Elvis Costello.Photo: Mark Seliger
It’s hard to resist the urge to psychoanalyze Costello’s decision to take this decidedly unsentimental look back. After all, it’s common during times of mass geopolitical turmoil to derive comfort from our past and solace from the things we once loved. This current crisis finds many of us spending more time in our rooms than we have since adolescence, which no doubt provides ample time for self-reflection. In Costello’s case, so did upheavals in his private life. A cross-continent move from Vancouver to New York City with his wife Diana Krall and their twin 15-year-old sons marked a major transition. A more tragic milestone was the loss of his mother last January at the age of 93. In light of such shifts, it seems only natural to retrace one’s steps.
In the following conversation, edited for length and clarity, Costello spoke to PEOPLE about new music, old habits, upcoming tours, and what moves him to write songs in the first place.
Universal Music
It wasn’t conscious, but obviously a lot of things have happened that lead us here. In March 2020, we had to hurry home [from tour] as the borders were closing around us. There was all this uncertainty, fear, dread and everything that we’ve lived through this little while. But once home, I had the music that becameHey Clockface, I had the intention of recording the piece for Audible and we had been working onSpanish Modelfor a couple of years. In fact, it was ready to be released, but we had to accept that the circumstance in the economy, particularly in the countries of some of the singers who were featured, were not conducive to a new release.
So in that enforced pause, we got to work. These new songs were written close together. I guess the energy of coming off a tour [was an influence.] I’d already started off with a rock ‘n’ roll idea of my own in Helsinki at the beginning of 2020, where I made"No Flag"and these other songs that were kind of jaggedy. They certainly weren’t the way they would’ve sounded with the Imposters, but once I got to work again writing, I wanted to go with major keys and a decent amount of tempo to tell a group of stories that seemed to hang together.
Elvis Costello.Diana Krall
I wasn’t consciously trying to pick up the energy, but I’d had the pleasure of listening to [producer] Sebastian Krys' mix ofSpanish Model, which involved listening to the original instrumental tracks that we cut 43 years earlier [forThis Year’s Model]. When Sebastian pushed the faders up in and around these different Latin artists singing adaptations of my lyrics from all that time ago, he found all sorts of power and energy in the band. I think you’ll find there are some tracks onSpanish Modelwhere the band actually soundsmoreforceful [than on the original album]. We were all excited to hear what the singers brought back to us in their adaptation — bearing in mind that the three of us [in the Imposters] have been working together 44 years, on and off. It never harms to get a reminder of what it feels like to do something thrilling. Sometimes you want to concentrate on a ballad, as I did in Paris forHey Clockface. Sometimes you want to let yourself go.
You have to let yourself not be embarrassed about rock ‘n’ roll. If you’ve been watching any ofthe Beatles’Get Backdocumentary, you see the most famous group in the world not being afraid to just sing nonsense words until the real words occur to them. There’s something really endearing about watching them will those songs into existence, because it’s something that I recognize — particularly in rock ‘n’ roll recordings. It’s not that I tend to go into the studio with unfinished songs, but you’re still writing them. Sometimes, in initially performing them, you don’t really know how to do it. You have to let yourself go.Do you need to scream? Do you need to hold back a little bit? How is that going to affect the rhythm?There’s me and [drummer] Pete [Thomas] in a dialogue. From the get-go of him and I playing together, there’s been some sort of agreement between the words coming out of my mouth and his drums. That’s as much the rhythm section as the actual rhythm section in some cases, because the words are coming out pretty fast. Before we knew where we were, we had a pretty solid foundation, which we then gave to Davey [Faragher] and Steve [Nieve].
It really wasn’t much different than people coming in and recording in separate boxes in different parts of the studio. There’s a little bit of a time delay, that’s all. You have to wait a day till you get the next bit, but it came. It was a puzzle that assembled itself, because we have a lot of ease and confidence in each other’s judgment. I think something about not being looked at while doing it allowed us to play with maybe even more abandon than if we’d gone, “OK, we’re going to go and make a record better than the other 30 we’ve made. Let’s go!” Then you’re self-conscious for a moment till you find it. In this, we had nothing to lose. What else are you going to do? Watch reruns onThe Love Boat?
