CostelloNews.com

Our Man's ear must hurt from all these phone interviews. This time it is CNN.

Excerpt: "Costello's pop-oriented recordings are released through Island/Def Jam. But Universal Classics chairman Chris Roberts offered Deutsche Grammophon as a haven for "North." It will serve as a prelude to the late-2004 release by the label of a Costello orchestral album, recorded with Michael Tilson-Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra. That set showcases a ballet score for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," commissioned by Italy's Aterballetto dance company.

"Roberts gave me the opportunity to make a ballad album," Costello says, "and I had a whole other repertoire of maybe 20 or more songs that I could have recorded. Then the 'North' songs appeared, and the imperative changed."

FULL TEXT
------------
LOS ANGELES, California (Billboard) -- "North" is hardly the usual direction for Elvis Costello.

In sharp contrast to his previous album, 2002's "When I Was Cruel," Costello's Deutsche Grammophon set -- issued September 23 -- eschews rock instrumentation and textures. Costello plays guitar on just one number; the collection's 11 tracks -- all original ballads -- are dominated by Steve Nieve's piano.

Costello says of his unusually naked new songs, "The first song is taken by some as romantic loss, when it's actually about bereavement. The rest of the songs describe a transition from bewilderment into acceptance. That is something I believe people will recognize in degrees ... Hopefully, in time, different songs will mean different things to individuals who are listening."

Though intimate in content, the set is embellished on several numbers by arrangements, written by Costello, featuring a string and horn ensemble that sometimes swells to 48 pieces. Soloists include jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz, trumpeter Lew Soloff and vibraphonist Bill Ware.

The introspective, bluntly honest and often wounded songs were penned during Costello's 2002 American tour.

He says, "I was seeking out pianos wherever I could -- backstage, in dressing rooms, sometimes in the wings of theaters. And then I bought a cheap electronic keyboard so that I could play late at night in a hotel room. I could sketch things out on that. I was also on the road, literally on the road, so I could sit at the back of the bus with the keyboard and keep working.

"When I finished the tour, a second group of songs appeared, which is the second half of the record. Pretty much, they appear in the sequence in which they were written."

Costello's pop-oriented recordings are released through Island/Def Jam. But Universal Classics chairman Chris Roberts offered Deutsche Grammophon as a haven for "North." It will serve as a prelude to the late-2004 release by the label of a Costello orchestral album, recorded with Michael Tilson-Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra. That set showcases a ballet score for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," commissioned by Italy's Aterballetto dance company.

"Roberts gave me the opportunity to make a ballad album," Costello says, "and I had a whole other repertoire of maybe 20 or more songs that I could have recorded. Then the 'North' songs appeared, and the imperative changed."

"We wanted to bridge the gap," Universal Classics senior vice president and general manager Marc Johnston says. "From "When I Was Cruel" into a symphonic, sort of ballet album was a pretty radical step, so this was the natural journey that Elvis was taking. This album is one step further toward the album next fall."

The CD package for "North" includes a PIN that allows the consumer to download the title composition, which Costello chose not to include on the album.

Costello begins an extensive tour of Japan and Europe in early October.

"Then hopefully," he says, "in the late winter or early spring of next year, we'll do a full-length American tour, if all is well."

Posted by Post Master at 10:52 PM | Permalink

From JamMusic

Excerpts: "Elvis Costello's star power in Canada went up several decibels after it was made public he was smitten with jazz darling Diana Krall. By his own admission, his bookings increased (including cities he hadn't played in 25 years), the venues got bigger and his face was splashed across the front pages of newspapers more frequently.

..."It's not just about looking at it and trying to picture somebody's life so much as see something that stimulates your imagination, like moving pictures," said Costello"

...""Why I don't have massive success and fame and wealth is because it doesn't accumulate the way it does for people who make the same record over and over again," he said."

FULL TEXT
------------
TORONTO -- Elvis Costello's star power in Canada went up several decibels after it was made public he was smitten with jazz darling Diana Krall.

By his own admission, his bookings increased (including cities he hadn't played in 25 years), the venues got bigger and his face was splashed across the front pages of newspapers more frequently.

"I'd perhaps underestimated that I was known in Canada," he said bashfully during a recent interview over the line from Germany.

And while fans can look for evidence of the couple's romance -- and his divorce from his wife of 16 years Cait O'Riordan -- on his new album North, Costello says things never happen precisely like they do in song.

"Life is longer, wider and more boring and messier," he said. "It's impossible to say it is literally in every detail exactly as it happened because it leaves out so many things. The things you choose to focus on become songs. Their aim is to be universal in appreciation, be there for people to see themselves in the songs."

Even the album's title has nothing to do with the homeland of his fiancee. "It's sort of like expecting the opposite of the old saying 'Something is going south.' It's like saying onward and upward . . . a general sort of movement towards the positive," explained Costello, who began his recording career in 1977 with the record My Aim Is True.

The actual song North, a whimsical ditty about a country with polar bears, moose and geese, wasn't included on the album because it would have specifically placed the album in Canada, Costello says.

"It would exaggerate the sense of identification of these songs with my life or with our life. And then I've defeated myself," he said.

Besides, he says, the songs were written prior to becoming romantically involved with Krall.

A collection of vocally driven ballads, North intensely captures tender emotions in a roundly classical style, reminiscent of his collaborations with Burt Bacharach and the Brodsky Quartet (which appears on the album). The record, Costello's 24th, follows last year's rock-minded When I Was Cruel.

Set to vulnerable piano chords and delicate orchestral arrangements, North plays like a movie, beginning with the end of a relationship and ending with the birth of another.

He describes the progression as "quite sad and then hopeful and eventually joyous."

"It's not just about looking at it and trying to picture somebody's life so much as see something that stimulates your imagination, like moving pictures," said Costello, who was born Declan MacManus.

To that end he chose to keep the instrumentation sparse because it fit with the lyrics. "That was the most truthful way for the songs to exist," he said. "There's a starting point of sadness and literally the first song is as much about bereavement as it is about romantic loss."

Forever fine tuning his craft and reinventing himself in various musical genres, Costello says he's proud of his ability to stick to his guns and not give in to any commercial formula.

"I didn't think very far forward 20 years ago. I didn't even think I was going to get out of next week in terms of writing and making records. But after a while it seemed, despite the fact that my old records didn't sell very much, there was always somebody there to listen. I'd made some changes . . . because I loved a different type of music and that's what I wanted to do," says the 48-year-old singer who started some 25 years ago with roots in the punk scene and later became one of the barometers for good pop music.

"I'd expected people to become exasperated at that point and stop listening but usually just as many people thought 'Hey that's great. I never heard that before.' "

And he's philosophical about what his approach has meant for him.

"Why I don't have massive success and fame and wealth is because it doesn't accumulate the way it does for people who make the same record over and over again," he said.

Now that the musical chameleon has completed his album, he'll be anxious for fiancee Krall to finish her new one.

But he insists, despite numerous requests by friends and fans, their careers will remain separate entities.

"As you would expect with people who share their lives, you would also lend support to one another but in ways perhaps that are harder to define," he explains. "We don't have to make records together and we don't have to be together all the time for that to be true."

They did however come together for Willie Nelson, performing a cover of Crazy for a tribute album.

"That's probably the right type of thing to do; keep it rare for the special occasion because we have, heaven knows, enough to be getting on with in our own independent careers."

He added that her new material is "a fantastic piece of work that will show another side of her that only aspects of have been shown before. It'll show a vivid picture of her in this place and time which is great for anybody to be able to achieve."

And that's what he thinks he's accomplished with North as well.

"A change," he starts, "But one that doesn't make them depart of the places that people know and love them for, but only deepens it," he explains.

North, he says, gets people's hearts pumping but not in the rock-out, adrenaline flowing sort of way some of his fans are accustomed to.

"I'm proud of the record touching people because I stuck to my intention to make it stay true to the original feeling I had when I was composing the songs and even hearing these orchestral ideas."

Posted by Post Master at 09:31 AM | Permalink

Costello Goes Soft

Excerpts: "Do not, under any circumstances, listen to "North" while operating machinery or motor vehicles. It's the aural equivalent of taking a Xanax and then downing a bottle of red wine.'

..."For songs that sound so quietly personal and private, Mr. Costello oversells every song, singing in a quavering vibrato that becomes gratingly thick and showy. After repeated listens, you'll be hard-pressed to distinguish one song from the next: It all wafts together into one soporific cloud of lounge smoke.

FULL TEXT
--------------
Elvis Costello has ... zzzzzz ... recorded another collection of ... zzzzz ... cabaret ballads. It's called "North," and it makes me wish I were East, West or South, anywhere but "North."
Do not, under any circumstances, listen to "North" while operating machinery or motor vehicles. It's the aural equivalent of taking a Xanax and then downing a bottle of red wine.
As someone who holds Mr. Costello in the highest regard, I wasn't particularly jazzed by the idea that the singer-songwriter was returning to the self-indulgent mood of "The Juliet Letters," his 1993 collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, and "Painted From Memory," his post-hip alliance with Burt Bacharach in 1998.
This after a scorching return to rock form with last year's "When I Was Cruel."
But return to the chamber Mr. Costello has done, gushing undying love to his new flame, the Canadian jazz-pop singer Diana Krall. "It's strange to finally find myself so tongue-tied / A change has come over me / I'm powerless to express / Everything I know but cannot speak / And if I try my voice will break," he croons on "Someone Took the Words Away."
Wonder who that someone is?
"Every single time I approached despair / I thought of your name and you were there," he surges lovingly on "When Green Eyes Turn Blue."
It's portentously announced in the liner notes that "North" was "composed, arranged and conducted by Elvis Costello," and each section of the 11-song cycle is minimalistically crafted in the style of old Broadway book or soft jazz-pop, with sporadic murmurs from brass and strings.
For songs that sound so quietly personal and private, Mr. Costello oversells every song, singing in a quavering vibrato that becomes gratingly thick and showy.
His longtime keyboard associate, Steve Nieve, plays on every track save for a pair, and drummer Peter Erskine lightly brushes a snare drum. The Brodsky Quartet appears on the album's best track, "Still," rescued by a gracefully simple melody.
After repeated listens, you'll be hard-pressed to distinguish one song from the next: It all wafts together into one soporific cloud of lounge smoke.
"Some things are too personal / Too intimate to spill / And gentlemen don't speak of them / And this never will," Mr. Costello sings on "Let Me Tell You About Her."
Couldn't have said it better myself.

Posted by Post Master at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

ELVIS Costello praises Canada
Canoe News, Canada
TORONTO -- Elvis Costello's star power in Canada went up several decibels after it was made public he was smitten with jazz darling Diana Krall. ...

Posted by Post Master at 07:15 PM | Permalink

Adopting the King's name and Buddy Holly's look, Elvis Costello is known as one of the most original performers in pop music. Over the past twenty-five years, Costello has experimented with edgy rock, new wave punk, and tender love ballads. More recently, he's collaborated with artists such as Burt Bacharach, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and The Mingus Big Band. On the show, Costello joins McPartland and bassist Gary Mazzaroppi. Featured Songs: "Gloomy Sunday" and "I'm in the Mood Again"

Go Here and enter your State to find local times and stations.

Posted by Post Master at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Elvis & A's and I's in the New York Times

Excerpt :"Given the choice between never seeing a vanished band and seeing its reunion, there is always hope that the old spark will return. Sometimes it does. Elvis Costello's 2002 reunion with three-quarters of the Attractions, renamed the Imposters and playing with predatory dynamics, cut the slack out of his songwriting. Joe Jackson's recent tour with his lean but unstoppable late-1970's band stoked his combativeness and his rhythmic kick. Both reunions showed the most auspicious sign: they generated full albums of new songs, proving that the musicians were willing to engage one another instead of just learn the old parts."

Posted by Post Master at 09:02 AM | Permalink

A really great review of the Sept 24th Show at Town Hall and North itself. This is perhaps first review of either that sounds to me like it was written by a thoughtful fan. How did they let a thoughtful guy work at Fox?

Excerpts: "Prolific to a fault, Costello has just released a new album which is called "North" but should have been named "I Absolve Myself."

..."But Krall shouldn't feel too comfortable. Costello included his "I Still Have That Other Girl In My Head" toward the end of Wednesday's show."

..."Oddly enough even these songs came across pretty well in concert, because Costello has become -- and really, I would have lost this bet back in 1991 -- playful, dramatic, and engaging on stage. As my grandmother might say, "Can you beat it?"

..."Even when Costello is ponderous he isn't boring. I take "North" as a notebook for future work. After all, it wasn't more than 18 months ago that he gave us "When I Was Cruel," an album so good that it got no mainstream awards of any kind."

==========
Full Text

------------------
Costello the Crooner, Tonight On A&E

Elvis Costello -- who appears tonight on A&E's "Live by Request" at 10 p.m. -- is never less than interesting. On his last American date before heading to Japan, he lived up to his reputation. Wednesday night's show at Town Hall in Manhattan was full of Elvis -- the man, the music, the crooner.

That's right: Costello, who was the original angry young man of punk rock circa 1976, loves to croon. He's turned his voice into something of a weapon in the process, sometimes sounding like a dog in heat and other times coming close to a sweetness his fans -- me among them -- could not have expected in those early days.

We love him either way.

