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“It took us 43 years to work out the thing that was holding this record back creatively, musically and commercially,” reflects Elvis Costello about This Year’s Model, his debut album with the Attractions. “My voice, and my face.”
Costello, famed for his biting lyrics and mordant wit, is joking… sort of. Fans expect the occasional left turn from the veteran songwriter, who has turned his hand to country, classical, jazz and hip-hop during a fêted career. But nothing quite like his latest project.
For Spanish Model, the musically curious Costello has taken the unprecedented step of recruiting an international cast of Latin pop and rock stars to re-record his seminal 1978 New Wave album entirely in Spanish.
Nineteen artists representing 10 countries, from Chilean talent-show winner Cami to Luis Fonsi, the Puerto Rican singer who topped global charts with “Despacito”, have transformed the songs for the Spanish-speaking world.
Their interpretations are layered over the original master recordings of Costello & the Attractions, so hits such as “Pump it Up”, re-voiced by Colombian rocker Juanes, retain the snarling energy laid down on tape by the crack team of Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas.
What will Costello’s loyal fans, who have followed every stylistic swerve, make of it?
“Some people who remember seeing us singing in English on Top of the Pops might go, ‘What the hell is going on?’ But just give it a listen and I think you’ll understand in your heart what we’ve done. It’s been done with a lot of playfulness.”
Costello, to be clear, does not speak Spanish himself. “It’s not something to be afraid of. The Beatles didn’t do too badly in German,” notes Costello of the Hamburg-schooled Fab Four repaying their large German audience by recording Teutonic versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”.
What Costello has done, inadvertently, is make the perfect album for listeners who find his vocals the least appealing element of his breakthrough records.
“We recorded ‘Pump it Up’ when I came back from an American tour and thought I knew everything. Suddenly quite a good tune was delivered with a sneer, to the detriment of the melody, if I’m really honest. But it was right for the sentiment and now we have this other beautiful version.”
Nuances buried in the Attractions’ assault are heard afresh. And putting a Spanish spin on classic tunes is also a commercially savvy move for a 67-year-old “heritage” artist.
English is no longer pop’s lingua franca, as the success of “Despacito”, which sold eight million copies in 2017 and broke down barriers for Spanish-language pop, demonstrated.
Latin America was the music business’s fastest-growing region globally in 2020, with revenues increasing by 16 per cent.
“Despacito” was followed up the charts by “Mi Gente” by Colombian singer J Balvin, boosted by a Spanish language contribution by Beyoncé, while Camila Cabello and Cardi B have become bilingual superstars.
“We’re known in Latin America but by no means have we had the hits of The Ramones there,” says Costello. “So to some people these songs are brand new.
“Streaming is how most people listen to Spanish Model and it could be a lovely way for people to discover it and maybe they’ll get a little curious to hear something else we do. Maybe they’ll listen to our next record? Who knows, but it’s not like that was the mission for it.”
The record stands on its own artistic merits. Costello conceived the idea after agreeing a request for Wild Belle singer Natalie Bergman to add her vocals to the original recording of “This Year’s Girl” as the theme to HBO drama series The Deuce.
“After hearing it sung from a different perspective, I made this rather fanciful leap into Spanish. I imagined hearing it in a dream one night.”
As it turned out, This Year’s Model has been a cult hit in the Hispanic world for 40 years, but Costello’s spittle-flecked vocal delivery had ensured the meaning of his scattergun lyrics had bypassed its intrigued – and puzzled – audience.
“Artists are always saying when they listen to Elvis’s music, ‘I wish I knew what he was saying,’” says Sebastian Krys, Costello’s Argentinian producer, who sourced the Hispanic singers. “So here’s an opportunity for people to dig into the ideas behind his songs, where the lyrics are paramount. These are adaptations, not literal translations. If you read Shakespeare in Spanish, it’s not Shakespeare, but you get the intent.”
The singers who came on board, including Draco Rosa, Fito Páez and Jorge Drexler, were given carte blanche to adapt Costello’s English idioms for a local audience.
Uruguayan musician Drexler, singing “Night Rally”, “called to discuss some of these idioms in great detail because he wanted to get every note right”.
The passing of time, and their reinterpretation in a new language, gives the songs a new resonance. The Trump-era scapegoating of Mexican asylum seekers gives a Spanish reading of “Crawling to the USA” fresh political relevance.
And “This Year’s Girl”, Costello’s laceration of the male gaze (“You want her broken with her mouth wide open/’Cause she’s this year’s girl”) hits home harder when sung by a young woman.
“I did say all along this is what the song was about,” says Costello, who was wrongly accused of sexism himself in 1978, over the track he wrote as a response to the misogyny of The Rolling Stones’s “Stupid Girl”.
“I can forgive people for misunderstanding the sympathy of the lyrics because of the intensity of my singing in these songs. Everything explodes through here,” he says pointing to a gap between his front teeth.
There were some surprises. He first heard the vocal for “Radio Radio”, as interpreted by Argentinian pianist Páez, down the phone while on holiday. “I’m trying to listen with my phone jammed to my ear in Disneyland and I’m hearing words that aren’t in the original. I
realised later he’d approached the story with a different perspective to the 1978 version. I’m hearing something about whisky – that’s not in the original song. And he’s saying my name. I loved that he was fearless with it.”
Costello says he doesn’t need to speak Spanish to respond emotionally to the new versions – he hopes the language barrier that for decades prevented English music lovers from opening their minds to music in a different tongue has been breached for good.
“When I heard Cami, a girl I’ve never met, sing ‘This Year’s Girl’, she made it truthful to her and that’s all I can ask.
“I respond to something in the sound of a voice when I listen to music in other languages,” he adds. “When I see the actual translation, it often surprises me what a song is about.”
“There are only a dozen topics in song, with a few exceptions: heartbreak, celebration and so on. It’s not hard to work out what’s going on.”
Costello is speaking from New York, where Hurricane Henri has just forced the mid-show abandonment of a Central Park “homecoming concert”, also due to feature Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon. It was a disappointment: fully recovered after treatment for an “aggressive” prostate cancer tumour in 2017, he is impatient to return to the live stage post-Covid (“I’m just trying to do my job, hopefully in a situation without all this hostility, anxiety and fear”). He hopes to gather the Spanish Model singers together for a special concert, possibly staged in Mexico City.
Costello kept busy during lockdown, releasing a defiant record, Hey Clockface, his 31st studio album, which has inspired another foray into foreign tongues – artists including Iggy Pop and Isabelle Adjani are working on French-language takes on its songs.
“Isabelle Adjani reciting my song ‘Revolution #49’ in French – talk about something coming to me in a dream,” he says, enthused.
Just don’t expect to hear “Oliver’s Army” in Japanese next. “The Spanish and French records are just a coincidence of timing. I’m not working my way through the catalogue going, ‘Now for the Romanian version of ‘Goodbye Cruel World’.’”
‘Spanish Model’ is out today
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