Musician, March 1986: Difference between revisions

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And because I was recording with new people, when it came time to do the songs I had no way of masking it. I didn't have any mannerisms of the band to hide behind. Which I suppose is why the band didn't end up playing on much of the record. The only mannerisms were my own limitations of pitch, of voice, of technical ability. By the time we finished the record I felt more at ease with the strangers than with the Attractions. It was weird.
And because I was recording with new people, when it came time to do the songs I had no way of masking it. I didn't have any mannerisms of the band to hide behind. Which I suppose is why the band didn't end up playing on much of the record. The only mannerisms were my own limitations of pitch, of voice, of technical ability. By the time we finished the record I felt more at ease with the strangers than with the Attractions. It was weird.
'''MUSICIAN:''' How did you approach working with such a range of musicians?
'''COSTELLO:''' We started off with the TCB Band, which was perhaps the most daunting. Everybody was daunting to play with, but because they were Elvis Presley's band I wondered what they'd think of my using the name. But they were so easy-going and open-minded. It was very heart-warming. Ron Tutt made one little joke about it.
Perhaps the payoff to working with those guys -- and with respect to any possible tension there might have been over the Elvis identity -- was when I left the booth with only four strings left on my guitar while the band was still playing the end of "Glitter Gulch." As I passed Jerry Sheff he said, "That kind of reminded me of playing with Elvis." My heart nearly stopped. I got just past him and he added, "Except with Elvis, the ballads were like that."
T-Bone suggested that we don't keep secret what the songs were about. If we were attempting to make emotionally involved records, we had to let the musicians in on the secret. So first off we'd gather the musicians in the center of the studio and I'd play them the song on acoustic guitar. I'd even explain anything that was a little guarded in the lyric. Perhaps it's easier to talk openly to people who don't know you well.
The Attractions played really good on "Suit Of Lights" and we got some other things in the can that will come out as B-sides.The band that got the most tracks on the record, theTCB Band, were also the people who recorded in the first weeks, so I'm not saying any one group of musicians were better than any others. I'm finding it a lot more fun to go in and do it like this, and the results seem to be better. Next year I might do something completely different.
'''MUSICIAN:''' When you sing "I was a fine idea" -- or ideal -- "at the time/ Now I'm a brilliant mistake," it sounds like a sadder, wiser sequel to your old notion of "This year's model."
'''COSTELLO:''' Yeah, it would be very arch not to have any recognition of mistakes. But not in the sack cloth and ashes sort of way that certain ex-members of the Beatles went through. You can do it with a little bit of humor. That song's an introduction to the record; a disclaimer, if you like, for everything else on there. It's not supposed to be some gigantic statement. It's not supposed to be confessional or anything, but there are things on the record that are quite true. There's no point in being coy and hiding behind a load of mannerisms any more.There's bits and pieces of a story going throughout which are not necessarily the pages of my life.
"Brilliant Mistake" is a sad song, but it's also sort of funny. It's about America and it's about lost ambition, not lack of inspiration. It's about a disappointed or frustrated belief. It's a song that people are going to read wrong. One line in it is, "There's a trick they do with mirrors and with chemicals." It means celluloid and mirrors, movie cameras. It occurred to me the other day that people will think it's a reference to cocaine. I could have written a big song about America, like Paul Simon's "American Tune." But I think "Brilliant Mistake" is more like "Peace Like A River," a personal thing in the face of a big disappointing artifice.
I've always tended to qualify in songs. I never wanted somebody to point and say, "What a naive position!" And I suppose in doing that I betrayed naivete in the long run. That's the irony of it in retrospect. It's only on the new record that I've written any songs that are completely straightforward. The older ones were always qualified, whether by the weight of songwriting technique necessary to write something like "The Only Flame In Town," or the obscurity, the convoluted writing of songs like "Kid About It" and "Man Out Of Time" -- which are actually true songs.