Prolific to a fault, Costello has just released a new album which is called "North" but should have been named "I Absolve Myself." That's because two years ago he fell in love with jazz performer Diana Krall, but let his longtime wife get the word through the press. He's just put their $1 million-plus Dublin estate on the market, too. The songs in "North" are all about being in love with Krall because he can't help himself.

But Krall shouldn't feel too comfortable. Costello included his "I Still Have That Other Girl In My Head" toward the end of Wednesday's show.

Most of the songs on "North" have the kind of pithy lyrics Costello is famous for, but nearly all of them lack the melodic strengths of his usual work.

Oddly enough even these songs came across pretty well in concert, because Costello has become -- and really, I would have lost this bet back in 1991 -- playful, dramatic, and engaging on stage. As my grandmother might say, "Can you beat it?" Back in 1991, Costello appeared on stage looking like Jerry Garcia's worst nightmare, with long unruly hair, bloated, a mess. It felt like he might shoot the audience. Something happened in the late 90s -- Prozac, maybe -- and now we have the new, happy Elvis.

This show, to keep costs down, consisted only of Costello and his faithful pianist/accompanist Steve Nieve. Against a barely composed backdrop the pair ran through some of the new numbers, mixing in Costello favorites. They dropped Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me" into the middle of Costello's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," which had the pleasing effect of eating a Valhrona chocolate dessert. Costello also polished off Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," as well as grand renditions of "All This Useless Beauty," "45" and "A Man Out of Time." They were spine tingling in the best way, which is something to say about a 48-year-old performer who's been at it since Gerald Ford was president.

So what about "North?" It might cause people to fall asleep at the wheel if played in a car. But that's a cheap shot.

Even when Costello is ponderous he isn't boring. I take "North" as a notebook for future work. After all, it wasn't more than 18 months ago that he gave us "When I Was Cruel," an album so good that it got no mainstream awards of any kind. And "North" is not without its gems. In "Still," Costello actually comes close to the compositions of his heroes: Burt Bacharach, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. And that's saying a whole lot.

What next? I'd say we're headed toward the Elvis Costello Broadway musical, like it or not. And I'm going to like it.

Posted by Post Master at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As of this writing North is #18 at Amazon and was at least as high as 12 earlier today. It is also listed as SOLD OUT (I'm sure that will change within a day). Wow - Regis is POWERFUL!

Posted by Post Master at 10:38 PM | Permalink

Elvis contributes a cover of 'Brilliant Disguise' to this CD.
NBC News story about the disc, charity, and artists including EC..

Order From Amazon - Light of Day: Tribute to Bruce Springsteen

Posted by Post Master at 02:45 PM | Permalink

EC had a few brief moments in the chair talking with Regis (VERY enlightening) and then sang 'Still'.

His voice seemed to have a slight toll from 4 shows in 4 days, but it was a solid performance none-the-less. I'm sure housewives everywhere are rushing to their local record stores right now causing a run on North....

Posted by Post Master at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

No, not a Virgin Museum - The Tuesday show at the Museum of Television, Broadcast to Virgin Stores.

1) Accidents Will Happen
2) Someone Took The Words Away
3) You Turned To Me
4) Fallen
5) Still
6) When It Sings
7) North
8) Almost Blue
9) I'm In The Mood Again

(Submitted by Mark)

Posted by Post Master at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An Australian Look North

Excerpt: "This is as intimate an album as Elvis Costello has ever fashioned. More intimate than we might have imagined from a man who always followed his own advice: "Don't wear your heart out on your sleeve, when your remarks are off the cuff."

..."Love isn't combat here but, at first, ebb and flow, doubt and exultation - a stumbling in and quick step back in defence. And then the early hesitance of the protagonist falls away to reveal the most unabashed moments Costello has ever committed to paper.

..."North sits somewhere between Nat King Cole's Nat King Cole Sings for Two in Love and Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours."

---------
Full Text
----------
Elvis Costello, North
(Deutsche Grammophon/Universal)

This is as intimate an album as Elvis Costello has ever fashioned. More intimate than we might have imagined from a man who always followed his own advice: "Don't wear your heart out on your sleeve, when your remarks are off the cuff."

It's stripped of the wordplay and abstractions that have both defined his style and enabled him to deflect attempts to infer the personal. Instead he speaks directly and plainly, not hiding the flood of conflicting emotions behind the bland expression falling in love.

Love isn't combat here but, at first, ebb and flow, doubt and exultation - a stumbling in and quick step back in defence. And then the early hesitance of the protagonist falls away to reveal the most unabashed moments Costello has ever committed to paper. From "all the words you say to me have music in them" in When It Sings, to the self-mocking Let Me Tell You about Her, where the newly-in-love finds himself so voluble about this woman that "when I start to speak [friends] roll their eyes", we are amidst happiness without calculation.

The lyrical intimacy is matched by the vocal closeness. Costello sings primarily down in his rarely used baritone register, his phrasing precise but intense, and there's none of the reach demanded by the songs on The Juliet Letters or Painted from Memory, the two closest comparisons in his catalogue. Essentially, he croons.

Musically these 11 ballads are decidedly intimate. There are no big pop hooks and no dramatics. You won't find yourself swept away at first (or even on second or third listen). Instead there's the accretion of elements such as down-tempo jazz chords (You Turned to Me has several Charles Mingus-like phrases), the swell of strings lifting a cloud, the quietly searching piano lines or the mellowness of a flugelhorn.

And then the realisation dawns that these melodies have warmth, tenderness and grace. And it becomes clear that emotionally and musically North sits somewhere between Nat King Cole's Nat King Cole Sings for Two in Love and Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours. Like the latter it works from a limited palette that says everything you need; like the former it has a sense of relaxed joy in the small moments.

Posted by Post Master at 10:11 AM | Permalink

Elvis is on 'Hollywood At Large' on CourtTV:
09/26/03 at 07:00 pm ET
09/27/03 @ 11:00 pm ET
09/28/03 @ 03:00 am ET
09/29/03 @ 04:00 am ET

Reportedly it is a 5min interview about MP3 Downloading

Posted by Post Master at 01:05 AM | Permalink

In addition to tonight's A&E Show (see below) Elvis is on The Daily Show with John Stewart tonight (on the Comedy Channel - check local listings) and on Regis and Kathy Lee (or whomever) tomorrow (friday) morning.

Posted by Post Master at 02:36 PM | Permalink

1) Accidents Will Happen
2) Brilliant Mistake
3) Little Triggers
4) Shot with His Own Gun (SN piano, no guitar)
5) You Left Me in the Dark (SN piano, no guitar)
6) Someone Took the Words Away (SN piano, no guitar)
7) When Did I Stop Dreaming? (SN piano, no guitar)
8) You Turned to Me (SN piano, no guitar)
9) Fallen (SN piano, no guitar)
10) God's Comic
11) Indoor Fireworks
12) Either Side of the Same Town
13) Man Out Of Time
14) In the Darkest Place (SN piano, no guitar)

1st Encores:
15) When It Sings (SN piano, no guitar)
16) Still (SN piano, no guitar)
17) Can You Be True? (SN piano, no guitar)
18) 45
19) Deep Dark TruthfulMirror/You Really Got a Hold on Me

2nd Encores:
20) (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding
21) Shipbuilding
22) All This Useless Beauty
23) When Green Eyes Turn Blue (SN piano, no guitar)

3rd Encores:
24) North (SN piano, no guitar)
25) Almost Blue (SN piano, EC guitar until the end - EC moves to piano and SN plays melodica coda)
26) I Still Miss Someone (Johnny Cash) (EC piano)
27) Let Me Tell You About Her (EC piano)
28) I'm in the Mood Again (EC piano)

29) I Still Have That Other Girl (SN piano, EC sings off-mike)
30) The Birds Will Still Be Singing (SN piano, EC sings off-mike)
31) Couldn't Call It Unexpected No.4 (SN piano, EC sings off-mike

Posted by Post Master at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"Live by Request" (9 p.m., A&E): Elvis Costello takes suggestions and plays for the next two hours. (Repeated at 1 a.m. and then for the next week or so)

From TV Guide: " Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Elvis Costello has made an influential career out of doing what he wanted to do. Tonight he'll let his fans tell him what to do in a concert of requests from New York City. In 1977, Costello arrived with his prototypical New Wave band, the Attractions, to put a spark into a rock scene that was becoming stagnant and overproduced. In the years since, he's dabbled in country and standards, and collaborated with Sir Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Anne Sofie von Otter and the Brodsky Quartet. What he does here, though, is your call."

From the LBR Web Site: "Live concert by the British singer and songwriter called "the most talented pop tunesmith of his generation" by The New York Times. Although he looks like a nerd, Costello's roots are in the explosive punk era and his music often includes themes of political and social protest. Viewers can phone in or e-mail their song requests to Costello as he performs at John Jay College in New York City."

Posted by Post Master at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Curious Trainspotting at Boston.com

Q. The Del Fuegos were once featured in a Miller beer ad. Do you regret doing that?

A. I wasn't in it, because someone at Miller said, ``What's that 12-year-old doing drinking beer?'' Would we do it again? No. ... But Elvis Costello came out [at the time] and said there's a big difference between Phil Collins doing a beer commercial and [the Del Fuegos] doing one. He was right. Now, of course, you can do anything as long as you do it ironically.

Posted by Post Master at 09:22 AM | Permalink

North with Bonus DVD - Available Now
Click the picture above to order from Amazon and support CostelloNews.com

(If you're not ready to buy it today, you can go to Amazon and add it to your shopping cart and then leave. Whenever you go back and make your purchase we'll still get the commission - thanks!)

Posted by Post Master at 04:07 PM | Permalink

The Dallas Morning News
Elvis Costello - Grade D - North - By TERESA GUBBINS
(Fake Login = elvis@costello.com password = costello)

Elvis Costello is practically 50, and boy does it ever show on North , a collection of listless piano ballads sufficiently dreary to induce narcolepsy. Ditching guitar in favor of piano, Mr. Costello moans like a dog, with an occasional segment of horns or strings to "jazz" things up. Minimal arrangements seem intended to make songs such as "You Left Me in the Dark" feel spare and atmospheric; but instead, they're just excruciatingly boring. His arrangement is lousy: He hits the exact same notes as the piano and it comes off as simplistic and deadly dull. And baby, there ain't no tunes here. The tracks, they meander aimlessly. Oh, how painful it all is.

Still, this direction doesn't come as a complete surprise. Forget not that he's engaged to singer-pianist Diana Krall, and also that he recorded "My Funny Valentine" way back in 1979. He's been an old fart at heart forever.

Editors Note: Dear Ms. Gubbins - Don't worry, there's a new Sting CD this week you can enjoy. Also, Mr. Costello wants to know if perhaps when he's next in the Dallas area would you perhaps be willing to 'tutor' him on some of the finer points of music, melody, arrangement, composition, and dog moaning? He's eager to improve and certainly someone of your obvious talents could be of assistance. Please let us know.

Posted by Post Master at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Costello rides song cycle on new side trip

Excerpts On North:
..."People will say 'Oh, it's informed by jazz,' but it's just as much informed by songs written in the 19th century," Costello said in a recent phone interview. "They don't have to be the same shape, but what they do have to be is true to the way you feel. And these are very true to my feelings at the moment."

..."Some of the best work I've done has come that way, but some other really good songs have been worked on over a much longer period," Costello said. "Some of the songs I wrote with Paul McCartney (are like that) - not necessarily the ones most successful in chart success (Veronica, My Brave Face), but the ones that perhaps have a little bit more grit. The song So Like Candy, this has been around awhile, and suddenly it has a permanence to it. You can go back and find a new angle in the drama of it."

NEWS OF NEW RELEASES:
..."We're one of the few performers in the world who doesn't have a DVD of some kind," said Costello, who is scouring for footage from throughout the years to make a live retrospective, hoping for release in 2004. He's located good early performance footage, as well as the MTV videos of his songs.

..."He also has ideas about putting out complete shows from various eras on CD. "The problem is I put out too many new records. It's difficult to actually stop long enough to create a gap. If you were really going to do it justice, you'd want to do some snapshot live albums from different periods of time rather than do the compilation live album."

..."Costello fans have other reasons to rejoice - the latest three titles in his reissue series are out. Trust, Punch the Clock and Get Happy are all jammed with bonus cuts....Almost as enjoyable as the music is Costello's own liner notes, where he's brutally honest about his music and himself.... "You're trying to tell a story of how the record came to exist. That's what the reissues are," Costello says. "The Get Happy notes . . . tell not just about the making of the record, but the dramatic period of time we moved through: The end of our initial pop success. It was not glorious; quite the opposite, it was quite horrifying at times."

..."He's able to issue these discs exactly as he wants because, unlike most artists, Costello retained the rights to his publishing and his master tapes. "It's rare for anybody to own his back catalog. Most people sell bits and pieces of themselves because they're forced into it. I managed to be in a position to reclaim all of it."

FULL TEXT
By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
September 24, 2003

With piano, bass and some string orchestrations, Elvis Costello knows exactly what some fans are going to think of his new album, North.

"People will say 'Oh, it's informed by jazz,' but it's just as much informed by songs written in the 19th century," Costello said in a recent phone interview. "They don't have to be the same shape, but what they do have to be is true to the way you feel. And these are very true to my feelings at the moment."

North, which just arrived in stores, is almost a song cycle. The album takes the listener from the end of one relationship to the beginning of a new one - a scenario almost certain to have fans thinking it's a chronicle of his marital breakup and engagement to singer Diana Krall.

