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“Life takes much longer than the average pop song,” Elvis Costello writes in his uneven and bloated autobiography, in which life takes much, much longer. You wouldn’t guess from this audiobook’s 18½ hours (“Swann’s Way” read by Simon Vance is a mere 17½) that Costello shot to fame with songs that could condense a great deal of feeling and literate expression into bursts of little more than three minutes.
John Updike wisely counseled reviewers to avoid chiding an author “for not achieving what he did not attempt.” But even the most generous listener might finish Costello’s baggy tale with a hunger for two or three shorter ones he could have told, each with a considerably sharper focus.
One might be a history of his family, which he traces here as far back as the 1800s. Costello is a big believer in all that David Copperfield kind of crap. And he’s good at delivering it. The memoir opens in 1961, with a very young Costello watching his dad, Ross, sing with an orchestra at the Hammersmith Palais, a dance hall in London. The father familiarized the son with music as a job, and introduced him to the sounds of the Beatles and others. Costello says that after he had achieved some success himself, cabdrivers would say to him about his father, “ ‘He was a better bloody singer than you’ll ever be,’ to which they would never get any argument from me.” Ross kept up with the times, eventually growing his hair long and wearing “an embroidered shirt with small mirrors sewn into the fabric,” along with some religious jewelry, “as if hedging his bets against more fashionable deities.”
Another book nested within this one addresses the art and commerce of pop music, subjects in which Costello is an expert. He speaks of his admiration for American bands that “leaned back behind the beat but instinctively agreed how to fold one phrase into the next. The best English groups lean forward and are more concerned with ‘How do we start?’ than ‘How do we end?,’ ” which is why “so much great English music ends in chaos.”
As ever, he’s a great and infectious enthusiast about his eclectic taste, which embraces the trumpet player Clifford Brown, the alt-country godfather Gram Parsons, the British singer Cilla Black (who counted the Beatles as fans) and the Swedish pop machine Abba, among countless others. Listening to Costello tell his own story while you watch YouTube would be a rewarding way to multitask. (As a narrator, Costello can be on the sleepy side for long stretches, occasionally breaking into gleefully cartoonish impressions of minor characters.)
Costello’s career has been as wide-ranging as his listening habits, leading to collaborations with everyone from Burt Bacharach to the Roots, and his remembrances of it answer some questions and raise others. He describes “Almost Blue,” his 1981 album of country covers, as “something of a Houdini act for me. I felt as if I’d slipped out of those tricky, bitter little songs that only appealed to a certain kind of creep.” It’s a striking line, though he doesn’t further elaborate on what he means by that “kind of creep,” or whether his feeling about those “tricky, bitter” songs was a momentary or lasting one.
Left out of any and all projects carved from this one would be the considerable padding here: a description of “the holiday of a lifetime” with his son in Moscow; dispatches from backstage at banal awards shows; lengthy excerpts from lyrics of unrenowned songs. (Was anyone clamoring for Costello to recite the lyrics he wrote for the Charles Mingus piece “Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too”?) With vanishingly rare exceptions, even lyrics by talented songwriters lose much of their power when unaccompanied by music. Costello’s are no exception.
What really makes this memoir more of a slog than a life like this should produce is its bewildering approach to time travel. If it adheres to a structural school, it’s that of Badly Organized Photo Album. We’re with Costello as a child watching his father perform; then within minutes, we’re beside him hanging out with the Clash in the 1970s; then at a memorial concert for Paul McCartney’s wife, Linda, in 1999. Later, we’re in Obama’s White House for a ceremony, then in Britain a hundred years ago, then dropped into a series of odd jobs Costello worked in the 1970s.
The book’s frustrations can be chalked up to a lack of discipline and shaping, not a lack of ability. There are many moments in “Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink” when he writes incisively, even lyrically, as in this passage about the “clamor and temptations” of a musical career when he was in his 20s: “I knew that I could become estranged from all that I held dear: vows I’d made, homes that had and would soon be broken, trust that I could betray, in hotel rooms in which I merely lodged, rehearsing lies to say.”
But too often, Costello sacrifices precision and deep diving for skating a curvy line through his memories, like an uncle at a family reunion. Don’t get me wrong; you’re listening to this uncle. He’s been some places. He’s hung out with Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney. For Costello’s fans, this telling of his life is a must-read, if not a will-love, but he has missed on the opportunity to write the kind of book that more tepid fans, or even nonfans, would press into the hands of other readers, like Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” or Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles.” Costello has plenty of good material here, but he only rarely makes it sing.
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