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The Last Elvis Costello Interview
You'll Ever Need to Read


Bill Flanagan

When Elvis Costello called his last album Goodbye Cruel World he wasn't kidding. After eight years he was sick of the whole pop star deal. For the rest of 1984 he played solo acoustic shows, turning his back on rock 'n' roll. 1985 was not easier. After a decade of ups and downs he and his wife Mary agreed to divorce. Relations with his non-working band, the Attractions, grew strained. It was just time to lay the whole Elvis Costello thing to rest. So he went and legally changed his name back to Declan Patrick McManus. He added one morename -- Aloysius -- in honor of the years lost to the character he'd created and who had taken over his life.

"I don't know why I ever changed it in the first place," Declan said. "Maybe it had something to do with actually believing the myth. It had something to do with actually believing I was in the wacky world of pop music. It happened too quickly to think of the implications. There was only my parents saying, 'That's a bit odd.' I can't see escaping it too easily. When people write about me there'll always be a dash between the names."

There were some positive signs. T-Bone Burnett, opening act on Costello's solo tours, became a good friend and the two songwriters collaborated on an exuberant 45 called "The People's Limousine." Better still, Declan fell in love with Cait O'Riordan of the Celtic punk group the Pogues.

I first caught up with Declan, Cait and T-Bone in London in mid-'85, where Costello and Burnett put on a two-man "Coward Brothers" show in a small theatre. Spirits were high early on, but crashed when the Attractions -- alerted by sour Costello roadies -- confronted Declan with the accusation that he planned to dump them and record his next (Burnett-produced) LP with American session musicians. As it turned out that wasn't quite the case -- the Attractions would be included among the players on the new record. But it would not be an Elvis Costello & the Attractions album.

"The record will come out under the name 'The Costello Show,'" Declan explained to me later. "It was almost 'The McManus Gang.' I tried to play down the whole thing. I want it to be gradually assimilated. Otherwise the trash press in England, the Daily Mirror and the Sun, will make a gimmick story out of it. I've been an oddball to them for ten years. I'll be even more of an oddball for changing from one stupid name back to the stupid name I was born with.

The morning after we met in London, history-buff Elvis/Declan and his ten-year-old son traveled to Russia for a short holiday. Unfortunately, Dad forgot about the American dollars he'd stuffed in the bottom of his bag during a U.S. visit. The Soviet customs commissars pulled out that wad and as quick as you could say "currency smuggler" yanked Declan off to an interrogation room. As the door closed the protesting songwriter saw his boy standing alone in the middle of the Ellis Island of the Evil Empire.

That mess got cleared up just in time for Declan to get back to Britain and sing "All You Need Is Love" at Live Aid.

A few months later Declan was in Hollywood. T-Bone and recording engineer Larry Hirsch came into the TV lounge at Sunset Sound to tell him they thought they had a final mix of "You're So Lovable," an uptempo number the former Costello co-wrote with new fiancee Cait. Heading for the mixing board, Declan displayed an impressive knowledge of the technical side of record making, pinpointing an elusive echo that seemed to be on the vocal track as the fallout from an effect on the guitar. He wanted it all as dry as could be.

T-Bone said later, "I don't think anybody's realized yet how good he is. Because he came in on a trend that was part of a street movement in England. The guy can really sing, can really play, and can really write songs. For me one of the failings of his other records was that while the Attractions play the type of music they play brilliantly, to take them out of their idiom is really unfair to them. They end up sounding not as good as they really are. And most of this record was out of that idiom. This record is a break with his past. It's back to what he really cared about in music in the first place."

For the new album Declan and Burnett wrote up a wish list of perfect players, ignoring voodoo warnings about the alleged incompatibility of diverse styles. T-Bone knew his way around different music scenes, and had no regard for what NRBQ's Terry Adams calls the Musical Border Patrol. So the California Costello sessions mixed together jazz greats like Ray Brown and Earl Palmer, the core of Elvis Presley's TCB Band (James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Ron Tutt), the Hall & Oates rhythm section, Southern hotshot Mitchell Froom, L.A. session vet Jim Keltner, and those perennial Attractions, who rolled into town late in the project and played the pants off "Suit Of Lights" -- a sort of requiem for Rhinestone Cowboys and other Last Year's Models. "That song's about the dubious embrace of celebrity," Declan explained. "The first verse came from seeing my father play to a very rude audience." Yes, the elder McManus was a musician, too.