"Certainly the record . . . isn't set out to tell a story, but it does progress. I always try to not prejudice people's ears by giving too much away," Costello said.

After the return to rock of last year's When I Was Cruel, the new CD is another side trip. North is a set exclusively made up of ballads he wrote on piano.

"I can't really ask people to do more than listen. I will say that it obviously isn't a record that in any way is a continuation of the sound of When I Was Cruel, but then again, When I Was Cruel didn't have anything to do with Painted From Memory, and next to nothing to do with All This Useless Beauty."

"It's very intimate in that I don't sing out a lot. I sing in a low register, close to the listener. It's a very emotional record," Costello said.

The songs came to him in a torrent, sometimes two or three in an evening. His prolific writing pace - one of the things that estranged him from his original label, Columbia, in the '80s makes fans believe the songs always come this way.

"Some of the best work I've done has come that way, but some other really good songs have been worked on over a much longer period," Costello said. "Some of the songs I wrote with Paul McCartney (are like that) - not necessarily the ones most successful in chart success (Veronica, My Brave Face), but the ones that perhaps have a little bit more grit. The song So Like Candy, this has been around awhile, and suddenly it has a permanence to it. You can go back and find a new angle in the drama of it."

If North has a shortcoming, it's in the sameness of the songs. While Costello is going through a variety of emotions (anger, betrayal, hope, joy) he varies his delivery little. Ultimately, the album may be for Costello fanatics.

Costello fans have other reasons to rejoice - the latest three titles in his reissue series are out. Trust, Punch the Clock and Get Happy are all jammed with bonus cuts.

"Get Happy was an exceptional record when it came out because it had 20 tracks. The version coming out . . . now has 50 tracks," Costello notes.

Almost as enjoyable as the music is Costello's own liner notes, where he's brutally honest about his music and himself.

"You're trying to tell a story of how the record came to exist. That's what the reissues are," Costello says. "The Get Happy notes . . . tell not just about the making of the record, but the dramatic period of time we moved through: The end of our initial pop success. It was not glorious; quite the opposite, it was quite horrifying at times."

He's able to issue these discs exactly as he wants because, unlike most artists, Costello retained the rights to his publishing and his master tapes.

"It's rare for anybody to own his back catalog. Most people sell bits and pieces of themselves because they're forced into it. I managed to be in a position to reclaim all of it."

That freedom has encouraged him to look further for more archive releases.

"We're one of the few performers in the world who doesn't have a DVD of some kind," said Costello, who is scouring for footage from throughout the years to make a live retrospective, hoping for release in 2004. He's located good early performance footage, as well as the MTV videos of his songs.

"People still get a kick out of them because of the funny fashions and odd staging. We're talking about putting out something next year that probably compiles all the video clips but also extends it into some live material."

He also has ideas about putting out complete shows from various eras on CD.

"The problem is I put out too many new records. It's difficult to actually stop long enough to create a gap. If you were really going to do it justice, you'd want to do some snapshot live albums from different periods of time rather than do the compilation live album."

Live At El Mocombo, issued as part of a Rykodisc box set several years ago, "is a reasonably good snapshot of the band in a club, but we certainly played better than that in our time, just not with tape rolling. We had very bad luck early on. Whenever we put a mobile recorder outside we tended not to play well or something went wrong."

These days, with all the archive releases, "there's a tolerance for a slightly less-pristine audio quality. Now you can release something that is literally like a Polaroid, an audio Polaroid, rather than people expecting it to be completely perfect, you know?"

North

Deutsche Grammophon,

Grade: B-

Posted by Post Master at 10:40 AM | Permalink

- Courtesy Barbara Fugate / The Danuloff Archives

<Zoom In - Image #3>

Posted by Post Master at 10:08 AM | Permalink

At WireImage
Elvis played last night in show rebroadcast at some Virgin stores last night, some others tomorrow night - see earlier listing for info. No setlist or other details yet.

Posted by Post Master at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

COSTELLO STEERS TO TRUE 'NORTH'
By DAN AQUILANTE

Excerpts:
...'ELVIS Costello's new album, "North," released yesterday, is an affected nostalgia record that hits the musical retro rockets so hard, the guy lands somewhere in the '30s

..."While the program was uniformly slow, Costello's emotive delivery and physical showmanship kept the concert from becoming a yawn fest.

..."The night was hardly perfect. Many of the in- and out-of-love songs sounded alike under the influence of Nieve's stark piano work. That sameness was a constant, from Costello's musical history lesson, "45," with which he opened the concert, to his autumn love song, "Fallen." Where he broke the stylistic pattern was with the concert showstopper "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," played with fond memories for the old new wave.

FULL TEXT
-----------

September 24, 2003 -- ELVIS Costello's new album,
"North," released yesterday, is an affected nostalgia
record that hits the musical retro rockets so hard,
the guy lands somewhere in the '30s, when tunes were
powered with sentimental sophistication.
That's right - it ain't rock 'n' roll.

So when the Irish songwriter celebrated the release of
that disc Monday with a gig at Town Hall featuring
most of those new songs, there was as much trepidation
as anticipation in the air.

But there was no need for worry. Costello and his ex-Attractions bandmate pianist Steve Nieve were very good at making the blue, moody, very old-fashioned love songs come to life.

While the program was uniformly slow, Costello's
emotive delivery and physical showmanship kept the
concert from becoming a yawn fest.

Though the merits of these new songs should be
apparent on the CD, they aren't. Take the tune "Let Me
Tell You About Her."

On the disc, it's easy to overlook Costello's clever
writing when he croons the urbane couplet, "I wasn't
very conversational, except to say, 'You're
sensational.' Friends now regard me with indulgent
smiles, but when I sing, they run for miles."

But in concert, with a little hand jive and his
expressive rubber face, these lyrics got smiles and
out-loud laughs.

That happened again and again during the show.

In the song "North," Costello was the master of the
interior rhyme, creating whimsical lyrics such as, "Up
where the polar bear and moose and geese will play,
and some of them address you en Francais," was
terrific during his stage delivery - yet the Looney
Toons humor remains undetectable on the studio record.

The night was hardly perfect. Many of the in- and
out-of-love songs sounded alike under the influence of
Nieve's stark piano work.

That sameness was a constant, from Costello's musical
history lesson, "45," with which he opened the
concert, to his autumn love song, "Fallen."

Where he broke the stylistic pattern was with the
concert showstopper "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace,
Love and Understanding," played with fond memories for
the old new wave.

Posted by Post Master at 09:49 AM | Permalink

NY Daily News

Elvis Costello played from his new album
By MAC RANDALL - SPECIAL TO THE DAILY NEWS

EXCERPTS: "So I'm at Town Hall," Elvis Costello cracked near the
start of his performance at the venerable W. 43rd St. auditorium Monday. "Does that make me the mayor?"

..."Which Elvis Costello was in the house? The spiky rocker? The classical buff? The jazz aficionado? Or the Merle Haggardloving country crooner? During a generous two-hour set, Costello - who plays Town Hall again tonight - displayed all these sides of his dizzyingly eclectic musical personality.

..."On record, many of the "North" numbers feel washed out, handicapped by string and horn arrangements that are tasteful to a fault. But stripped down to just piano and voice, they gained a surprising intensity. Taking advantage of Town Hall's stellar acoustics, Costello sang in an intimate, conversational fashion, often abandoning his microphone. Nieve tossed off florid trills, broke into jaunty bursts of stride and lingered over pregnant pauses, during which you could hear the crowd breathe.

(Submitted by John Foyle)

-----------------------------------------------------
Onstage, Costello
finds true 'North'

.

"So I'm at Town Hall," Elvis Costello cracked near the
start of his performance at the venerable W. 43rd St. auditorium Monday. "Does that make me the mayor?"

Well, no.

But easy as it was to answer that question, a bigger
one remained:

Which Elvis Costello was in the house?

The spiky rocker? The classical buff? The jazz
aficionado? Or the Merle Haggardloving country
crooner?

During a generous two-hour set, Costello - who plays
Town Hall again tonight - displayed all these sides of
his dizzyingly eclectic musical personality.

He did it in ultra-Spartan style, accompanied only by
longtime foil Steve Nieve on piano and melodica,
occasionally joining in himself on acoustic guitar.
And he did it with seemingly effortless command.

Nine of the show's 27 songs came from Costello's new
CD, "North," a subdued collection of ballads tracing
the demise of one relationship and the start of
another. According to Costello, it was the first time
they'd been played in a full-length concert.

On record, many of the "North" numbers feel washed
out, handicapped by string and horn arrangements that
are tasteful to a fault.

But stripped down to just piano and voice, they gained
a surprising intensity.

Taking advantage of Town Hall's stellar acoustics,
Costello sang in an intimate, conversational fashion,
often abandoning his microphone. Nieve tossed off
florid trills, broke into jaunty bursts of stride and
lingered over pregnant pauses, during which you could
hear the crowd breathe.

"Fallen," with its dreamy autumnal melody plumbing the
depths of Costello's vocal range, was a particular
standout.

Besides the "North" tracks, Costello and Nieve
peppered the set with fan favorites ("Accidents Will
Happen," "Man Out of Time"), rarities ("Either Side of
the Same Town," written for soul singer Howard Tate)
and a tender tribute to Johnny Cash, "I Still Miss
Someone."

They also, quietly, made a political point with three
songs in a row: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love
and Understanding," "Radio Silence" and the haunting
anti-war anthem "Shipbuilding."

Originally published on September 24, 2003

---------------------------------------------------

Posted by Post Master at 09:34 AM | Permalink

North - By Ken Micallef

It began with 1982's Imperial Bedroom. The album featured a newly reflective and ever poignant Elvis, not the sarcastic new waver known for such lines as, "six little Hitlers will fight it out until one little Hitler does the other one's will." The fireball wordsmith was replaced with Elvis-as-Sinatra, swooning for an imaginary lover, God's lonely man. Angry Elvis never really returned, gone to collaborate with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach, fashioning himself as a worldly torch singer with the Brodsky Quartet. Well, while Elvis is quite the crooner, an entire album of achy-breaky heartache is too much for the casual Costello listener to bear. Imperial Bedroom was only an experiment; North is a full tilt ballad blowout. Elvis pens beautiful songs like the Bacharach-esque "When Did I Stop Dreaming?" and the moonlight missive, "Can You Be True?" Accompanied simply by piano or strings or a subtle trio, we imagine Elvis in the spotlight on a concert stage, or wrapped around a streetlamp on a 1940's Warner Bros. film set. He pines and pouts and bares his soul, releasing his inner demons through majestic lyrics. "I will be there if the days bring torment, not trust," he sings. "My darling," he continues, "you make everything seem right." It's so touching these 11 songs of pain and sacrifice. "As a consequence, I can see out of the gloom," he sings near North's end. We are simply tourists along for Elvis's emotional outpouring. We are humbled. Robert Goulet, Pavarotti, and Celine Dion line up for autographs. But Elvis has left the building. And so have we.

(Submitted by John Foyle)

Note: We're trying to get details on the special pressing of Armed Forces which contains the four extra little Hittlers...

Posted by Post Master at 09:17 AM | Permalink

Elvis points 'North' -- Costello devotes much of Town Hall show to his newest CD
BY JAY LUSTIG - Star-Ledger Staff

EXCERPTS:
..."took place on the eve of the release of his new album, "North." Yet it would be hard to imagine an event that ranked lower on the fanfare scale

..."he didn't even play his guitar on the "North" material

..."Other surprises in the show included the country standard, "I Still Miss Someone," and "Either Side of the Same Town," which Costello co-wrote for "Rediscovered," the recent comeback album by soul singer Howard Tate. Songs from old Costello albums included everything from the Dylanesque anthem "Man Out of Time" to elegant ballads like "Almost Blue" and "Shipbuilding

..."And show-opener "Accidents Will Happen," which dates back to Costello's punk/new wave phase of the late'70s, supplied an ideal first line for this down to-earth, conversationally toned evening: "I just don't know where to begin."

Congratulations to Jay for the most incipid lines on a North Review:

FULL TEXT
----------
Elvis points 'North' -- Costello devotes much of Town
Hall show to his newest CD

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

BY JAY LUSTIG
Star-Ledger Staff

NEW YORK -- Elvis Costello's Monday night show at Town
Hall took place on the eve of the release of his new
album, "North." Yet it would be hard to imagine an
event that ranked lower on the fanfare scale.

Throughout the show, he was backed only by his
longtime keyboardist, Steve Nieve, and he didn't even
play his guitar on the "North" material. Nieve left
the stage at one point, and Costello presented solo piano-and-vocal versions of three songs. For the final number, "Couldn't Call It Unexpected, No. 4," Costello sang with no amplification.

There were no visual gimmicks, and Costello even
joked, during "God's Comic," that the show didn't have
a high enough budget for someone to kill the lights,
for theatrical effect, when he sang the line, "turn
out the light."

Costello managed to dazzle in the unflashy setting,
though, warmly crooning 10 songs from "North" -- his
first full-length cabaret-style album -- and
performing scaled-down versions of tunes from
throughout his career.

He rocked at times, muscularly strumming a distorted
acoustic guitar on songs like "45," "Tart" and
"(What's So Funny'Bout) Peace, Love and
Understanding?" There was just as much tension and
release in "Rocking Horse Road" and "Radio Silence" as
there would have been with a full band. But most of
the numbers were in a more calm, thoughtful mode.

