had a period where I wrote a group of songs. I had a guitar in my hands for songwriting for the first time in a number of years, and that changes it a little bit. Around the time that Pete Thomas [The Imposters' drummer] said, 'I'm fed up going down in my basement, playing every day, playing along with my favorite records. There's nothing more to play.' And I said, 'Well, how about this?' The next thing we were making this, having this conversation and sending it back and forward. It wasn't really much different than if I'd charted the songs and we'd gone into the studio and cut it.
"Pete and I cut a whole album in two days once, with just the two of us, an album of demos for a record I wrote for a singer called Wendy James. So, I know that we are a good rhythm section, even if it's just me singing and him playing drums and me filling out the guitar and on occasion add the bass even. Of course, we just sent it to Davey [Faragher, bass] and then sent it on to Steve [Nieve, keyboards], who at first did have a complaint that we hadn't left anything for him to do. Of course, he quickly found something great to do."
So, was he misquoted some years ago, when it was reported that you weren't going to make any albums anymore?
"But it was sort of true. It was true for a couple of years," responds Costello. "I think sometimes the business side of music gets in your head a bit. I didn't feel as if I had a sense of entitlement to ever do anything. I knew I had to earn it. I had made this record in 2010, which I thought was as good as I could write, and I had been on the road with a really interesting, very wonderful band, which was an acoustic band, and we had had some tremendous shows. We'd made two albums in quick succession, the second of which was National Ransom. If you held a gun to my head and said, 'Name 10 songs that you would stake your reputation on,' at least three from that record would be in 10 out of 45 years. So, that's quite a high strike rate when you think what else there is.
"But the release of that record didn't call for us to play one performance from the week after the record came out. The band basically broke up because they had lots of other things to do. I thought that was too bad and I was discouraged. The rhythm of my working life had been about making records and then going and playing that music. So, I figured that must have come to an end. I don't know, maybe this is something to do with the way everything about the business is changing, and you could say evolving, or certainly I'm not needed here.
"So, maybe I should put my energies into making the shows exceptional and that's what I did for the next few years. I created stage shows like an impresario, one of them being the Spectacular Spinning Songbook revival, the second being Detour. I had a ball, because I could put all of my repertoire in play, either by chance or by theme, and I had lots of different ways to play them. Just when I thought I wasn't going to do anything else in the studio, I got invited in to do Wise Up Ghost with Steve Mandel and Questlove. No sooner had we done that than T Bone [Burnett] rang me and said, 'You want come into this band and play these Bob Dylan lyrics and turn those into songs?' Well, why would you turn that down?
"It was wonderful to be part of that unit that assembled around that notion. I got to play with some people I didn't know, a couple I did. And of course, all of that just reintroduced how great it is to make records. By which point my friendship with Sebastian Krys had given me a couple of opportunities to make records. And we made Look Now, which was a sort of summary of one approach to pop songwriting that I really appreciate, which is the sort of uptown pop song, orchestrated pop song with a strong rhythm section.
"I don't know what happened after that. I just suddenly, I guess it caught my fancy again to make records, and next thing I know we're making them every day. It seems like we're constantly recording."
Costello struck up a friendship with producer Sebastian Krys who had worked with a variety of Latin artists and who suggested they record a Spanish version of This Year's Model, Costello's second album that was released in 1978, enlisting some guest singers.
"Sebastian's reaction was, 'Yes, it is an insane idea, but let's do it anyway, because I think I know who you could approach.' He has been a tremendous friend in many, many ways, both in finding the way for The Impostors to make a record at the level of Look Now, where their individual talents are heard as they are today, not in a reference to the way two or three of us used to play a long time ago."
Krys also works alongside Costello on the production of The Boy Named If, a collection of thirteen 'snapshots' that according to Elvis's notes, "Take us from the last days of a bewildered boyhood to that mortifying moment when you are told to stop acting like a child — which for most men (and perhaps a few gals too) can be any time in the next fifty years."