But I do hear what you’re saying. I hear that urgency. And some of that is to do with what’s going on in the compositions. I wrote them to be that way and the band didn’t let me down. I think over the whole record, they get to do all of the things they’re capable of.
You’ve said that this new record “takes us from the last days of a bewildered childhood to that mortifying moment when you’re told to stop acting like a child.” For most of us, that’s quite a painful period. It’s a time of excitement, but also a time of loss — loss of innocence, loss of a sense of certainty. What led you to revisit this time?
It just sort of came all in my mind at once. I suppose it can’t be unconnected with the fact that, for the second time in my life, I had proximity to that in my home. I had less proximity when my eldest son was that age, because my career was just starting to happen then. I made choices, some of which I regret, and I missed very crucial things. Now my [younger] sons are almost 15. Until recently, we’ve all been in the house constantly.
Maybe also, the road ahead is shorter than the road behind. It just is.
None of the events of the last few years are far enough away to have really got into the songs through long contemplation. So just like asking me if doingSpanish Modelor the Audible piece influenced the energy of this record, I can’t say that the age of my younger sons, or the age of my older son, or my age, or the passing of my mother earlier this year definitively influenced the subject matter. But I don’t doubt they’re somewhere under the surface of all of it.
The lead single, “Magnificent Hurt” really stuck with me because it brought me back to the time of a first big heartbreak. Yet in the moment I almost enjoyed it because it was all new. There was a sense of “This isliving!” Maybe it’s a bit of the old writer’s mentality: this’ll make a good story someday. (Or perhaps I’m just a masochist.) Hearing this song, with lines like “But the pain that I felt/Lеt me know I’m alive,“I got a sense that you maybe had a touch of that, too.
That song’s not so specific. It’s like you have such desire for somebody that it’s pain; that it hurts. You have such longing. It’s not really romantic, it’s a carnal feeling I felt when I was that [age.] All allegiances and loyalty is lost in the moment of that thrill of desire. That’s one way to say it. But it’s true what you say, there’s certainly moments of that. And then there’s moments of fear of the unknown. You’re leaving one world behind; its only certainty is that anything is possible. Your anxieties are probably just about being abandoned when you’re a child. There’s nothing that can stop your imagination, for better or worse, from going anywhere. So you have both dreams, fantasies, and nightmares.
Then as you become a teenager — as I recall — you become incredibly self-conscious and fearful. You feel like you’re being looked at and judged when you might not be. And there’s a period where other people, both other boys or sometimes girls or anybody you encounter, may have knowledge that you don’t have, which makes you feel uncertain. Which is really what that song speaks of. And I tried not to point any fingers in that.
Are there any moments on the record that come to mind as being especially autobiographical?
“Penelope, Halfpenny” is sort of based on somebody I met when I was a kid. I romanticized this teacher who came briefly into our lives. It wasn’t so much that she looked beautiful or that we had desires for her. She seemed to represent a series of possibilities in life that had nothing to do with learning the book we were reading. I felt like she wasn’t likely to remain a teacher very long; that she was actually on her way to doing something else; maybe having a career in espionage or something. [laughs] She seemed to have a mind half out the door. And through that door, you could sort of imagine a really exciting world that grown-up people got to go. You didn’t get there [in school]. There was something inherently sexy about that. Not so much the person, but what she represented: all the life that you didn’t yet have any access to was thrilling. That’s why I put it the way I did in the song: She “disappeared with the dot of a decimal place.”
I tried to find all those little moments where you recognize that. “Mistook Me For a Friend” is about being young and reckless and completely without any compass. No moral compass, no actual compass. You’re not really sure where you are, whether what’s being said to you is an invitation or a threat or a seduction. Is it sincere or real, or transitory or illicit? But all of it’s happening at such speed. Hence the music is more chaotic. It was fun to try and represent that rather than being actually in the moment. I’ve written songs when I was in that situation and they are different songs. These [songs] are not supposed to make you nostalgic for that time. This is another way to look at those moments, with maybe a little bit more of a sense of humor.