"North" is a soul-searching song cycle about losing
love, then finding it again. While it does display
some of Costello's trademark cleverness, it also
contains some of his most plainspoken lyrics.

"I wasn't very conversational, except to say that
you're sensational," he sang, with disarming
enthusiasm, in "Let Me Tell You About Her," a song
that painted this 48-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of
Famer as a lovestruck schoolboy: "Friends now regard
me with indulgent smiles/But when I start to speak
they run for miles." Whether Costello or the more
virtuosic Nieve was playing piano for "North" songs,
they stuck to a simple, uncluttered style that never
distracted from the lyrics.

In addition to the 10 album tracks, Costello performed
the song "North," which was left off the album, but is currently available for free downloading on his Web site, www.elviscostello.com. Presumably, it didn't make the album because its whimsical flavor would have been out of place, but in concert, it supplied some necessary comic relief. It's a quirky song of praise for the healing powers of Canada. "The polar bears and moose and geese will play/And some of them address you en français/Give me the ice and snow/Time to go north," sang Costello.

Other surprises in the show included the country
standard, "I Still Miss Someone," and "Either Side of
the Same Town," which Costello co-wrote for
"Rediscovered," the recent comeback album by soul
singer Howard Tate. Songs from old Costello albums
included everything from the Dylanesque anthem "Man
Out of Time" to elegant ballads like "Almost Blue" and "Shipbuilding."

"In the Darkest Place," a gorgeous song from "Painted
From Memory" (Costello's 1998 collection of
collaborations with Burt Bacharach), proved perfectly
suited for the unplugged treatment. And show-opener
"Accidents Will Happen," which dates back to
Costello's punk/new wave phase of the late'70s,
supplied an ideal first line for this down-to-earth, conversationally toned evening: "I just don't know where to begin."

Costello's show tonight at Town Hall is sold out.
Tomorrow at 10 p.m., he will perform at John Jay
College in New York. This concert will not be open to
the general public, but will be broadcast live on the
A&E cable television network, with an encore
presentation Sunday at 10 a.m.

Copyright 2003 The Star-Ledger.

Posted by Post Master at 09:12 AM | Permalink

POP REVIEW | ELVIS COSTELLO - By JON PARELES
Elvis Costello Returns, Brooding and Restless

EXCERPTS:

..."Style, it might be argued, is the sum of a musician's reflexes: the melodic contours, harmonic turns, rhythms and verbal patterns that come most naturally. Elvis Costello is determined to refute that argument. Whenever he grows secure in a style, he sets it aside and seeks out another one, fighting his own reflexes to a draw. His new album, "North" (Deutsche Grammophon), is his latest battle with himself. ... He made up in drama what he had sacrificed
in decibels."

..." While the words aspire to transparency, the music grows complex, as if Mr. Costello soaked up as many convolutions as he could from his 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, "Painted From Memory" (Mercury), then set out to bend and fold them further. He sounds as if he has been studying Cole Porter, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Chopin and Schubert, too. The "North" album features Mr. Costello's own arrangements for strings and horns, but onstage he put down his guitar for the new songs, letting Mr. Nieve provide pastel jazz harmonies and pristine quasi-classical embellishment."

..."Mr. Costello hasn't made his songs easy on himself. He's at the limits of his vocal instrument in his new ones, trying to use the strain in his voice to suggest yearning. Another singer might be more comfortable with this music. But Mr. Costello would clearly rather find comfort in romance than in songwriting.

FULL TEXT
---------
Style, it might be argued, is the sum of a musician's
reflexes: the melodic contours, harmonic turns,
rhythms and verbal patterns that come most naturally.
Elvis Costello is determined to refute that argument.
Whenever he grows secure in a style, he sets it aside
and seeks out another one, fighting his own reflexes
to a draw.
His new album, "North" (Deutsche Grammophon), is his
latest battle with himself. Last year he reunited with
most of his crafty late-1970's band to speed up and
rock out on "When I Was Cruel" (Island); now he has
veered to the opposite extreme, singing slow,
sustained ballads. At Town Hall on Monday night (he
has a second concert there tonight), accompanied only
by Steve Nieve on piano, Mr. Costello retrofitted his
old songs with his latest approach while he unveiled
new ones. He made up in drama what he had sacrificed
in decibels.

The songs from "North" turn Mr. Costello's usual
gambits inside out. The album has a story line about
an old romance collapsing and a new one beginning
(although the title song, which is available only on
the Internet, is more playful, a tribute to Canada).
On the album the lyrics replace Mr. Costello's usual
rush of images and wordplay with brief, emotionally
direct verses: "Maybe this is the love song that I
refused to/Write her when I loved her like I used to."

While the words aspire to transparency, the music
grows complex, as if Mr. Costello soaked up as many convolutions as he could from his 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, "Painted From Memory" (Mercury), then set out to bend and fold them further. He sounds as if he has been studying Cole Porter, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Chopin and Schubert, too. The "North" album features Mr. Costello's own arrangements for strings and horns, but onstage he put down his guitar for the new songs, letting Mr. Nieve provide pastel jazz harmonies and pristine quasi-classical embellishment.

In the past a typical Costello melody has taken clear,
stepwise motions up and down the scale, while using
symmetry to make the audacious lyrics more
approachable. But his new tunes rarely go very far
without taking a leap to an unlikely note. They also
use harmonic nuances to paint the lyrics, with rising
or falling chords to match mood shifts and chromatic
tensions giving way to reassuring major-chord
resolutions.

Mr. Costello chose older songs, like "Shot With His
Own Gun," "All the Rage," "Rocking Horse Road" and
"Almost Blue," that are full of betrayals and bitter aftermaths. As he sang them, Mr. Costello reveled in
dynamics: a desperate crescendo followed by a brooding
hush, a shout leading to a pained reconsideration. He
often moved away from the microphone, letting his
voice be heard unadorned.

Mr. Costello hasn't made his songs easy on himself.
He's at the limits of his vocal instrument in his new
ones, trying to use the strain in his voice to suggest yearning. Another singer might be more comfortable with this music. But Mr. Costello would clearly rather find comfort in romance than in songwriting.

Posted by Post Master at 09:05 AM | Permalink

Billboard
Elvis Costello & Steve Nieve / Sept. 22, 2003 / New
York (Town Hall)
Accompanied only by longtime collaborator/pianist Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello took to the stage at New York's Town Hall last night (Sept. 22) to introduce "North." The new album of ballads, in stores today via Deutsche Grammophon, is a departure from the wry, often bitter material for which the artist is so well known, and he wisely couched the material within selections spanning his career.

Costello performed nearly the whole of the new album, plus the title track (only available to buyers via free download) throughout the more than two-hour exhibition to an overly eager audience in the pristine theater. And while sparse arrangements of such beloved songs as "Accidents Will Happen," "Man Out of Time" and "All the Rage" met the new ballads on a musically even field, differences between old and new were easily notable.

The new material is passionate traditional pop in the vein of George and Ira Gershwin or Costello's one-time collaborator, Burt Bacharach and his songwriting partner, Hal David. The lyrics are direct, devoid of clever-clever wordplay and cheeky humor, instead laying matters of the heart out in the open. And it's mostly a startling success; sophisticated, not syrupy, and seemingly screaming for an ancillary narrative for which to frame it for a long life on Broadway.

Selling it to last night's crowd was easy, although hardcore fans frothing in anticipation of an intimate evening with Costello at times detracted as much from the experience as the occasional ringing cellular phone. Anxious applause broke out as the quietest moments of these unfamiliar and subdued songs were
mistaken for the songs' end. Tittering sometimes spread as some searched for sardonic meaning in words and actions where none was intended.

Nonetheless, the heartbreak of "You Left Me in the Dark" and "You Turned to Me" and the rebirth of "Let Me Tell You About Her" and "I'm in the Mood Again" soared even to the upper reaches of the cozy theater. Costello's investment in the songs and arrangements were obvious as he prefaced some with explanation, stood by the grand piano to enjoy Nieve's playing during "Someone Took the Words Away" and basked in the approval of the faithful. "It's the first time we've incorporated so many of these works into a full length concert," Costello said, admitting that he and Nieve "appreciate your appreciation."

Aside from the "North" selections, the crowd was also treated to such gems as "Indoor Fireworks," a mid-tempo version of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding" and "God's Comic," as well as a poignant rendition of Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone" by Costello alone at the piano. Only "45" and "Tart," both from last year's "When I Was Cruel" (Island), belied the majority of the set with caustic distortion wailing from his acoustic guitar.

Nieve's astounding abilities at the piano aside, the charm of "North" and its performance lay in Costello's vocal abilities and limitations. Emotional camouflage and lyrical conventions stripped away, the pain of betrayal and loss feels alarmingly real, and by the same token, the fragility of the first steps of finding love again is relived with hesitation and excitement. As such, fans who have indulged Costello's seemingly constant exploration of music's varied landscapes with an open mind will be rewarded if they follow him
"North." -- Barry A. Jeckell

Costello & Nieve play Town Hall again on Wednesday (Sept. 24) and will spend October and early November visiting Japan and Europe.

Posted by Post Master at 09:01 AM | Permalink

1) Accidents Will Happen
2) 45
3) Rocking Horse Road
4) Shot with His Own Gun (SN piano, no guitar)
5) You Left Me in the Dark (SN piano, no guitar)
6) Someone Took the Words Away (SN piano, no guitar)
7) When Did I Stop Dreaming? (SN piano, no guitar)
8) You Turned to Blue (SN piano, no guitar)
9) Fallen (SN piano, no guitar)
10) God's Comic
11) Indoor Fireworks
12) Either Side of the Same Town
13) Man Out of Time
14) When It Sings (SN piano, no guitar)

1st Encores:
15) In the Darkest Place (SN piano, no guitar I think)
16) When Green Eyes Turn Blue (SN piano, no guitar)
17) Can You Be True? (SN piano, no guitar)
18) All the Rage
19) Tart
20) (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding
21) Shipbuilding
22) Radio Silence

2nd Encores:
23) North (SN piano, no guitar)
24) Almost Blue
25) Still (EC Solo - On piano)
26) I Still Miss Someone (J. Cash)
27) Let Me Tell You About Her (EC Solo - On piano)
28) I'm in the Mood Again (EC Solo - On piano)
29) Couldn't Call It Unexpected (SN piano, EC sings off-mike)

-this probably isn't exactly right order - post comment with any fixes.
Highlights: All North songs sounded far better to me than they did on the Advance CD, but 'Still' was my personal fav of the evening. Even better was 'Either Side Of the Same Town', 'Radio Silence', and of course 'All The Rage'

Posted by Post Master at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Given out last night at the Town Hall show. Lots of people didn't get them and the distributor was nowhere to be found a few minutes after the show. Not sure how many were given out, or where or when they might appear again...

Posted by Post Master at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The May 2002 Appearance of (I don't want to go to) Chelsea put Elvis on this disc along with Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Leonard Cohen, Dusty Springfield, and many others.
(Submitted by Chris Wright)

Posted by Post Master at 08:59 PM | Permalink

Elvis's house in Dublin was sold today, for approx. $1.3M US.

Posted by Post Master at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

ELVIS COSTELLO - "North" - NY Post
"North," the latest from Elvis Costello, is a musically pretty disc that's also pretty boring as it tells a boy-loses-girl, boy-finds-himself-and-rediscovers-love story.

Inspired by loss and propelled by mopey, moody music, "North" heads South because all of the songs sound alike. Die-hards will take umbrage and cite the subtleties within individual tunes, but after several spins it seems as if he's lost his pop compass and drifted into the land of background music. Be warned: This is a quiet strings 'n' things record that's closer to easy listening than rock 'n' roll.
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 08:52 PM | Permalink

Elvis Costello, North (* * * ½) USA TODAY
Costello may have been cast as a child of punk early in his career, but as a writer, he has always owed a greater debt to Lennon & McCartney and Rodgers & Hart than Lou Reed or the Sex Pistols. This latest effort emphasizes that point, spotlighting the meticulous songcraft that has provided the foundation for all of Costello's diverse projects through the years. The spare, moody tracks here may not offer the bracing punch of last year's more rhythmically charged When I Was Cruel. But the delicately haunting melodies and lyrics driving tunes such as Still, Can You Be True? and I'm in the Mood Again — and Costello's characteristically tasteful, intuitive singing — blend wit and feeling as few can.
—Gardner
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 08:50 PM | Permalink

"Dagsavisen" (3 out of 6). Deems EC´s singing as probably the best he´s ever done, but think he should´ve written some decent tunes to go with that great voice....

"VG" luuuurves it (6 out of 6) and calls it "a masterpiece from a superb songwriter"

"Dagbladet" (5 out of 6) hails the album as a "brilliant song-cycle og broken and newfound love"
(Submitted by Sverre Ronny Saetum)

Posted by Post Master at 08:47 PM | Permalink

Elvis will be doing 2 new numbers on the show this thursday.

Posted by Post Master at 08:45 PM | Permalink

A change of direction for Mr. C
Elvis Costello - "North" - 3 1/2 stars (out of 4)
Los Angeles Times September 21, 2003
Well, it was fun while it lasted, but you can put away the dancing shoes, Elvis has left the ballroom.

Last year's "When I Was Cruel" was Costello's return to the sound and spirit of the snarling young rocker, but since his career is an adventure in genre-hopping, it's no surprise to see him pirouette 180 degrees. American saloon song meets European art song in "North" (in stores Tuesday), which recounts a romantic meltdown and reawakening in the vernacular of pre-rock torch music and jazz-dappled pop standards.