The album will be released with an 88-page hardback storybook edition — each one numbered and signed by Costello — featuring thirteen illustrated short stories, which have the same titles as the songs on the record.
Costello's recent energy is certainly imbued in The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Tales), which features songs that burst out of the speakers and are reminiscent of his early work. There are also the requisite number of touching ballads at which he is so adept. The IF in the title is a name for an imaginary friend.
"There's something endearing about the notion of a child excusing certain things or having certain flights of fancy that involve an imaginary presence," explains Costello. "I don't know what psychologists think that is. There's also a slightly sinister element to it that I sort of feel is a bit like Turn of the Screw. You can look at it like that. And as you get older and when you continue to advance this alibi for your transgressions, I think it becomes much less endearing. When it becomes, 'Oh, I had to stay out all night. Oh, I had to sleep with her, she made me do it' — that's just bad behavior, that is immature, would be the way people sometimes describe it. Willful would be another way, cruel sometimes.
"I suppose that thread of musing on this period in life is partly about the departure from innocence and a sort of unselfconscious access to imagination and wonder, when you can dance or skip or stand on your head without in any way feeling foolish. In fact, you love to do it. You can versify, pull funny faces, draw fantastic inventions that can't possibly exist in reality. Then they force you to learn algebra. It takes all that magic away, around the same time that maybe you sense desires and impulses that you don't understand properly. In the period of ignorance before you understand them or even can control them, there are times when other people can use that ignorance against you, and it can be an innocent thing or it can be a mischievous thing, but it is a real thing. It's not abuse I'm talking about. I'm talking about just a sort of slight cruelty that can be between children. When I say children, I'm talking about people around 13."
"So, that's what is described in the refrain of 'The Death of Magic Thinking': 'She took my hand in an experiment / put it where it shouldn't be / put in underneath her dress and waited to see. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to say. It was just a game, I guess, one I didn't know how to play.' It's not a crime, and it's not a judgment, it's just something that happens. There are so many songs in popular music that portray the female object in the song as a temptress, and sadly, many more recently that speak of some cruel and wicked imbalance of power between men and women and all sorts of things that acknowledge the advantage taken by a man of a woman. But not so many that speak of this moment of uncertainty and vertigo."
"But of course, there are other songs that are describing other times in life: a young, irresponsible adulthood, older unrepentance, scandalous scoundrel living in exile, looking back on having tempted a novice into a love affair, betraying her vows. Then later on when he's kind of in exiled hiding, thinks back over his crimes and still thinks of her. Maybe he actually had some sincere feeling for her, but he never knew how to express it. He only knew how to take advantage of her. So, that's that story, which is the song 'Mr. Crescent', which closes the record. There's no particular significance of that being the last song, other than it sounded like it should be the last song. Sometimes we had to take the lead of what the music told us."
'Mr Crescent' is just one of several great ballads on the album, along with 'Paint the Red Rose Blue' (which sounds like a classic that many others will record in future).
"They're both musically quite simple," explains Costello when I ask how difficult it is to write a memorable ballad. "They don't really do anything that harmonically unexpected. 'Red Rose' has some very unusual things in the bridge, but I wanted the songs to carry the story. The red rose is usually a symbol of romance, isn't it? It's like the rose you give at Valentine's Day or on a birthday. It turning blue isn't about a change of allegiance or anything to do with flags or malice, it's totally to do with the mood that's usually represented with blue, melancholy. And the story is about a couple who have been through some sort of terrible sorrow, to the point that they've actually lost the place in love between them, and they're trying to find it.
"That's why the rose has turned blue. That's a quite simple idea in some ways, but it's also maybe a portrait of, at least the man maybe, as somebody who has actually flirted with darkness as a kind of, like it says, theatrical blood is convenient to spill, has actually maybe invited that kind of darkness in. When it arrives with full force, it's overwhelming and you have to rebuild belief. It's not an easy topic for a song, so I thought it should have a melody that really fell on the ear invitingly, and I believe it does."