Mark Seliger
My sons are 15 next week. I won’t say who they like because next week they might not like them, but the people that they are interested in speak directly to them. If somebody likesTaylor Swiftor BTS, they speak to them. And I don’t see that as separate to rock. The only thing I object to about [rock devotees] is they can be quite high-handed about other forms of music. If you put orchestral strings on something, that’s [seen as] sort of self-aggrandizing. If you like acoustic guitars, that’s automatically put in a box and it’s condescended to. Jazz is frightening to many orthodox rock people because they can’t play it and they don’t understand it. But that isn’t a reason not to engage. It’s like any kind of prejudice. It’s based on ignorance and that’s part of the whole sadness of this to me. Rock and roll was a subversive, revolutionary force that represented change and sex. Just like dancing and jazz. The word “jazz” was originally intended to be an insult, which is why a lot of people rightly say that’s African American classical music — because that’s another way to define it.
I was listening to your tour playlist that you posted online, which is certainly eclectic. I was reminded of thefaux-warning labelyou had on [1981’s album of country covers]Almost Blue: “Caution, might cause offense to narrow minds,” or words to that effect.
The jumping around looking at yourself in the mirror aspect of rock and roll — you have to keep that. I mean, look at most contemporary pop acts on a television show. What is the first thing that you notice about their demeanor? Do you know what I would say? They’re quite narrow. Singers in the past, like Frank Sinatra, would put his arms out. He was small in stature and he would suddenly look imposing because he would put his arms out while he was singing and gesture in this very elegant way. But [today] you’ll see even very beautiful people on television work [close]. You know why? Because they’re looking at themselves on screens most of the time. They live in a kind of TikTok lens and there’s nothing outside the frame. Doesn’t matter if they’ve got dancers on either side of them. Their movements are very minute in radius. Check it out and you’ll find it’s true.
I’m not talking about somebody who dances everywhere on the stage. I’m talking about people who stand still and sing. They really stand still, but their faces go through a range of expressions, which are also a process of regarding yourself in the mirror. I’m not criticizing this, because we did it in a different way when I was a kid with literally anything that looked like a guitar — a big spoon or a tennis racket. People always say it’s a kind of play-acting. It’s an important part of doing rock ‘n’ roll.
My first experiences with “performing” music involved a piece of cardboard cut to look like Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass when I was 10. Years later I learned that you got your start in roughly the same way!
I did the same thing. When you’re a kid, you tend to draw things that you admire. I used to draw guitars on all my school books. And then I thought, “Well, if I can draw a little one, maybe I could draw it on cardboard.” It was somewhere in my kid imagination, which is a lot to do with the moment that’s described in several of the songs on this record — a moment of leaving that sort of wonder. When you draw as a kid, you can draw very exceptional devices that your imagination allows you to dream of. There’s no inhibition. I remember that moment where I thought, “‘If I draw that guitar, then I could cut it out, I could hold it, and then I’d be Paul McCartney,” or whoever.
Sean Dempsey/AP
When you’re a child, you break something and — like I’ve said in the songs on this record — you blame it on your imaginary friend. When you get to be 25, you say, “Well, it was my other side of me that came out that made me go get drunk and sleep with that other person.” Whatever transgression it is. That bad alibi isn’t so charming when you’re old enough to know better, is it?
Elvis Costello.Dexter MacManus
On the topic of drawing and sketching — there’s an 88-page book to complement the record featuring vignettes for each song, and illustrations you’ve done under the name Eamon Singer. Were these pictures born from the same impulse that led you to sketch in school books? How do they dovetail with the music?
The short stories have the same titles as the songs and they are the preceding scene, the succeeding scene or the background action to the song in some way. So if you have the curiosity to read it, you would find something else about that song.
I scribbled away in books, as I said, when I was a kid. But I lost the freedom to do it when I became an adult. I became too self-conscious. It’s just like not being able to dance or do handstands or any things that you did with less fear when you were a child. How many adults skip? Leonard Cohen used to skip onto stage. I found it very endearing that this man, who was 80, would skip onto the stage with a joyful sort of demeanor. Even though he was thought to be very dour, he was, of course, tremendously humorous.