Tempos range from near-stillness to measured, the emotional pitch is rigorously restrained, the modulations of mood are sometimes all but imperceptible. A meditative tone emerges from spare settings -- some songs are formed by just piano, bass and voice, while others introduce strings and horns -- and from a focus on the specifics of this singer's story. Costello's phrasing is conversational but idiosyncratic, and his register is a clear, intimate baritone.

Lyrically, the noted wordsmith seems determined to avoid knee-jerk signifiers and easy slogans, big-sell choruses and clever couplets. That keeps him well clear of cliches, but the bargain leaves his introspections on the dry side, sometimes to the point of austerity. That "North" remains so consistently moving testifies to the music's power to animate the scenarios. - Richard Cromelin
(Submitted by Nunki)

Posted by Post Master at 08:43 PM | Permalink

Elvis Costello - North - From Rolling Stone

Having reinstated his rock & roll credentials last year with When I Was Cruel -- not to mention getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame -- Elvis Costello characteristically makes a dramatic stylistic turn on North. The album is filled with haunted, piano-centered ballads and elegant string and horn arrangements that tease out subtleties in the songs' already understated melodies. Costello's singing is quiet and controlled, an intimate voice describing an emotional journey from abandonment ("You Left Me in the Dark") to a renewed commitment to love ("Let Me Tell You About Her"). North exudes a consistent, subdued beauty that, at times, is almost too delicate to make a true impression. Despite its intelligence and musical sophistication, the album floats by on a breeze so light that it risks escaping notice; the songs disappear into the air before the listener can discover a way to inhabit them. There's an undeniable pleasure in that effort to grasp this music and its meanings before they fade, but at times you can't help wishing they were less evanescent, more substantial. - ANTHONY DECURTIS
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 08:42 PM | Permalink

Elvis Costello is featured in an exclusive interview on the upcoming Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks CD/DVD release, available everywhere November 4th from Surfdog Records.

Posted by Post Master at 08:40 PM | Permalink

The great All Music Guide takes a look at the bonus discs

* Trust
* Punch The Clock

Posted by Post Master at 08:38 PM | Permalink

North crashed into this week's UK album charts at #44.
(submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 08:35 PM | Permalink

We'll have extensive coverage of last night's NYC show soon. Technical problems today, sorry for the delay. We've got some exclusive pictures and artwork, and more - check back soon.

Posted by Post Master at 07:43 PM | Permalink

The Independent looks at what happend to Gram Parsons after he died.

Posted by Post Master at 02:49 PM | Permalink

The New York Times strains the old EC quote to introduce children's books:

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,'' Elvis Costello told an interviewer 20 years ago, when he was still angry. Capturing the essence of one medium in the other, he suggested, has its challenges. Actually, he was a little more blunt. ''It's a really stupid thing to want to do,'' he said.

Three of these books approach Costello's simile from its other end. They take an architectural approach to dancing. They are workmanlike, serious, even rigorous, which can be a good thing and does capture one aspect of ballet. But they do not get at its essence, and they pass up opportunities to make use of the many vivid ways illustrated books for children can tell stories."

Isn't there some debate about whether or not EC was the original author of this quote? I seem to recall a case being made for Frank Zappa having said it first.

Posted by Post Master at 02:47 PM | Permalink

Canada loves Elvis - so they talk about Howard Tate. Very good article on the man and his history plus this new CD.

"Eleven of the 12 songs on Rediscovered are Ragovoy compositions - including a rendition of Get It While You Can, a song first recorded by Tate and then made famous by Janis Joplin. Also included are Prince's Kiss, and Either Side of the Same Town, a collaboration between Ragovoy and Elvis Costello. "

Posted by Post Master at 02:45 PM | Permalink

Posted by Post Master at 02:43 PM | Permalink

While checking out the Elvis Costello Home Page I took note of the exhaustive schedule of concerts and appearances on the home page - impressive!

Posted by Post Master at 12:26 PM | Permalink

The EC home page just posted scans of the new Rhino sampler for GH, Trust, and PTC.

Rhino's promotional text from the sleeve:

"From vinyl to cassette to CD and to CD again, we know that you've bought these fine albums enough times already and frankly, we don't expect you to buy them again simply because our remastering engineers are so damn good. No, we're willing to give you Get Happy!!, Trust, and Punch The Clock, in all their re-re-remastered glory, absolutely free. All you have to do is purchase their respective "bonus" discs, each one worth every cent we're asking. In fact, the so-called bonus discs are so packed with previously unreleased Elvis--demos, B-sides, live cuts, raritites and, get this, DEMOS OF RARITIES-- that it may take you days before you get around to those albums you loved enough to buy over and over and over again in the first place."

(Submitted by Conner Ratliff)

Posted by Post Master at 12:24 PM | Permalink

SMH Australia discovers that North was impacted by relationship changes in EC's life.

Excerpts:
..."Obviously any close identification of these songs with me is less important than the variety of identifications that occur [in listeners]," the 49-year-old says. "It's irrelevant really whether they're about my life or not. It's irrelevant to the listening pleasure unless all you want to be is a voyeur. It's an unsatisfactory investigation and a fruitless one, if people ask me."

..."I can't pretend I live in those times," Costello says, with only the barest hint of resignation. "I, as a songwriter, live in the post-Blood on the Tracks, post-Blue era - just to pick two albums [by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell] from my record collection that meant a lot to me. We assume a close identification between the singer and the songwriter. Maybe that's wrong or maybe, as it is with this record, that is much less important than what we feel about those songs.

..."There's no doubt that, at a certain point around the time when Dylan switched from a fantastic and righteous commentary on events to the interior life, there's a shift ... from people writing lyrics of romantic convention, which might, of course, have been informed by very personal experiences - and certainly were in the case of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart, and people like that - to naked rambling at times. Some of it very uninteresting and unedifying rambling."

FULL TEXT
-------------
Falling in love again fuels Elvis Costello's new album. Just don't expect him to kiss and tell.

Elvis Costello ended a 16-year relationship with Irish singer and songwriter Caitlin O'Riordan last year and began a surprising new one with Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall.

Costello's new album, out on Monday, is packed with songs about the giddy euphoria of falling in love again. Musically it harks back to the great American songbook tradition of Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Mercer and Porter, marking another shift after last year's more rock-influenced album When I Was Cruel.

Lyrically it appears to be an album structured along the lines of Harold Pinter's play Betrayal: beginning with an end (You Left Me in the Dark) and ending with a declaration of hope at a beginning (I'm in the Mood Again).

Yet Costello does not want us to see any great significance in this, does not want us to assume that the songs on North are necessarily related to his life.

"Obviously any close identification of these songs with me is less important than the variety of identifications that occur [in listeners]," the 49-year-old says. "It's irrelevant really whether they're about my life or not. It's irrelevant to the listening pleasure unless all you want to be is a voyeur. It's an unsatisfactory investigation and a fruitless one, if people ask me."

Costello laughs as he says this, but there's no questioning the steel. In 26 years and 19 albums since his twitchy and wordy 1977 debut (the country/rock rather than punk-influenced My Aim is True), Costello has never discussed his private life and has consistently denied personal connections in his lyrics.

Sure, the lyrics on North are the most direct he's ever written, the most unabashed in their emotional celebration: "These few lines I'll devote/To a marvellous girl covered up with my coat/Pull it up to your chin/I'll hold you until the day will begin."

Sure, they were written in a feverish burst in the weeks and months after he met Krall in Australia last year while they were both on tour (he and O'Riordan attended Krall's Opera House concert). But he isn't about to change now.

Still, he knows terrain will be scanned and matters assumed by fans, reviewers and the curious. What Costello wouldn't give for a public and critical mood more in tune with the musical era upon which North draws.

It was a time when Lorenz Hart's troubled and unrequited love for his songwriting partner Richard Rodgers emerged in songs that the general public digested happily as universal love songs.

"I can't pretend I live in those times," Costello says, with only the barest hint of resignation. "I, as a songwriter, live in the post-Blood on the Tracks, post-Blue era - just to pick two albums [by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell] from my record collection that meant a lot to me. We assume a close identification between the singer and the songwriter. Maybe that's wrong or maybe, as it is with this record, that is much less important than what we feel about those songs.

"There's no doubt that, at a certain point around the time when Dylan switched from a fantastic and righteous commentary on events to the interior life, there's a shift ... from people writing lyrics of romantic convention, which might, of course, have been informed by very personal experiences - and certainly were in the case of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart, and people like that - to naked rambling at times. Some of it very uninteresting and unedifying rambling."

I put it to Costello that, when I first heard the songs of Lorenz Hart, I knew nothing of his story and responded to the songs on one level. But, when I learnt what some of those lyrics signified, I had a different, yet no less valid, appreciation of those songs.

"I think you can, after the fact, but what was most important was your first instinctive reaction to it, an emotional reaction that was not intellectual," he argues.

So if we can't discuss who, can we say what the songs on North are about?

"Most acutely it's about the acceptance of love, that feeling of bewilderment, that first realisation," Costello says. "Not everybody starts from the position of absolute confidence and self-belief. You have doubt, bewilderment, embarrassment almost at being taken over by this feeling.

"The songs came to me fairly rapidly. They were written before I had time to consider whether I was writing in a different way or not. The next thing I knew, I had five or six songs which were very different to the music I was currently playing.

"I wrote most of them while I was on the road last September [with his rock band, the Imposters]. I was writing them after the shows, in the small hours, on the buses, while playing with the Imposters. It was such a different voice, musically and lyrically that the songs were taking shape before I had time to consider whether there was a choice about them."

It sounds like it was an uncontrolled, almost overwhelming outpouring. "Yes. Three songs in one evening. It can be quite upsetting to write like that, you know. It can be quite disquieting when you have absolutely no choice: I must find a piano right away. It's sort of a thrilling, exhilarating and slightly unnerving experience."

It's interesting that the language Costello uses to describe the response he had as this music was pouring out of him is similar to the language he used to describe the overwhelming nature of love arriving, being denied and then accepted.

It's even more interesting that a man usually assumed to be more concerned with bitterness and revenge than love has made an album so full of love. Love to the point of euphoria.

He's happy to wear that: "In the world that we live in, I would rather sing of love and its transforming power than I would of anything else right now."

Posted by Post Master at 10:25 AM | Permalink

Once the king of caustic rock, Costello is now its Croon Prince.
Another North piece, from today's Boston Globe

Excerpts:
..."It's been years since Elvis Costello was an angry young man. According to his calculations, relayed over a cellphone from the back of a car in London, one would be hard-pressed to find a caustic pun in anything he's written during the last decade -- certainly not the score to a dance production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," nor a work for countertenor and viol ensemble, nor even his lush pop collaboration with Burt Bacharach.

..."It's the tender words and whispered remarks that Costello returns to with astonishing purity on his new album, "North," to be released on Tuesday...The songs tumbled out with a force and speed that Costello found upsetting. It was, he says, like being tapped insistently on the shoulder at random times of day and night. Six of the 12 ballads were composed while he was on the road with the Imposters last year, touring in support of 2002's searing "When I Was Cruel" and playing what Costello describes as some of the most ferocious shows of his life -- the oddly raucous bed in which these intimate ballads bloomed.

...."Indeed, "North" is dramatic and emotional, but Costello has mastered the fine art of letting the spaces speak. Silence is color here, and the music is carefully sketched in pencil lines and pointed strokes. Costello doesn't have a beautiful voice, and his throaty quiver skewers these delicate love songs with a flawed humanity that's either captivating or annoying, depending on your musical standards. On every level, they're the most revealing songs he has ever sung. But Costello doesn't care to be called courageous. "Courage is an innocent man facing a firing squad," he says. "I've stripped a lot away here. But it wasn't hard because that's what I was called upon to do by the initial inspiration. I wanted to speak clearly."

..."Neither is he terrifically concerned about how people will receive "North." "I'm not trying to join the dots and be one of the most successful artists of all time," Costello says. "An audience is a group of individuals with different points of view. People my age who loved `This Year's Model' may understand the transitions in these songs very well. People who want to hear music that sounds like what I used to do have become exasperated and left the room. I figure they're served by somebody else. Others have discovered me through the songs with [opera singer] Anne Sofie von Otter. There's a revolving door. People go out and come in." ... Does "Can You Be True" ask if a lover is real or if she can be faithful? "They're inescapable conclusions with more than one meaning," says Costello. "The dreadful, wonderful transitions occur simultaneously when there's a changing in the heart. When people part it can be crushing, but so long as we're alive there's the possibility of another happiness. And I suppose that's why the record is called `North' as opposed to `Down in the Hole.' "

(Submitted by Herb Boers)

----
FULL TEXT
----

Once the king of caustic rock, Costello is now its croon prince By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff, 9/21/2003 It's been years since Elvis Costello was an angry young man. According to his calculations, relayed over a cellphone from the back of a car in London, one would be hard-pressed to find a caustic pun in anything he's written during the last decade -- certainly not the score to a dance production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," nor a work for countertenor and viol ensemble, nor even his lush pop collaboration with Burt Bacharach.

