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Elvis Costello emerged from the fledgling “New Wave” scene in the late ’70s as a singing/song-writing enigma, and has deftly bobbed and weaved his way through every musical style from country to opera ever since. As a result, he’s been described as a “pop encyclopedia,” able to “reinvent the past in his own image.” When not collaborating with Paul McCartney or T-Bone Burnett, these days he turns his trademark glasses and imposing intellect to the task of bringing musical giants and should-be giants to the small screen, thus allowing us the privilege of listening in on conversations that can only take place musico a musico.
And now he’s coming back to Edmonton for a fundraiser for Fort Edmonton Park. Despite his famously having said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” I jumped at the chance to speak with him at length about his past, his music, his marriage to jazz musician Diana Krall and, as it turns out, his still raw memories of interviewers who were not quite up to the task.
SEE: I remember hearing you back in 1978 and thinking, “who is this guy?” because you didn’t really seem to fit into any of the particular genres that were going on at the time. You seemed to be a singular voice. So I’ll ask you, “Who was that guy?”
Elvis: Well, I don’t know the answer to that question. You would’ve had to have asked me then and I might not have answered in any case. One thing I will say about it is that I always liked records where people sounded singular, you know, they sounded different, not as if they were fitting in. I don’t think any of us thought of it philosophically but you might say that there was an approach that didn’t really have much time from what had immediately passed before. And that’s nearly always the case with popular music. It just had a little more edge to it then because it was being characterized as something. Some provocateurs wanted to make it sound like it was in some way revolutionary. That was more to do with making their name than necessarily making the music sound better. It didn’t actually make the records sound any better to shout a lot about them, or to make provocative gestures around them. It just got a lot of attention for a short period of time. In the long run the good records are the good records for whatever time they come from, that’s what you find.
SEE: You were referred to at one point as a “menacing Buddy Holly” I believe.
Elvis: That showed a tremendous imagination, didn’t it? Because he wore glasses and so did I, so we can dismiss that one right away. Menacing? I don’t think so. I mean, I never killed anybody. My experience at physical threat is pretty limited.
SEE: I think the “menacing” may have just come from how you presented in the videos, your sense of bravado…
Elvis: Well, videos, let’s just take that one as an example. Videos are people standing in a room for hours and hours pretending to sing a song they’ve recorded on another occasion. They were for a brief time seen as an essential pendant to the recording, you know. Obviously, the first ones that we made predated MTV, and as soon as MTV appeared we more or less stopped making them for the very good reason that we didn’t look the way that people on MTV looked, you know, so I was kind of relieved when that stopped. I made one or two after that at the behest of the record company and we had some fun making a couple of them, but I never really thought of them as a serious thing. I think if you saw the outtakes, a lot of the videos and the pictures that we took at that time that are seen with the benefit of 30 years hindsight to be in some way menacing or threatening, you would see the people cracking up and realizing it was ludicrous.
SEE: I’m interested in how you feel about another quote from 1978 where you said your “ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant, someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking.”
Elvis: Well, you know, you have to visualize the person on the other side of the table from me at that time. I was 22 and I’d just made a record, and there were two types of journalists that I encountered in the first days. There were people who looked like they’d escaped from a Glam Rock band and mostly comported themselves as if they were the rock stars, and in some cases they had every reason to believe they were, they were not bad writers and they’d probably taken more drugs than many of the people they were writing about. And then there were sort of leering, stained people with comb-overs and a cigarette with a long plume of ash, who were kind of like a caricature of a journalist in a bad movie with a belted raincoat and a spiral notebook who wanted sort of juicy tidbits about the girls that you met backstage. There were only two types of people. There was nobody that my youthful, arrogant self identified as a sentient human being. So I think I probably said things that I thought would get up their nose. And I think that worked. It mostly had the very, very pleasing effect of getting them to leave me the fuck alone for a number of years. And I got on and I made quite a lot of records in a short bit of time without the burden of having to speak to anybody.
SEE: You seem to have taken the establishment on in a sense, and I think that’s really what comes through then, and to a lesser extent, or maybe not to a lesser extent, now.
