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"I Don't know what anyone else knows or what they don't know or what they care about," says Elvis Costello. "I'm just doing what I'm doing now, and I know what the value of the songs I've written is to me. I perceive what certain members of the audience have invested in one or two songs and that some people know every note you've played. I just don’t see myself in those terms, with these sort of adjectives that crop up in reviews, which can be flattering or even ridiculous hyperbole."
Thirty-five years into a recording career, Costello is well aware of his standing in the pantheon of pop. From writing alongside Paul McCartney to hosting the Spectacle television show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has long been looking for opportunities to experiment and challenge with his music, to use his accomplishments as a way to boldly go places his peers might be afraid to tread.
Most recently, Costello took on perhaps his most surprising and risky project yet, collaborating with The Roots, the world's greatest hip-hop band, on an album called Wise Up Ghost. As he describes below, creating this record alongside long-time Elvis superfan Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson led him into entirely new methods of songwriting and recording, ultimately resulting in a sound that clearly drew from both rock and hip-hop but can't be pinned down in any category. (The process was extended even further with the release of the Wise Up Thought remix EP in late November).
In the midst of running around Manhattan to promote the album, 59-year-old Costello bounded into the office of legendary Blue Note Records executive Bruce Lundvall. He went straight to the room's walls, which are covered with signed sheet music and photos of jazz titans, offering a story about a favorite song or an encounter with many of them. When Costello settled in to talk, the lunch he carried in mostly want untouched, as he reeled off a virtual monologue expressing his excitement and wonder about the new album.
He used the example of the Wise Up Ghost track "Wake Me Up" to illustrate how the new songs often developed out of fragments from his catalogue, and said that 2004's "Pulling Out The Pin," the starting point for the new track, was one of the best songs he ever recorded with his band, The Imposters. "It might seem odd to some people that I would want to re-record those lyrics," he said. "But that was how confident I was right off that what we were doing was trying to offer me a different opportunity - not repetitive, just different."
Where does the story of this album begin?
Ahmir will tell it as a trap, a very attractive pit they dug. But for me, the invitation to play the (Late Night with Jimmy) Fallon show came when I was publicizing Spectacle, so I was in a situation where I was playing with all these people that I could never imagine sharing a stage with, but I didn't have my band assembled. So I thought, how am I going to play the show? I could see how a retrospective song could be a good move, because a lot of the Spectacle idea was to look back at what people loved about music, and I didn’t think I wanted to do it solo, it seemed a bit too dandy for that show. I got in touch with Ahmir, and I went in there to find that they had called an arrangement of "High Fidelity" a slower arrangement that I had dropped in '79 and hadn't really thought about since. I thought that was great, really different - that's exactly what the investigation of Spectacle was about, it illustrates the lack of fear about things and it sounded great.
We did a version of "Chelsea" and, as you can imagine, Ahmir took hold of that drum pattern , which was pretty great to begin with, and did something with it. And then the next time I went in, we did "Stations Of The Cross" and "Black And White World," and the third time we did Bruce Springsteen songs. So we had the tools we needed over those three appearances, we just needed the recognition on both of our parts that it was worth pursuing for more enduring recorded music.
What made you think there might be an album in it?
After those three appearances, they said "We'd like to do some songs from your catalog and look at them a little deeper - let's start with "Pills And Soap". And I thought that was curious, because with "Pills And Soap" you could be tempted just to fill it out with a full arrangement; all that's on the record is a LinnDrum and a piano. And curiously enough, that song was the result of me hearing the first commentary rap records, things like "The Message," which connected to things I knew earlier, like The Last Poets, or Gill Scott-Heron or Dylan even.
There was no way I was going to adopt the performance practices of that music and be that literal-minded. - The Rolling Stones moved beyond Howlin' Wolf to taking that blueprint and creating all this incredible stuff. One minute you're doing "Little Red Rooster" and the next you're doing "Jumpin' Jack Flash," but you can see where the root is.
So how did you start in with "Pills And Soap?"
They sent me a loop, very spare and a different feel from anything I'd done. So I sketched out a version of "Pills And Soap" over this loop and kind of pulled the structure apart. The theme of the first verse is the horrible intrusiveness of a camera in a moment of tragedy. The song opens out of that to look at a number of different things in the way it was in England at that time. So I inserted a verse that came out of a song called "Hurry Down Doomsday," because that was the next time I returned to that theme, and I realized those verses would flow over this new rhythm.
That second verse starts with one of those novelty stories that you read in the footnotes; "Woman gets divorced because she will not remove the shirt of Jim Reeves from her husband's pillow at night," which was an actual story I read, and that's just too beautiful an image not to put in a song. Underneath that, I put "and the parents of the kidnapped children start the bidding for their tears." Now, when I wrote that, that kind of hadn’t really happened - the song was a futuristic song - but it sure as hell happens now. You see whole industries of people auctioning their tears. When something really terrible befalls them, the first thing they’re thinking about is the reality show about it. So then it had to have something that rejected that, so I lifted out "Stick our your tongue/Drink down the venom," which had come out of a verse of "National Ransom," which was a different kind of commentary song, utterly different king of music. Some other lines from "National Ransom" seemed to continue the thought, and then we returned back to some adapted lyrics that I hadn't recorded for "Pills And Soap."
Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...
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