Still, Costello will always be king of the cutting barb. He'll forever be bristling with guilt and pumped for revenge, his real feelings brilliantly disguised by a barrage of acerbic wordplay and clever chord changes. Costello understands that in the annals of rock he will go down as the stiff misanthropic dweeb, dumped by Alison and sneering. "I've written lots of bitter, accusatory songs," says Costello, a gracious and erudite conversationalist. "But there's a curious anomaly to me being thought of as a rock 'n' roll singer. My main thing has always been to sing ballads and write in the ballad form. I don't equate emotion with histrionics, or even a raised voice. That's a terrifying sound, but there's a lot to be said for the tender word and the whispered remark."

Costello's fascination with the classic pop songcraft of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart reaches back to 1982, the year he turned 27, when Costello released "Imperial Bedroom." Track 6 was a melancholy affair called "Almost Blue," a song that's become a jazz-pop vocal standard covered by Chet Baker, Jimmy Scott, and most recently Costello's fiancee, the Canadian singer Diana Krall. Costello began to carve a career as one of the most eclectic and gifted songwriters of his era -- going country one year, burrowing into soul the next, flirting with jazz, and immersing himself in classical music. "He's a risk taker. He certainly took a chance making a record with me," says Bacharach. "The guy simply won't be bound to one kind of music, nor should he be. He's always investigating because he can."

It's the tender words and whispered remarks that Costello returns to with astonishing purity on his new album, "North," to be released on Tuesday. It's a cycle of slow, intense songs that begins with "You Left Me in the Dark" and closes with "I'm in the Mood Again"; what happens in between chronicles with uncharacteristic directness the end of Costello's 16-year marriage to musician Cait O'Riordan of the Pogues and the beginning of his infatuation with Krall. Costello is wary of attaching too much autobiographical weight to the collection. He's fiercely protective of his ex-wife's privacy, and sensitive to the perils of being half of a musical power couple. At the same time Costello knows how silly it would sound to deny it. "I'm reluctant to so closely identify these songs with life, because life is quite a bit more complicated," he says. "I know I sound pedantic and evasive. The songs clearly have a relationship to an emotional transition I've experienced, but my mission is to move beyond the initial inspiration to expression and craft. Describing the moment when you picked the purple woolen thread off your dress doesn't mean anything to anyone else. I offer these songs to other people with no irony, no escape clauses, to relate to their own lives. Otherwise I'm talking to myself."

The songs tumbled out with a force and speed that Costello found upsetting. It was, he says, like being tapped insistently on the shoulder at random times of day and night. Six of the 12 ballads were composed while he was on the road with the Imposters last year, touring in support of 2002's searing "When I Was Cruel" and playing what Costello describes as some of the most ferocious shows of his life -- the oddly raucous bed in which these intimate ballads bloomed.

When he returned early this year to New York -- one of the places Costello spends enough time to consider a sort of home, along with Ireland (his base for 13 years), London (where Costello's father and son reside), and Canada (Krall's home) -- he immediately holed up in an old studio on the top of the Steinway Building. Orchestrations came to Costello almost simultaneously while laying down demo recordings. Initially unaware that he was composing a song cycle, Costello began to perceive "an accumulation of feeling," he says, noticed "a sense of connection," and wrote six more songs that would complete a picture of a man moving from darkness into light.

Lyrically and sonically, "North" follows an upward trajectory, growing sweeter and headier as it goes. "You know the expression something's `gone south'? It's the opposite of that. It's also a place I go, the northern part of the North American continent," Costello says of the album's title. "North" reunites the singer-songwriter with the Brodsky Quartet for "Still," the album's winsome centerpiece; on the rest of the album longtime pianist Steve Nieve, drummer Peter Erskine, and double bassist Mike Formanek form a hushed, dusky rhythm section accompanied by a horn nonet and 28-piece string section arranged and conducted by Costello.

There are less than 12 bars of electric guitar on the record, and there's no better way to get at the aesthetic of "North" than to scroll through the Sinatra-esque adjectives Costello conjures to talk about his lover. She's a marvelous girl, sensational, indescribable. The songs' savvy internal rhymes, too, smack of old-school style and first-class romance, and the elegant musical phrasings owe a debt to jazz, musical theater, classical music, and vintage pop. Imagine Sondheim with the Beatles in his blood, sung almost entirely in Costello's broken, burnished baritone and brandished with a startled heart. Just be careful not to confuse a string section for sentimental embellishment. "If anybody attaches `lush' to the record, they're ignorant or a liar," warns Costello.

Indeed, "North" is dramatic and emotional, but Costello has mastered the fine art of letting the spaces speak. Silence is color here, and the music is carefully sketched in pencil lines and pointed strokes. Costello doesn't have a beautiful voice, and his throaty quiver skewers these delicate love songs with a flawed humanity that's either captivating or annoying, depending on your musical standards. On every level, they're the most revealing songs he has ever sung. But Costello doesn't care to be called courageous. "Courage is an innocent man facing a firing squad," he says. "I've stripped a lot away here. But it wasn't hard because that's what I was called upon to do by the initial inspiration. I wanted to speak clearly."

Neither is he terrifically concerned about how people will receive "North." "I'm not trying to join the dots and be one of the most successful artists of all time," Costello says. "An audience is a group of individuals with different points of view. People my age who loved `This Year's Model' may understand the transitions in these songs very well. People who want to hear music that sounds like what I used to do have become exasperated and left the room. I figure they're served by somebody else. Others have discovered me through the songs with [opera singer] Anne Sofie von Otter. There's a revolving door. People go out and come in." The angry young man, now 48, speaks with a clarity available only to those who are comfortable in the spaces between black and white. Even these songs, so candid and unironic, are layered with dubious messages. Is "When Did I Stop Dreaming" about waking up to reality or the end of believing in something? Does "Can You Be True" ask if a lover is real or if she can be faithful? "They're inescapable conclusions with more than one meaning," says Costello. "The dreadful, wonderful transitions occur simultaneously when there's a changing in the heart. When people part it can be crushing, but so long as we're alive there's the possibility of another happiness. And I suppose that's why the record is called `North' as opposed to `Down in the Hole.' "

Posted by Post Master at 12:10 PM | Permalink

Full article with Interview at Jam Showbiz.

===
FULL TEXT
===
Elvis Costello opens up
By MARY DICKIE -- Toronto Sun
Elvis Costello's career has taken a lot of twists and turns in its quarter-century journey. Punk, post-punk, new wave, country and avant garde chamber music have all been part of his repertoire, but some constants -- such as razor-sharp wit, brilliant wordplay and a kind of amused bitterness -- have always been present in his lyrics.

Until now, that is. Costello's latest album, North, is much more of a departure than the left turn we might have expected after last year's return-to-rock When I Was Cruel. It's a collection of quietly intense, startlingly intimate songs in the '50s pop-jazz vein -- think Ella Fitzgerald's songbooks or Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours -- directly inspired by the breakup of his 16-year marriage to former Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan and his new relationship with jazz pianist Diana Krall.

In a way, North is a bit of a throwback to the music Costello's parents listened to in '50s Liverpool. "My father was originally a bebop trumpet player who took a job as a bandstand vocalist after he got married and I was born," Costello says over the phone from Germany. "And my mother worked in a record store. So I was lucky enough to hear lots of different music. Those '50s pop records were in my family home for as long as I can remember -- my mother tells me that I could request I've Got You Under My Skin before I could form whole sentences.

"I went back to them as a young man, when I was old enough to know what the songs were about. There's something unashamedly adult about those vocal records; they require patience that a child doesn't have. And they've been my predominant listening ever since, even though the music I've been writing and recording has had a very different tone.

Still, Costello has put his modern stamp on a vintage style. "I didn't set out to make a nostalgic album for a time that I didn't actually live in," he says. "The thing that separates those older albums from this one is the language. The language of the '50s songs is very restrained, almost like a code. No matter how tragic the song, the way things are said is not very overt. And I've lived through the changes in songwriting that led us to the moment when you can write things more literally -- and in fact, to do otherwise would be a bit cute."

And North is literally and overtly about new love -- specifically his new love. As he winsomely sings in Still: "Lying in the shadows this new flame will cast/Upon everything we carry from the past/You were made of every love and each regret/Up until the day we met."

In fact, North is the most personal work Costello has done, revealing our cynical, world-weary singer as surprisingly vulnerable, nervous, even euphoric. Instead of semi-cryptic cleverness, he sings with excitement, candour and even embarrassment about the joy and bewilderment of falling in love. Sometimes, as on Let Me Tell You About Her, he combines all of the above as he describes his friends rolling their eyes when he starts going on about his new love.

In our interview, Costello exhibits a similar ambivalence -- he seems reluctant to discuss Krall directly, but acknowledges the (rather public) relationship and the intimacy of the songs, as well as his happiness, which is evident throughout the lyrics anyway. For example, take this passage from When Green Eyes Turn Blue: "You brighten up my darkest gaze/And as a consequence I can see out of the gloom/That I gathered about myself/That I thought would flatter me/What the hell was the matter with me?"

Or the album's wonderful closer, I'm In The Mood Again, which conjures up the image of a besotted Costello roaming the streets of Manhattan at dawn: "I don't know what's come over me/But it's nothing that I'm doing wrong/You took the breath right out of me/Now you'll find it in the early hours/In a lover's song."

"I'm not denying that these songs have some relationship to my life -- they obviously do," Costello admits. "But there's an element of craft in writing songs which makes them accessible to other people. That is the point of them; otherwise you'd be singing to yourself. And the one thing I don't want is to make the experience of listening to this record predicated on knowing something about me. When you tie songs so rigidly to one person's experience, it stops them from operating as songs should -- to work on other people's imaginations and emotions."

In fact, he even left the title track ("You can ring those southern belles/I'm going North") off the album because it drew perhaps too clear a picture for listeners.

"It reinforced the personal identification with the songs past the point where I could say, 'This is not all about me -- it's about you, too,' " he explains. "If you include a song about Canada and your fiancee is Canadian, people assume all the songs have to be thought about in those terms.

"I wrote this light-hearted song about Canada, and it brought the house down when we played it in Montreal and Calgary. I think they even printed the lyrics in one of the papers. I was kind of thrilled that people took it on as if it was some sort of unofficial anthem, and it was meant in a good spirit, because I've always had a fine welcome in Canada. But I think with a song that has humourous overtones like that, the charm can wear off on repeated listening. (The song North will be made available on the Internet shortly.)

"Still, there is a wonderful feeling in finding a new type of song that I can do, after 25 years of singing about the darker side of everything," he adds. "That doesn't mean I've been relentlessly unhappy, either. Obviously I've had some happy moments! I've written a lot of dark songs because I believed that they made better material, and that I did it better than other people.

"But in these songs I found a way to say things that I've never been able to say before. All the details are not exactly how things happened, but I can tell you that this is a real feeling."

North also breaks new ground for Costello in the way the songs were written and recorded, and in their instrumentation -- they're piano-based, with low, softly sung vocals, strings, horns and virtually no guitar.

"I found myself writing the songs very quickly, and trying to make sense of all these musical ideas," Costello recalls. "I wrote late at night on the road, in dressing rooms, in hotel rooms and on the bus, singing to myself. Normally the process is to then raise their keys and find the right accompaniment to project the idea. But every attempt I made to do that would contradict their emotion, so I kept them in their original low keys.

"I think it's the warmest and gentlest part of my voice, 'cause when I get louder I get a lot of edges in it. This singing is close to speech, which heightens the personal, intimate nature of the songs. You know -- personal in the sense that it comes from within you, not necessarily that it's everything that you ever wanted to know about my life."

Right. Obviously it's difficult to conduct your relationship in front of the world, but hard to avoid when you're that horror of horrors, a celebrity couple. Costello and Krall have appeared in public together on several occasions, including at Willie Nelson's 70th birthday celebration, where all three collaborated on a version of Crazy (available on Nelson's recent Live & Kickin' album). But he declines to say whether he and Krall will work together in the future.

"When you share your life with somebody, you lend support to each other in many ways, and in your work as much as possible," he says. "But she doesn't need any help from me to make great records. We were asked at the ASCAP awards how things were different since we've been together, and she said, 'He's happier, and I'm angrier.' It was a funny way of getting out of answering, but it's also slightly true. There's a fire in her playing right now that might take people by surprise. I don't want to say anything about the record she's working on, but it's really thrilling stuff.

"At one concert, she did a version of my song Almost Blue, and a friend said afterward, 'Well, you don't have that one anymore!' I'll gladly give it up. There can't be anything better for a songwriter than to sit in the audience and hear their song interpreted so beautifully. But when you love that person and you get to go home with them, it's even better. I am a very lucky man." (More on Elvis Costello)

Posted by Post Master at 10:38 AM | Permalink

Hear EC interviewed by Simon Mayo for BBC Radio 2 on "The album Chart show" (broadcast on 15 September 2003). Requires realplayer.

The EC item is about 22 minutes into the show (just after the Human League), so you can safely skip the first 20 minutes.

This link works today (Sunday), but hurry to hear it as they'll broadcast another show tomorrow (22 September) and will update the link 'ere long so that it leads to a recording of that show.

(Submitted by Nick Ratcliffe)

Posted by Post Master at 10:35 AM | Permalink

An *approximate* set list is below. I think I've got all the songs, but the order is possibly a bit off.

