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Most pop stars' forays onto the higher ground of "serious" music are simply considered umimportant side projects, the unfortunate afterleavings of a bout with self-indulgence. Artists who reside regularly in the swamp between categories, such as Diamanda Galas and John Cale, are sometimes dismissed as dilettantes or weirdos.
Yet Paul McCartney's written a requiem, and Police drummer Stewart Copeland gave opera a shot. David Bowie recorded Bertolt Brecht's Baal, and Extreme's latest album was a Jesus Christ Superstar-style song cycle. Then there's the Joffrey Ballet's "Thunder Suite," based on songs by His Purple Majesty. Perhaps it's the aura of doom surrounding the adventure that makes so many pop artists want to take that leap.
Given this context, Elvis Costello's latest effort seems both inevitable and disastrous. Costello's never been able to keep his fingers out of other generic paint pots: he's tried country, vaudevillian music hail, torch songs, Sam Cooke soul, and television advertising jingles. But he's not dabbling around with The Juliet Letters. As he puts it in the album's liner notes, he and his collaborators, the Brodsky Quartet, were "anxious to avoid that junkyard named 'CrossOver,'" instead hoping for a new, ostensibly pure, musical form.
Perhaps it's that fear of crossover, a term which signifies not only hybridization but accessibility, that makes The Juliet Letters sound so strained. On his rock records, Costello slips easily from one emotion to another; he can belt it out or croon, play the punk or the folkie, and never lose himself. He can do this because his persona itself contains a contradiction that never lets it settle: he's a cynical sentimentalist. On albums from My Aim Is True to 1991's underappreciated Mighty Like a Rose, Costello wrings emotion from wordplay because he never forgets that pop is both serious and a game.
Compared to these albums, The Juliet Letters is a clunky costume drama undermined by Costello's histrionics. The inspiration for the piece stems from one of Costello's favorite games, the literary conceit. He learned of a Veronese professor who'd taken to answering letters written by the anonymous lovelorn to Shakespeare's Juliet. Costello and the Brodskys wrote 19 musical "letters," some of which might have been received by the professor and others, such as a piece of junk mail and a memo from a law firm which are supposed to fit on the album simply by virtue of their form.
The Brodsky Quartet plays beautifully, but like any such ensemble, it's a closed group; Costello's singing can't penetrate its occult structure. In pop songs, music and vocals intertwine to shape a hook or a groove, but the acoustics of classical music don't allow for this kind of blend. I once saw the soprano Jane Manning sing Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" with the Kronos Quartet; her voice careened against, and sometimes pushed all the way through, the string players' furious embattlements. That was as close to rock & roll as classical ensemble playing gets, its relish of disharmony recalling rock's desire to tear things down.
But Costello's not that kind of rocker. He's a harmony addict; he wants to make the bitterest pill taste irresistible. Throughout The Juliet Letters, Costello tries to make himself an appropriate presence, to fit in with the assumed proprieties of strings. "This Offer Is Unrepeatable" takes a stab at Brecht's alienated theater, but just sounds forced. "I Almost Had a Weakness" sounds like musical theater in badly fitted drag. The unsettled tune of "Taking My Life in Your Hands" indicates that Costello's fighting his own tendency just to make swell songs; his pretensions, usually an asset, defeat him here.
The Juliet Letters may contain a few notable compositions, but the setting never coalesces enough to let any simple beauty shine through. I'd love to hear "Jacksons, Monk and Rowe," a jaunty composition by Brodsky members (and siblings) Jacqueline and Michael Thomas, backed by bass and drums. "The First To Leave" is vintage sad Elvis, circa Imperial Bedroom. But Costello sings these songs as if he's at the edge of the orchestra pit, straining to reach the depths of meaning suggested by such a formal setting.
As a pop artist, Costello specializes in brilliant asides; he carefully crafts his insinuations to appear offhand. Whether he's playing with country, power pop or the Broadway croon, he has an uncanny knack for extracting a funny bone, the musical or lyrical detail that makes a song tingle all over. But he can't get under the skin of The Juliet Letters. Its evocative instrumental passages only underscore Costello's distance from chamber music's organic meaning, established in quiet circles over years of history and never really open to chair-climbers like him.
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