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This is the quietest, most deliberate record Elvis Costello has made yet, and the most articulate: both in terms of what he says and how he says it. The instrumental configuration varies a little from song to song, but it's primarily the sort of line-up you'd find in a small jazz band or an early rock 'n' roll combo — guitars, bass, drums, organ, piano — and those instruments are likely as not to be acoustic, with brushes on the drums. The result is a warm, intimate sound, buoyed especially by the bass playing, which in every instance but two is provided by the excellent Jerry Scheff and otherwise by the great Ray Brown.
Listening to the roughly hour's worth of music on King of America, one realizes what has been lost in rock and pop as the music has become more and more electrified. There is an intimacy, a liveliness here not found in almost any other pop record of recent memory. By taking the sophistication back to about where the first rockabilly musicians first began plugging in, Costello and his producer, T Bone Burnett, quickly recapture a lot of the spark and the suppleness that characterized those earlier records.
It is not, however, "roots" rock, a la Dave Edmunds or the Blasters, nor is it a tribute to a genre, the sort of thing Costello himself aimed for with Almost Blue, his country record. Rather, it seems like nothing more or less than an effort to strip music down to its essential parts, to explore the strengths in playing it straight.
This is perhaps the one unexpected maneuver left to a performer who has made a career out of doing the unexpected. Heretofore his music has never lacked for complexity, either lyrically or instrumentally, and it has certainly never lacked a lot of surface flash. King of America, on the other hand, is straightforward music — intelligent and well thought out but simple enough to be played on any stage, in any bar, in any living room for that matter.
Costello's trademark acidulous wordplay crops up now and again ("She said that she was working for the ABC News / It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use"), but most of the songs eschew cleverness save where it serves the lyric, something Costello has not always been willing to do. Likewise, his normal accomplices, the Attractions, play on only one song, and even they forgo their usual chinoiserie finish work in favor of the rougher, deeper sound that pervades the rest of the album.
Elsewhere the musical duties are handled mostly by that other Elvis' back-up band: James Burton, Jerry Scheff and Ron Tutt. Ray Brown and Earl Palmer grace two numbers, and assorted studio musicians fill out the roster. The music that results is a collection of ballads, blues, a bit of rockabilly and some rock 'n' roll that sounds as though its makers have listened to all of what has come before them, picked what they liked and fashioned a style that manages to be both traditional and novel at the same time.
This sounds like coyness unless I explain that these musicians haven't just listened to rock 'n' roll but to jazz and blues and fiddle tunes — American music — and of course no one has listened to American music with more raptness and devotion than the average post-war English lad.
So what results isn't coy, but it is self-conscious at times (and a little show offy, in a we-can-do-anything sort of way, which isn't true, sadly: The two or three up tempo songs sound rushed and unanchored; things only soar in the ballads and the mid-tempo numbers). At least three of the record's 15 songs are about the price of fame and the masks that one is forced to wear or dons voluntarily. The jacket credits the songs to Declan MacManus, Costello's former name, and labels the effort as done by "The Costello Show, featuring the Attractions and Confederates." The jacket further labels each side of the record "Face One" and "Face Two."
Thematically, this carries over into the lyrics, as evidenced even in such phrases as "King of America," "King of Fools," "Jack of All Parades" and "Suit of Lights." But the lyrics aren't confused. Marked by ambiguity, yes, and a mite murky now and again, for the most part they wonderfully illuminate the hard business of finding one's place in the world. The "Glitter Gulch" of stardom may be foreign territory to most of us, but most of us do know what it's like to come to terms with the face in the mirror and again what it's like to reconcile that face with the roles we play in society.
Ultimately, the only way I can ever tell if something is good is to live with it. If I had to bet, though, I'd bet I'll be listening to this record for a long time.
There's a bigness to these songs, a spaciousness to the best of them that lifts you up and carries you along. There's some corniness to them, like good jokes, and some surreal angles, but mostly there's just good songwriting and high spirited singing and playing. I can't think of anything else to ask for.
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