I Hope You're Happy Now
Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)
Everyday I Write the Book
Beyond Belief
Radio Radio
Everybody's Crying Mercy
Clubland
Pump It Up
Either Side of the Same Town
Dust
Alison/Tears of a Clown/Suspicious Minds

ENCORE:
(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding

(Submitted by Nunki)

Posted by Post Master at 10:34 AM | Permalink

ELVIS COSTELLO - North (jazz)
Deutsche Grammophon är ett av de riktigt tunga skivbolagen inom klassisk musik, och den skiva som Elvis Costello släpper där har följaktligen väldigt lite med "This year"s model" att göra.
"North" är förvisso inte klassisk musik, även om arrangemangsmässiga drag finns där. Det är heller inte riktigt jazz, även om de djupblå stämningarna ofta talar det språket. Möjligen kan det ses som en vidareutveckling av den sida hos Costello som skrev "Almost blue", den som gjorde ett album ihop med Burt Bacharach och den som gjorde ett annat med Brodskykvartetten.
Men egentligen är "North" bara en serie avskalade och inkännande Costello-ballader, där en vuxen man tar ett sorgset pianot till hjälp för att berätta om vägen ur ett långt förhållande och in i ett nytt och de känslostormar som blåser upp under resan. Kanske inget för den mest reaktionära pub rockfalangen bland Costello-fansen, men den som lyssnar med öppnare öron och är beredd att ge "North" lite tid finner musik som både roar och helar.

Håkan Steen Publicerad: 2003-09-19 (Submitted by John Foyle)

Translation:
"ELVIS COSTELLO - North (jazz)

Deutsche Grammophon is one of the heavyweight classical music record companies, consequently Elvis Costellos new release on this label hasn´t got much to do with "This year´s model". Neither can "North" really be classified as classical music, even if some of the arrangements sounds classical here and there. It´s not really jazz either, even if the record shares it´s melancholy blue mood with the genre. The songs on "North" rather sounds like a natural development from the composer who wrote "Almost blue", and went on to write with both Burt Bacharach and The Brodsky Quartet. It´s best described as a series of naked and intense Costello-ballads, in which a grown man, aided by a blue piano, tells some tales of the journey out of a long relationship and into a new one, and all the emotinal turmoil during the journey. I shouldn´t think that there´s anything here for the most reactionary "pub-rock" crowd among Costellos fans, but if you´re willing to open up you mind and ears and give the album some time to grow, you´ll find music that amuses and heals."

Posted by Post Master at 06:39 PM | Permalink

Elvis Costello - North, 7/10

Aqueles que pousarem apenas à superfície de "North" dirão que se trata de um álbum aborrecido, pouco melódico e demasiado homogéneo. Puro engano: Costello constrói uma jóia mínima que, sob pena de não se apreciar devidamente a complexidade da escrita, tem de ser analisada à lupa, um disco em que não é a opulência da jóia mas sim a delicadeza da filigrana que encanta, com a voz - em surpreendente registo de contenção - a dar pequenas voltas, enleando-se como trepadeira pelas cordas da orquestra acima, a brincar em complexos jogos harmónicos com o piano (peça basilar do disco). À excepção da lascívia de "Impatience" (estupenda canção), "North" é, do princípio ao fim, um manifesto de sobriedade, elegância e bom gosto, em que a omnipresente orquestra parece emanar de dentro das canções, nunca se impondo à voz ou ao piano: se Sinatra tivesse hoje 50 anos e decidisse regravar "September of my years", "Fallen" e"Still" teriam de lá estar. "North" é um disco tocado pela graça - e Costello é um mestre absoluto dessa coisa promíscua e menor que salva vidas - a chamada música popular. João Bonifácio

(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 06:37 PM | Permalink

See an exclusive Elvis Costello live performance from the Museum of TV & Radio beamed via satellite to Virgin Megastores across the US

9/23, 8PM at the "A" stores
9/25, 8PM at the "B" stores

List of A&B Stores

Posted by Post Master at 06:35 PM | Permalink

Doing the math on Elvis Costello yields some remarkable figures: More than a quarter century and hundreds of compositions into his catalog, you can count the sweet, unbarbed, unremittingly positive love songs he's written on one hand and still have a digit left to "wish [someone] luck with a capital F" (to quote this month's Punch the Clock reissue).

Now comes North, a piano-based ballad cycle that instantly doubles the truly romantic original songs in his canon with an elated second half all about the initial flush of love; the dour first half more characteristically mourns a prior relationship's breakdown. (We can assume, despite his coyness in confessing, that this narrative mirrors his marital breakup and subsequent engagement to Diana Krall.) With Costello somewhat in let's-be-Frank mode, it's as if Capitol reissued the despairing Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely and ebullient Songs for Swingin' Lovers! on one disc.

Falling in love has some side effects-like reducing Costello's vocabulary to a once unthinkable minimalism, with no irony, punmanship, or even Lorenz Hartian wit in sight. Two tracks even take speechlessness as their topic: "Someone Took the Words Away" describes a repartee deficit in the waning days of (let's say) a marriage, while "Let Me Tell You About Her" explores conflicting urges to keep a new lover's confidence or kiss 'n' tell; both end with Costello shutting up and handing the ball to a jazz soloist (Lee Konitz on sax and Lew Soloff on flugelhorn, respectively). Exquisitely arranged orchestra and brass make unobtrusive interjections, rarely rising to overwhelm Steve Nieve's subdued piano figures or Costello's hushed confidences.

North is, in its latter stretches, a love letter, but not just to a certain jazz thrush. It also feels like a mash note to autumnal Manhattan, most explicitly in "I'm in the Mood Again," in which Costello, buzzed on love, spends the wee small hours walking off his high, watching papers being delivered on the empty city streets. A New York stricken by the September blues couldn't ask for a nicer get-well present.

A
-Chris Willman

Posted by Post Master at 08:22 PM | Permalink

The Guardian profile

Elvis Costello: Though fans applaud his musical courage, dedication and aversion to pigeonholes, critics have turned on the self-exiled Briton, savaging hislatest album, North. But the artist has scant regard for his detractors

EXCERPTS: "It has not been a good week for Elvis Costello. For a musician who quit Britain 13 years ago, the harsh reviews of his latest album, North, may have confirmed the decision to leave. While the Guardian's reviewer believed that "with every play the album becomes, like love itself, impossible to fight off", it was described elsewhere as "total agony". One Sunday paper's critic dripped alliterating bile: "pompous, pretentious ... this soporific pseudo-Sondheim sucks."

...Robert Wyatt, who sang his famous anti-war lyric Shipbuilding, praises
"the seriousness with which he applies himself to the cause of being a musician, he never seems to make do. "He seems to be a David Attenborough of music. He just explores every nook and cranny that intrigues him. "If he wants to try country music, he goes to Nashville. He's really brave. He wants some trumpet playing on his definitive Shipbuilding, he gets Chet Baker. "Rock people develop a Little Lord Fauntleroy front with their entourage and all that stuff. He just likes to write, he just loves music."

... Costello denies now that he was ever a "Khmer Rouge punk" who believed in a musical year zero, but there were moments of nihilism...Those who have worked with him say he is animated by a spirit of musical adventure. "Ever since I've known Elvis, more so in recent times, he's been one of the few people in the music world, that I've worked for who's able to give you some freedom," says Steve Nieve,the pianist on his 1977 hit Watching the Detectives as well as a collaborator on his latest album. "I was some 18-year-old student at the Royal College of Music. All through the time I've known Elvis, he was extremely interested in all kinds of music. "Having spent a year at one of the most prestigious musical establishments in England, I learned much more talking to Elvis about music."

...But critics felt that an artist who boasted of writing a song a day needed reining in. "He was too prolific," says Jim Irvin. "I just felt that he wanted editing. Sometimes his best song would be on B-sides. "It just seemed significant that you would get one of his records and think, 'Why isn't this song on the album?'"

...Costello, who now divides his time between Dublin and New York, has nothing but scorn for his detractors. In a telephone interview from New York, he says: "The latest furore is such bollocks. The truth is that every single time I do something different there's a small - and totally untalented - chorus of people who jump up and down and make a fuss about it: 'He's betrayed
himself.'

..."Five years later, the same people are kissing my arse about the same piece of work. My view is that they should go straight to the last page and mail in their apology now. "When people hide behind the safety of the byline, whether it's in the press or over the internet, it colours the way they express themselves ... it encourages them to say things they wouldn't say to your face. "A songwriter has to get up on stage and do it in front of people. If you have particularly strident or provocative opinions people will respond argumentatively, whether it's to leave the hall or throw things."

...There is, he says, "a rather unpleasant English personality trait ... that of being uncomfortable in the presence of clearly expressed emotion". He is reluctant to be drawn back into the discussion of why he is not writing about politics, but suggests that sweeping away of the old establishment has diminished the number of obvious targets. "I mean in the sense that there isn't an obviously repressive regime in England [anymore]." When he was younger, he feels there was "a divide between people in power and everybody else. "A whole class of people who had gone to public school together who were running the country, then there were the rest of us." Despite originating in a scene that made being against the grain fashionable, he insists he has never cared about trends."

=========================
FULL TEXT
The Guardian profile

Elvis Costello: Though fans applaud his musical courage, dedication and aversion to pigeonholes, critics have turned on the self-exiled Briton, savaging hislatest album, North. But the artist has scant regard for his detractors

Jeevan Vasagar - Friday September 19, 2003 - The Guardian

It has not been a good week for Elvis Costello. For a musician who quit Britain
13 years ago, the harsh reviews of his latest album, North, may have confirmed the decision to leave.

While the Guardian's reviewer believed that "with every play the album becomes, like love itself, impossible to fight off", it was described elsewhere as "total agony". One Sunday paper's critic dripped alliterating bile: "pompous,
pretentious ... this soporific pseudo-Sondheim sucks."

Then on Wednesday, on Radio 4's Today programme, a long interview was edited down to a few minutes of airtime asking why musicians like Costello, famous for his attacks on Thatcher and the Falklands war, were now ducking politics.

The British media seemed to be ganging up to savage both his musical worth and relevance of a singer who had outlived punk but now seemed to be flirting with every genre but the one for which he was first adored.

By the most commercial reckoning - Amazon's product listing "Customers
who bought this title also bought" - Costello is bracketed with a generation of thoughtful, energetic "alternative" music: the Clash, Talking Heads and
Squeeze.

But Costello has made a country album (Almost Blue) and collaborated with the
Brodsky Quartet to make classical music. Next month he plays in a festival of
"sacred music" at the Royal Festival Hall. With North he has released a set of Tony Bennett-style crooning love songs.

Admirers and those who have fallen out of love with him respect his eagerness
to fight his way out of pigeonholes, even if he does not carry all of his
fanbase with him.

Robert Wyatt, who sang his famous anti-war lyric Shipbuilding, praises
"the seriousness with which he applies himself to the cause of being a musician, he never seems to make do.

"He seems to be a David Attenborough of music. He just explores every nook
and cranny that intrigues him.

"If he wants to try country music, he goes to Nashville. He's really brave.
He wants some trumpet playing on his definitive Shipbuilding, he gets Chet
Baker.

"Rock people develop a Little Lord Fauntleroy front with their entourage
and all that stuff. He just likes to write, he just loves music."

Costello's dedication to the craft is what made him stand out from the punk
bands with which he was tagged, agrees Glenn Max, producer of contemporary
culture at the Royal Festival Hall and a Costello fan since he was a
schoolboy in the 1970s.

"I came from a very backwards place. Not far from New York City, but with
a very backwards mentality," he says.

"Elvis Costello was very alternative ... the thing was, to me punk seemed, most
of it seemed to be hype and media-manufactured.

"I was a kid in the 'burbs. Elvis Costello represented an alternative to the stupidity. He had the edginess of punk but had craft.

"I remember going to see Elvis in 1978 or 79 on the Armed Forces tour. The only person in the school I could find that would go with me was not really a friend but was derelict enough that he would come along."

Costello denies now that he was ever a "Khmer Rouge punk" who believed in a
musical year zero, but there were moments of nihilism.

The infamous low point was when, in a bar in America in 1979, he described Ray Charles as an "ignorant, blind nigger". He later described the remark as "speaking the exact opposite of my true beliefs in an attempt to
provoke a fight".

He was labelled a misogynist, too. "It's easy to read into those songs," says Jim
Irvin, a contributing editor to Mojo. "I'm prepared to believe he wasn't, but you can see why it happened.

"There was a lot of bile being directed at the second person in the song - 'you' is in for a hard time, and 'you' was assumed by the listener to be female."

But what the fans overlooked the flaws for was the music, as angular as the man himself, and the bitter wit of the lyrics, lines like:

I said 'I'm so happy I could die' She said 'drop dead' and left with another guy

In the 1980s the anger had a political focus, as with perhaps his harshest lyric, from Tramp the Dirt Down, a song dedicated to Margaret Thatcher. "There's one thing, I know, I'd like to live Long enough to savour That's when they finally put you in the ground I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

The fans were the alternative boys and girls, some who saw themselves in an awkward-looking computer programmer who called himself Elvis.

The literate lyrics, written by a man who picked up the guitar at 15 and left school a year later, have inevitably spawned book titles; Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is named for a Costello song, as is Brett Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. But that hip niche was one in which he says he never wanted to be placed, and he has done his best to escape.

Those who have worked with him say he is animated by a spirit of musical adventure. "Ever since I've known Elvis, more so in recent
times, he's been one of the few people in the music world, that I've worked for who's able to give you some freedom," says Steve Nieve,the pianist on his 1977 hit Watching the Detectives as well as a collaborator on his latest album.