The album Declan dubbed King Of America sounds so perfectly unified it would be easy to believe the same band played throughout. The tracks were cut live in the studio with Declan singing and playing acoustic guitar. And the players always focused on serving the songs.

Which is as it should be. Because these may be the best songs Elvis Costello -- by any name -- ever wrote. Declan stripped his work down to its emotional core, eschewing flashy chord structures and virtuosic wordplay. There is great delicacy in the composition, but not extravagance; skill and humor in the lyrics without showiness; deftness in the performances rather than flash. In its feeling of standing outside time and trends, King Of America recalls the first two LPs by the Band. Some of the album is concerned with a traveler arriving in America. This inspiration came from Declan's grandfather, a one-time ship's musician who regaled the family back in Britain with tales of New York. A less skillful writer might try to summon the disorientation of a British immigrant in the new world with images of skyscrapers or the Statue of Liberty. Declan accomplishes a lot more with the phrase, "new words for suspenders and young girls' backsides." Real funny, real evocative, and real true.

In the emotional intensity of its best songs, King Of America is a little like Blood On The Tracks. Like Dylan Declan seemsto have used his recent emotional ups and downs to create extraordinary narratives. King Of America sounds like a record made by a man who's been through the darkest night and come out of it convinced that goodness is possible.

Which is exactly the sort of pretentious rock criticism Declan McManus hates. When we finally sat down in New York in early winter to start what became a series of interviews, the man the world still calls Elvis admitted, "Before you came over Cait said, 'Tell Bill that how you write songs is, I just say mad things and you put them down.'

"There comes a point," he said, "where you recognize one thing is what you do for a living. Then you play that game of musical chairs and charades for a while. It's sort of like, if Goodbye Cruel World was a fudged attempt at a full stop, this album is a colon." We both burst out laughing and he added, "How's that for pretentious?"




MUSICIAN: There used to be a lot of one-upmanship in your writing. This album is a lot more generous.

COSTELLO: There's not an easy answer for that. I think a lot of the one-upmanship, a lot of the game-playing, was part of the persona. The reason I've changed my name back is to divorce myself from that. I mean, I'm always going to be known as Elvis Costello. Columbia is never going to stand for me abruptly abandoning the name. Also, I don't want it to become a statement, like becoming Robert Velline [Bobby Vee] or John Cougar Mellencamp. I mean, it's a simple thing. I want my life back. This Elvis Costello thing is a bit of a joke really. He doesn't exist. Except in the imaginations of people who've got the records and come to the concerts and wait for me to throw some stupid tantrum. It came out of insecurity. Some of it was real and some of it was playing with reality and some of it was playful.

But this record is more straightforward, there is more generosity. There's more love in this. My last couple of records were kind of dishonest, really. I think there is an honest person lurking in them somewhere. It's hard to talk about this without it coming out sounding pompous.

"Generosity" is a word that flew around a lot. It's something to do with T-Bone's influence. It's unusual to have a producer who prods at your motive in writing and singing the song, who keeps reminding you, "Think of the song!" Not in the sense of "Don't put strings on it" or "It'll be alright when we get the horns on." This was more like making a method record. There would be times in recording when we'd get stuck and no matter who we had in the studio, it would start to sound like a Tom Petty record or something: like a really good modern pop record with all the right sounds, but kind of flat. Those days when it went wrong we'd go back to the hotel and sometimes I'd suggest, "I'd better re-write it." T-Bone would go, "No, there's nothing wrong with the song. We agreed the song was good. You're not singing it right." It was always down to me. It's being generous with what you've got; giving the song enough space to actually be what you originally intended, instead of trying to turn it into something else. Which is what I used to do. With the Attractions, if we didn't get a song in four takes I'd twist a couple of things around at the last minute, and instead of it being a stroke of brilliance I'd completely fuck up.

Whereas T-Bone was saying, "Remember what the point was. Why did you write it?" People don't often do that. Producers obviously don't do that enough. It's an unusual kind of production in that sense.