Eventually it became part of the way I thought of the music, in a dimension outside the three or four minutes of the duration of the song. These images didn’t have to be the best drawings ever done in the history of art, because I wasn’t putting them in a golden frame and hanging them in a gallery. I’m just putting them in juxtaposition with the music. And frankly I don’t care whether everybody thinks they’re any good. They came from inside my head.
It’s the same as when people ask you, “Is this a very personal record?” How personal is the inside of your head?Of courseit is. It doesn’t all have to be a last will or confession. It doesn’t have to all be a painfully rendered real-time account of your life in the previous six months or three minutes. It could be somebody else that you imagined and tried to put yourself in their shoes. In some ways that’s less selfish and less self regarding. And that’s why I like to sometimes write character songs to try to summon something up. It’s why crime writers very rarely go to jail for killing their creations. Maybe they don’t get to be God, but they get to be judge and jury. And that is acceptable. Part of the morality of writing is it’s not seen as wicked.
Here’s a question that’s going to betray the fact that I’ve never written a song in my life. When speaking with people who are blessed with the ability to write, I’m always curious to know what compels them to do so. In your case, is it a desire to communicate and connect with people? Or is it a need to simply get a melody or a feeling out of you — almost like an exorcism?
And really, even as late as ‘77, when I took my little home-recorded tape into Stiff Records, I still thought I was going to be hired to write songs for other people on the label. That was my stated intention. I think it was their first idea that I might write songs for Dave Edmunds, who didn’t write songs. I did later writea big hit record for him [“Girls Talk”]but I think what we realized very quickly when they sent me in to demo a handful of songs was that nobody else could sing them. They were tricky in ways that weren’t immediately apparent. They weren’t virtuosic songs in the way that opera is virtuosic, but they were very tricky because of the way I used words in rhythm. I was the one who could render the most coherent and vivid versions of them.
For how many songs I’ve written, which is around 400, the amount of cover renditions is quite small. It’s restricted to a handful of maybe 20 titles that have been recorded more than once. But I’m not bothered. It’s worked out okay. [I’ve written] 15 with Paul McCartney, 30 with Burt Bacharach, my wife [Diana Krall] and a few other people, plus all the ones I wrote on my own. I’ll settle for that. I can’t complain about anything. I’ve had tremendous good fortune.
And for these new tunes, I’m very, very fortunate to work with Pete and Steve and Davey for 20 years. And Charlie Sexton — he’s been playing guitar with us, and that was another benefit to our live performance. The five of us played with a different approach. Suddenly we’re having different conversations. For some reason we played with more dynamic control, maybe because we were listening to the little exchanges going on. And a little change is good. A massive change maybe seems perverse, but a small change to the balance of things really made these new songs light up and actually renewed a lot of the older songs, as well. So that’s good. If Charlie comes with us for a little while longer, that would be lovely. We really love playing with him. It’s just changed in some very unexpected way. We hope to do that when we go back to the stage this coming year.
Given the dearth of live music, has the last two years changed your relationship to performing in any way?
It was just so inspiring. And of course, somebody coming along could say, “I wish he playedthisorthat.” But he didn’t, he playedthese. It was uncompromising in the best way. It was with the confidence of somebody operating at the top of their powers, which is a very extraordinary thing to say when you’re talking just chronologically about somebody who’s 20 years past the time when some people are out in the garden digging a trench to fall into. This is vivid music being played at a high level of communication and feeling and humor. That’s wonderful to have somebody you’ve admired a long time spur you on to hold your nerve and do the best that you can do. All the people I admire most don’t compromise. And I’m sure I felt I haven’t done that myself, but I know I must have done because everybody does at some point. It’s not a question of laziness, it’s a question of what’s going to get the job done. Sometimes it’s easy to throw in a song that you don’t have so much feeling for, but [you know it’s] one people respond to.Then you think, “Well that was too easy. Let’s do something that takes usallon a little trip somewhere.” And let’s try and get somewhere where there’s a feeling we haven’t had before.
source: people.com