Nick Lowe said that when he writes songs, he's always thinking that someone else is going to record them. 'Paint The Red Rose Blue' has a lot of longevity to it and I wonder who Costello would like to record it as well.
"Well, anybody that really would take it on sincerely," he replies. "Not a lot of people record my songs. I think how many that I've written, they obviously present a challenge, in many cases because of the volume of words, which is more than some singers want to negotiate or can't negotiate, because rhythmically, they just don't do that. Some of the songs that I wrote with Burt Bacharach are actually quite difficult to sing and even superficially more accomplished singers than me have tried and failed to sing them.
"I've written lots of songs with somebody in my mind, even somebody that I never did know and would never meet, and some people that had already left this place. But I hadn't really thought of that, to be honest but if anybody did want to sing it, I'm sure it would be lovely. I didn't imagine anybody else singing these songs, because I was working quite quickly, and as I had finished them, we began recording them. Next thing I knew, we'd finished the record. It didn't really take very long. So, maybe I didn't even have time to think about that, but it's a nice thought."
The 88-page book that comes with the album adds a whole new dimension to the lyrics as well, with accompanying superb illustrations by Costello.
"Well, it's something at the time when we were making it, there was a sort of a vinyl scare, so to speak," explains Costello. "These days, the physical object at the center of the story of a record release, I think needs to be something you can physically hold in your hand. It's very hard to catch hold of the bytes, a download, let alone a stream, that you can't hold that in any way. It encourages the feeling that music is ephemeral.
"My chosen delivery for records these days is vinyl again, because I like the scale of it for the artwork, and I like the sound of vinyl better than CD. That's my preference. Not everybody agrees with me on that. I was told that we could have CDs, and I thought, well, they're little things that aren't very substantial to hold, and the title of the record is The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Tales). So why not make that a reality, create this book? I fully expected somebody to say, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. That would just be too expensive' or, 'We could never do that.' But much to my surprise, everybody said yes. I wrote the stories with the same title as the songs, sometimes setting the scene for the song, sometimes a postscript to the song, sometimes background detail to the song.
"Sometimes the relationship of the song and the story might not be that obvious to the reader, because I didn't want to make it a necessity that you read it. You could enjoy the song without ever reading those tales."
"That's something that I've done over the last few years," admits Costello when I ask him about the illustrations in the book. "I find a lot of comfort in just drawing. I never learned any technical skills. I didn't go to art school or anything. I don't know. I couldn't do any of those things with a pen or a paint brush, but I can do them with an electric pencil, which allows you access to the imitation of various pictorial techniques without learning how to actually do them with something as wet as paint or ink. But then David Hockney paints on an iPad, so I'm absolved from any guilt.
"If you really want to know, in 2018, it was a year of some challenge. I had an operation, which was something which avoided serious illness. Nothing more need be said about that. It was something nobody would've known about if I hadn't had to cancel some shows. But then in the summer, my mother had a very serious stroke, and being in her nineties, there was a good chance she wouldn't recover. I of course went to England, sat with her, and ended up sitting in the hospital ward for five weeks. Although she was seriously impaired, she did regain a lot of cohesion to her thought and even, with difficulty, speech. It gave her two more years. She passed in January. While I was there, you can't sing, you can't be in a hospital ward with other people screaming, sleeping, moaning, complaining, whatever. You can't make a lot of noise. Often, you're watching that person sleep, and you don't know when they're going to wake up, so it was good to have something that was involving and some way, I guess, consoling.
"I started to do these cartoons for all sorts of occasions. I put them on record sleeves. I put them on the video backdrop. They amuse me, and they annoyed some people, which made me just want to do more of them. Then with this collection, I had really a reason to do them, but they came from a really personal place. They're not of any value artistically, but they are of value emotionally to me, because of the origin of them, particularly all the more now. So, I thought, well, as there are themes of the emergence of childhood, it's an appropriate moment. Even though I'd written all the songs before my mother passed, it's not without dishonor that this record and the whole thing should exist, really. I think she would've got a kick out of it."
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