Before we started, T-Bone and I would sit around and play songs, which is something you don't really do in England. His friends would come over and we'd play songs for each other. I realized that I had actually gotten away from ever sitting down like that with the Attractions. We'd known each other for so long and worked together so much I got inhibited. I got secretive about actually playing the songs. Maybe it was a lack of confidence, thinking I always had to do something better than the last record. When they're people you're always with, you wonder if they're thinking, "Oh, here he goes again, same old crap." I got to the point where I'd be mumbling the words until we got to the final takes of the songs.

But I got my confidence back through this process of playing them for new people. I read a biography of Hank Williams which said he used to go right up to people's faces and play them, like "Your Cheatin' Heart" and say, "That's a good one, isn't it?" That was an inspiration for me, that you could play a song like doing a card trick. Maybe I gained confidence from playing solo, where it became obvious that the way to record the songs was to try to make them as clear as possible.

And because I was recording with new people, when it came time to do the songs I had no way of masking it. I didn't have any mannerisms of the band to hide behind. Which I suppose is why the band didn't end up playing on much of the record. The only mannerisms were my own limitations of pitch, of voice, of technical ability. By the time we finished the record I felt more at ease with the strangers than with the Attractions. It was weird.





MUSICIAN: How did you approach working with such a range of musicians?

COSTELLO: We started off with the TCB Band, which was perhaps the most daunting. Everybody was daunting to play with, but because they were Elvis Presley's band I wondered what they'd think of my using the name. But they were so easy-going and open-minded. It was very heart-warming. Ron Tutt made one little joke about it. Perhaps the payoff to working with those guys -- and with respect to any possible tension there might have been over the Elvis identity -- was when I left the booth with only four strings left on my guitar while the band was still playing the end of "Glitter Gulch." As I passed Jerry Sheff he said, "That kind of reminded me of playing with Elvis." My heart nearly stopped. I got just past him and he added, "Except with Elvis, the ballads were like that."

T-Bone suggested that we don't keep secret what the songs were about. If we were attempting to make emotionally involved records, we had to let the musicians in on the secret. So first off we'd gather the musicians in the center of the studio and I'd play them the song on acoustic guitar. I'd even explain anything that was a little guarded in the lyric. Perhaps it's easier to talk openly to people who don't know you well. The Attractions played really good on "Suit Of Lights" and we got some other things in the can that will come out as B-sides.The band that got the most tracks on the record, theTCB Band, were also the people who recorded in the first weeks, so I'm not saying any one group of musicians were better than any others. I'm finding it a lot more fun to go in and do it like this, and the results seem to be better. Next year I might do something completely different.

MUSICIAN: When you sing "I was a fine idea" -- or ideal -- "at the time/ Now I'm a brilliant mistake," it sounds like a sadder, wiser sequel to your old notion of "This year's model."

COSTELLO: Yeah, it would be very arch not to have any recognition of mistakes. But not in the sack cloth and ashes sort of way that certain ex-members of the Beatles went through. You can do it with a little bit of humor. That song's an introduction to the record; a disclaimer, if you like, for everything else on there. It's not supposed to be some gigantic statement. It's not supposed to be confessional or anything, but there are things on the record that are quite true. There's no point in being coy and hiding behind a load of mannerisms any more.There's bits and pieces of a story going throughout which are not necessarily the pages of my life. "Brilliant Mistake" is a sad song, but it's also sort of funny. It's about America and it's about lost ambition, not lack of inspiration. It's about a disappointed or frustrated belief. It's a song that people are going to read wrong. One line in it is, "There's a trick they do with mirrors and with chemicals." It means celluloid and mirrors, movie cameras. It occurred to me the other day that people will think it's a reference to cocaine. I could have written a big song about America, like Paul Simon's "American Tune." But I think "Brilliant Mistake" is more like "Peace Like A River," a personal thing in the face of a big disappointing artifice.

I've always tended to qualify in songs. I never wanted somebody to point and say, "What a naive position!" And I suppose in doing that I betrayed naivete in the long run. That's the irony of it in retrospect. It's only on the new record that I've written any songs that are completely straightforward. The older ones were always qualified, whether by the weight of songwriting technique necessary to write something like "The Only Flame In Town," or the obscurity, the convoluted writing of songs like "Kid About It" and "Man Out Of Time" -- which are actually true songs.



-

Musician, March 1986


Bill Flanagan interviews Elvis Costello

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