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Elvis Costello is a mighty resilient artist. Next time you find yourself sweating the small stuff, think about this: The song Costello and his co-producers mixed at the end of the sessions for his latest release, When I Was Cruel (Island), is titled "The Imposter vs. the Water Tide," because, he says, "The weekend that we recorded it, seven feet of water came into our storage space and destroyed all my guitars. Hopefully, some of them will be salvageable. We did lose a lot of instruments and amplifiers, and sadly, the little 15-watt Sears Roebuck amplifier, which was the sound of this record, will probably not survive, but I think I got my money's worth out of it. It was an impulse buy in Red Bank, New Jersey. I just saw it in a shop window, and it lasted till the last day of the session. It was starting to complain that day. Little did it know that its days were numbered." He displays a surprising sense of humor under the circumstances, but maybe that's because, for Elvis Costello, the spirit of his work has always been at least as important as the tools.
In fact, pre-production for When I Was Cruel began as much with the pursuit of a feeling as with firm ideas about sounds. "I decided I wanted to make something like a rock 'n' roll record, but I didn't want it to go like one that I'd made in the past," Costello explains. "In other words, you go into a room, and you teach people rhythmically what you think it goes like, and they interpret that, and, obviously, they feed back to you a lot of ideas of their own. That's been very productive, and, obviously, when I had a band of my own [The Attractions] and we toured all the time, we worked the different permutations of three chords or nine chords or however many chords we were using, and different rhythms, pretty well. We made a lot of records, and many of them pretty good, I think, but I don't have that setup anymore. I don't have a regular band, so I was trying to find something that gave that propulsion to the music.
"So, I started messing around with some really simple machines, kind of kids' drum machines, really. I described it as having a thing with big, orange buttons on it — if it had big, orange buttons, I'd probably like it — and a really cheap little sampler that runs on batteries, so that means you can take it anywhere and record anything.
"I pretty much had the blueprint of certainly a good half of the record, either having just written in the way I've always written — just with a guitar or a piano, though in this case, it was all on the guitar — or the ones that were particularly rhythmically propelled, they were really integrated with these kind of big, stupid machines. They're big, bold strokes machines, incapable of any sort of subtlety. So, I had demos of me sort of bashing the songs out, and it was thrilling, because it was like rebounding off of a band the way you do at the very beginning."
As you can guess from Costello's description of his working method, the sounds he was working toward during the writing process were much more rhythm-driven and somewhat more electronic than the type of music he's normally associated with. When he was ready to dig deeper into the actual sounds and arrangements that would end up on the album, Costello reassembled a production team that he had worked with recently on some film music. Costello and the...
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