Elvis: I really don’t know about that. I think that the gestures of rebellion and defiance in popular music are wildly exaggerated in terms of their daring and impact. I mean their impact is great among the people who are paying attention. It’s like imagining that the world is looking to you because you’re holding a communication device in your hand, whether it’s a mobile phone or one of these Twitting things, you know. It’s only an illusion you’re creating for yourself. You’re making yourself a sort of star in your own movie. All of show business is like that anyway. Now, everybody’s in show business. I don’t really think that there’s much daring involved in any gesture. I mean, you’re trying to write songs from the heart and sometimes the songs contain feelings and sometimes even the occasional coherent line that matters to you and expresses your point of view, and if somebody finds some sympathy with that thought, or that thought strikes them as something worthwhile or something that they appreciate, then that’s the extent of the pact. It doesn’t make you friends, it doesn’t create an obligation on the part of the listener or the person that’s singing to repeat that form. It doesn’t really strike a blow against the darker forces in the world because they’re not paying attention. It just makes us feel better that we’re not so lonely.
SEE: I speak to people about “New Wave” and no one seems to really understand what that was. Is it possible to put “New Wave” in perspective musically?
Elvis: I’ve no idea really what that term was supposed to denote. It was just a cute way of distinguishing groups that weren’t pierced in any way from those that were. It was really just a marketing ploy, because they had a bunch of bands that played short songs in a vaguely aggressive way that couldn’t be identified as punk.
SEE: So what’s you’re opinion of the concept of genre in music, or in any art form? Is it worthwhile?
Elvis: Not really. I think you’re wasting a lot of time thinking about theoretical stuff. Why must something be in a list or in a class, you know? We’re not classifying plants here. It’s not a scientific endeavor. It’s just music. Whatever you call it. People give it different names. Would it have been better if it had been called “Woogie Boogie” instead of “Boogie Woogie”? It’s just an arrangement of letters and sounds that represent some sort of feeling you get when you hear music. When there’s a change of mind, a change of heart, a change of hairstyle you can easily call it something else. They were all doing the Charleston one day and now they’re not.
SEE: With your TV show you’re sort of, and you may not like this so I apologize, but a curator of musical artists, in a sense. That’s the way I see it. You help us to understand artists in a forum where we can really go deeper.
Elvis: The show is really revolving around slightly longer form conversations about music and the place music has in people’s lives and work. In the main they are musicians, we share some of the same experiences, we have different methodology, we come sometimes from different generations but we are aware of a certain relationship between words and tones and the experience of standing on a stage and trying to express unto an audience. Therefore perhaps I am at a slight advantage to a person in another occupation asking those same questions. The guests have ranged from people who don’t require any explanation because they’re extremely well known, and there’s a degree of generosity in them coming into the framework of the show, people like Bono and Edge, Bruce Springsteen and even President Clinton, and obviously the executive producer, Elton John. And then I’ve had the opportunity to feature people who I believe should be much better known but for some reason aren’t, like Ron Sexsmith and Jesse Winchester, you know, and people may be really startled by hearing a song by Jesse Winchester, not just an old song which is great to hear him singing beautifully but also a brand new song. Like a lot of good things it’s very simple. I haven’t seen it as a burdensome or grand design. It’s just a conversation, the kind of conversation that musicians have, and it goes on as long as it will do at the taping. We have to edit it and try to develop a narrative after the fact rather than having, as it would be on a “chat” show, a very brief amount of time to banter and ending up with a plug for the new release, you know, and then a musical number. It’s a different animal. It’s not necessarily superior inherently but I believe you’ve got a better chance of hearing a bit more about what people value in this context than where they’re just sort of making light hearted chit-chat, you know? People seem to like it well enough. And that’s really the story of that, there really isn’t that much more to add because the great thing about it is you can’t really have a conversation about a conversation, you know, what’s in there is what’s intended to be in there.
SEE: What is “The Shape”?
Elvis: “The Shape” is the name of a character that I’m portraying in a piece which is being constructed. It’s an unusual form. It’s a sort of a radio play, as it were, except it’ll be on record. It’s a collaboration between John Mellencamp and Stephen King, produced by my friend T-Bone Burnett, and a number of singers, some of whom are friends like Roseanne Cash and people that I’ve recently met through Spectacle like Neko Case, Cheryl Crow, likewise, and Kris Kristofferson. There are actually a number of people that have been on Spectacle but that’s purely, completely coincidental. But we happen to be all characters in this story, and “The Shape” is this sort of demonic, satanic I suppose, demonic rather than satanic, the provocateur character that nobody sees but whispers in everybody’s ear. Typecast again. But it’s interesting to do. I think some people got hold of the wrong end of the stick and imagined it was going to be a Broadway musical, but I think it would be pretty tough to imagine all those people showing up for Broadway.
SEE: A little, yeah.
Elvis: But this is another way to do it, I think it’s an interesting way to do it, get people into the studio and record. It’s kind of like a collage almost of dramatic performances, and a lot of the songs are written in character voices. I’ve written a number of songs where I’m not that person that’s singing, there’s even reprehensible characters in songs where I wouldn’t want to be that person. But here I’ve got a little more licence to go a bit further with that, because it’s somebody else’s character that’s been created and I have to sort of try and bring it to life in some way that made sense to me and I hoped that they liked it. People are trying different things. The record company relationship with artists is less dominant than it used to be. People are able to sort of try some different forms without being worried about losing radio play in Idaho. Nobody cares about that anymore. If there’s a good station in Idaho, then they can have a direct conversation with you. If there isn’t, then you’re not losing anything by doing something that’s interesting to you. It’s probably a good idea to give it a try, see what happens.
SEE: I have to ask you about your marriage. I hate to bring up the word “genre” but it’s a cross-genre marriage in a sense. How has that impacted your writing? Do you and your wife share ideas or do you just sit back and enjoy each other and say, “Well, that’s not me, but I like it”?
Elvis: I really love hearing my wife’s performances and she makes great records. We obviously are encouraging and supporting to each other. That’s what you do anyway with the person that you share your life with, there’s no big surprise in that. The fact that we have the same profession or vocation means that we understand some of those things, while not necessarily making exactly the same kind of music. That would be sort of idiotic. We’ve written a few songs or have collaborated on a few songs, but it isn’t something that we do as a compulsion or an obligation. If we did it again it would probably be different than the songs that we wrote before. But you know, that was a very specific time and place that Diana needed to express some slightly more personal meanings than she had previously put on record. And for me I don’t doubt that there are a number of songs that I wouldn’t have written had our life not turned the way it did. But that isn’t to say that every song must be a reflection of your life as it is in that moment. It perhaps in some ways frees you to be more wide ranging and less self-regarding, and perhaps as time goes on you are less self-absorbed than you might have been as a younger person when you were exploring the impact of some emotional conditions upon your writing. I think something that all writers are guilty of sometimes is provoking turmoil in their life so that they can have something to write about. I think that if you reach some degree of peace in your life it opens up another set of possibilities of what you might be able to write about and not waste your energy on that.
SEE: There’s the idea that as writers grow older and become more content with their life, their writing seems to suffer. But your suggestion is sort of the opposite.
Elvis: I have access to the blue side of life whenever I want it. You only have to look in the headlines to see tragedy, and to see stupidity and cruelty. You don’t necessarily have to invite it into your life moment to moment in order to be stimulated to write. There’s no doubt that moments of turmoil in our communal life as a society or in individuals, it can at times generate great writing, but I don’t think that it’s necessary, you know?
SEE: You’re coming to Edmonton for a theatre fundraiser for Fort Edmonton Park. Tell me about that.
Elvis: The objective is to restore a cultural landmark of the city. Venues are increasingly uninspiring, the new ones. Quite often they’re just concrete raised blocks and all-purpose venues that lack the elegance of older theatres, which have some continuity with other styles of performance. I’m personally very happy to play when I find a great old theatre. There are very few modern venues that have that same feeling. When the lights go down and you forget everything you’re probably just concentrating on the music anyway, but you have a head start if you’re in a good environment. It’s not any great theory apart from that, except that it gives me the opportunity to come back to the city. I haven’t been there for awhile.
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