"I was some 18-year-old student at the Royal College of Music. All through the time I've known Elvis, he was extremely interested in all kinds of music.

"Having spent a year at one of the most prestigious musical establishments in England, I learned much more talking to Elvis about music."

But critics felt that an artist who boasted of writing a song a day needed reining in. "He was too prolific," says Jim Irvin. "I just felt that he wanted editing. Sometimes his best song would be on B-sides.

"It just seemed significant that you would get one of his records and think, 'Why isn't this song on the album?'"

Costello, who now divides his time between Dublin and New York, has nothing but scorn for his detractors. In a telephone interview from New York, he says: "The latest furore is such bollocks. The truth is that every single time I do something different there's a small - and totally untalented - chorus of people who jump up and down and make a fuss about it: 'He's betrayed
himself.'

"Five years later, the same people are kissing my arse about the same piece of work. My view is that they should go straight to the last page and mail in their apology now. "When people hide behind the safety of the byline, whether it's in the press or over the internet, it colours the way they express themselves ... it encourages them to say things they wouldn't say to your face.

"A songwriter has to get up on stage and do it in front of people. If you have particularly strident or provocative opinions people will respond argumentatively, whether it's to leave the hall or throw things."

Despite saying he still feels love and attachment to such places as London and Liverpool, where he moved with his mother when he was a teenager, Costello has not lived in England for 13 years and says: "I knew from the moment I left that it was better not living in London."

The new album was written after the break-up of his 16-year marriage to songwriter and former Pogues member Cait O'Riordan and the start of a new relationship with the jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall. He hints that this is behind the critics' displeasure.

There is, he says, "a rather unpleasant English personality trait ... that of being
uncomfortable in the presence of clearly expressed emotion". He is reluctant to be drawn back into the discussion of why he is not writing about politics, but suggests that sweeping away of the old establishment has diminished the number of obvious targets.

"I mean in the sense that there isn't an obviously repressive regime in England [anymore]." When he was younger, he feels there was "a divide between people in power and everybody else.

"A whole class of people who had gone to public school together who were running the country, then there were the rest of us." Despite originating in a scene that made being against the grain fashionable, he insists he has
never cared about trends.

"I've never been fashionable," he says. "I still see people coming to the shows dressed like a version of me from 20 years ago. "That other people wanted to dress up like that was a problem for them and their tailor."

Life is short

Born Declan Patrick Aloysius in Paddington, London, August 25 1954

· Went to school in Hounslow before moving to
Liverpool, where his father was a singer and
played the trumpet

· Left school at 18 and worked in a bank and
then as a computer operator

· Began as a folk singer in Liverpool and then in
pubs in a band called Flip, which broke up in 1975.
Using his mother's maiden name, became Elvis
Costello and signed with Stiff Records in 1977

· His first hit was Watching the Detectives, his
live debut with the Attractions in July 1977.
Their debut album was Armed Forces. Produced
Oliver's Army, No 1 in the US

· During the 80s produced albums for the Specials,
Squeeze, Bluebells and the Pogues

· In 1996 he collected Q magazine's songwriter
award, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame this year

Elvis on his latest album: "It's the only record
I've ever made that aspired to beauty as the
prime objective."

Posted by Post Master at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As reported here first - all the original singles on new CDs with original packaging replicas - coming later this month.

Set 1
Set 2
Set 3

Posted by Post Master at 02:07 AM | Permalink

Elvis is doing a taping for the PBS show Soundstage on 9/26. More info, including info on tickets (expensive!) is on the site.
(Submitted by Adam Newman)

Posted by Post Master at 01:12 PM | Permalink

Accidents Will Happen / Pills & Soap / 45 / Man Out Of Time / Shot With His Own Gun

(Submitted by Chris Wright)

Posted by Post Master at 12:32 PM | Permalink

BBC review:

Ballads feature throughout Elvis Costello's output, from 1977's "Alison" and the lacrymose "Almost Blue", to his recent collaboration with Burt Bacharach. His latest project is a suite of eleven self-composed piano ballads, some of which are the kind one might expect to hear in a smoky jazz lounge, behind the clinking of glasses and the murmur of voices. But this is no jazz album. North was recorded at Avatar Studios and Nola Recording in New York City and is released on Deutsche Grammophon. Despite the posh label, though, it's no classical album either. It is, however, his most successful attempt to escape the rock idom.

Costello has set himself a tough task here. Many of his compositions are vocally challenging, with some tricky phrasing, and Elvis exposes himself more than usual through the sparse and formal arrangements. Nevertheless, he exquisitely weaves around his melodies, as a slick as glycerine, as tight and prickly as a pinecone. Those who found his vocal style on the Bacharach collection a little ear-splitting at times, will welcome his consistent and mostly contained baritone register on North: it's certainly some of Costello's best singing, on any record.

The highlights - "You Turned to Me", "Fallen", "Let Me Tell You About Her" - are delivered with a careful maturity and a grown-up voice and, compositionally, are streets ahead of his earlier work in this style. Elvis is accompanied on most of these, as ever, by his trusty lieutenant Steve Nieve and his grand piano although our man plays piano on two tracks). The remaining Attractions are replaced by Peter Erskine on drums and Mike Formanek on double bass. A forty-eight-piece ensemble of horns, strings and rhythm section provides the remaining instrumentation where necessary, the middle eights filled with soft
sax solos and muted trumpet parts, courtesy of soloists Lee Konitz and Lew Soloff. On "Still" he is reunited with The Brodsky Quartet, with whom he recorded the rather lacklustre Juliet Letters in the early Nineties. The reunion is altogether more auspicious.

"Someone Took The Words Away", which almost slips into The Stylistics' "You Make Me Feel Brand New" at it's opening line, turns out to be a beautiful heartfelt
song about getting tongue-tied. Not something Elvis would normally suffer from, one would think. "When Did I Stop Dreaming" is dark and brooding, as good as any Elvis tune in this mode. After a dramatic opening burst of strings, "Can You Be True?" is yet another terrific love song. In many ways, this is his most intimate collection. And all this with less than 12 bars of electric guitar on the entire record. North confirms Costello's position as one of the most
accomplished songwriters of the last thirty years.

Posted by Post Master at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Financial Times / By Richard Milne

Elvis Costello's first word was not "Mama" or "Daddy"
like normal mortals, but rather "skin". As in Frank
Sinatra's I've Got You Under My Skin. This tale was
just one of a series of nuggets served up by Costello
in this intimate nightclub show for BBC Radio 2's Sold
on Song programme.

Interspersing songs from throughout his career and
from beyond with mini-interviews with the husky-voiced
Mariella Frostrup about songwriting, Costello
demonstrated just how literate and eclectic a
performer he is. Those expecting an academic exercise
in quiet torch songs were swiftly disappointed as he
launched into "Accidents Will Happen" and a crunching
"45". Even his sartorial concession to the upmarket
venue - a rather dapper suit and shirt combo - was
soon broken as he loosened his tie.

As befits a man who has tackled everything from punk
to classical, the mood changed swiftly and often as
Costello flitted from one period to another. The songs
were all beautifully arranged, with classical
flourishes from Steve Nieve on the piano and the
Brodsky Quartet, but most revealing were the
dialogues.

"Songs will come to you, wake you up and tap you on
the shoulder," he said explaining the often late-night
genesis of his latest album North. This is among his
most emotionally honest, using sparse piano and his
own hushed baritone vocals to catalogue his
relationship with Canadian singer Diana Krall.
"Someone Took The Words Away" and "Fallen" sounded
particularly fine, with the latter being perhaps the
most romantic song ever written in Oldham.

But Costello also gave deep insights into his writing
in earlier times. The influence of narcotics - good
for songs, bad for life, it seems - was touched upon,
as was his use of the piano to surprise himself
melodically.

Ultimately, it was the strength of what came out of
this process that impressed, whether it was the highly
topical "Shipbuilding", written at the time of the
Falklands conflict, or a rollicking "Either Side Of
The Same Town". "Musical unfaithfulness", as Frostrup
described his career, has never sounded so appealing.

Café de Paris, London 'North' was released on Monday

(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 10:15 PM | Permalink

Elvis , it would seem , is in love. With marriage to
second wife ( ex-Pogue Cait) now behind him , the not
at all pompous high priest of pop is currently head
over heels with jazz singer Diana Krall. So, from
opener `You Left Me In The Dark` to closer `I`m In The
Mood Again` , this is a poetically versed collection
of emotionally bared songs gradually charting his
uplift in mood from hurt to hope , pain to bliss ,
`last hurrah` to `first bouquet`.

But be warned , it`s one of his `serious`albums .
Hence the Kronos Quartet and varied featured soloists.
Yes , `North` might involve new lyrical themes and
different musical drapes , but we`ve been here before.
To cut to the nub , Costello`s voice simply works best
when snapping and rasping and buried in brutal
imbroglio. Here , however , he does that oversinging
thing again - all epic , aching, soncerity and dubious
, jarring vibrato. It`s uncomfortable to listen to
and painful to endure. Of course , everything is
washed in the finest silken sounds : Steve Nieve`s
sensitive piano , the gently melodramatic strings , a
light wash of brush on drums and tenderly muted
trumpet. But always , always , there is that foghorn
bellow. Anyone tempted to purchase , should be
redirected towards classic Sinatra albums like `Songs
For Swinin` Lovers`, `In The Wee Small Hours` , `Only
The Lonely` or `Come Fly With Me`. They`re somewhat
cheaper and infinitely better. Already got them? Good.
Now rest assured , you don`t need this.

Ross Fortune.
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 10:10 PM | Permalink

Report from someone who was there:

"What an evening with the Radio 2 luvvies! Café de Paris is a swanky little niteclub, on Coventry Street (nowhere near Covent Garden as the Radio 2 website would have it). The guest list ran to several pages, far outnumbering the 50 lucky competition winners and their guests.

Missed out on the first round of champagne being offered, so we raced to one of the few unreserved tables on the ground floor. We were swiftly joined by Janice Long and friends who kindly included us in their conversation for the evening. Janice was star spotting for her mum; Phil Jupitus, Mark Lamarr, Jeremy Vine, Richard Allinson, (all Radio 2), Sue McGregor (Radio 4), Alan Yentob ("he knows loads about art") and many more BBC Radio managers and tecchies. David Puttnam (Film producer) and Steve Levine (Record producer) were also present. There were also a couple of minor acting celebs; including one lady who Janice wasn't sure if she was, "a nurse in 'Casualty' or the psycho from 'Hollyoaks'" ...

Free canapes, champagne and beer were server up until showtime and in the interval.

EC's set started at around 7:30pm and went on until the interval at 8:45pm. After the interval the show ran from 9:00pm to ~10:15pm. Husky voiced Mariella Frostrup acted as compere and interviewer and popped up frequently between songs. She seemed to have done her homework and got on well with a very talkative EC.

For all songs, except those with the Brodskys and those marked, EC played his Gibson semi-acoustic (with the now rather tatty yellow "Elvis" label). Steve played piano except with the Brodskys (I think!) and for the final two encore numbers.

1. Accidents
2. 45
Conversation with Mariella
3. Shot With His Own Gun (no guitar)
Conversation with Mariella
4. Someone Took The Words Away (no guitar)
5. Fallen (no guitar)
Conversation with Mariella
6. In The Darkest Place
7. Indoor Fireworks
Conversation with Mariella
8. Shipbuilding
Interval
9. Pills & Soap (w/ Brodskys)
10. My Mood Swings (w/ Brodskys)
Conversation with Mariella
11. Real Emotional Girl [Randy Newman] (w/ Brodskys)
Conversation with Mariella
12. Still (w/ Brodskys) ["first performance w/ Brodskys" as they recorded their contribution in London whilst North was being made]
13. The Birds Will Still Be Singing (w/ Brodskys)
Conversation with Mariella
14. Either Side Of Town [co-written with Jerry Ragavoy for Howard Tate]
Conversation with Mariella
15. Man Out Of Time
16. Deep Dark Truthful Mirror / You Really Got A Hold On Me

Encore #1
Milo hides Mariellas mic.
17. Peace Love & Understanding
18. Almost Blue [for the coda EC moves onto the piano whilst SN plays a little plastic piano-harmonica to Parisian effect]

Encore #2
19.I Still Miss Someone [Johnny Cash] (EC solo on piano)
20. I'm In The Mood Again (EC solo on piano)

And that's it. "Fantastic" as Janice would say!

A free "promo" CD was handed out to punters as they left; Card sleeve, with the "North" cover on the front and a Radio 2 style rear cover including details of "Sold On Song" producers and the Café de Paris event. "This CD is one of a special edition of 500 produced to mark the launch of Radio 2's Sold On Song, celebrating great songs & great songwriters on air, on line & on the road". The CD itself looks like a CD-R with a simple "Elvis Costello 4 track promotional CD" printed in black lettering on the label side.

Tracklist;
1. Still
2. Fallen
3. Someone Took The Words Away
4. When It Sings

The whole evening was well worth the TV Licence payers money!

(Submitted by John Martin on behalf of Richard Arthur)

Posted by Post Master at 04:21 PM | Permalink

By the end of tomorrow (Tuesday 18th) you can go to www.bbc.co.uk/soldonsong at watch excerpts from tonight's launch party concert with Elvis at the Café de Paris in London.

Then on 18th October Radio 2 will be broadcasting the concert. Fans not based in the UK can listen online, and don’t forget about the BBC Radio Player, which lets you listen to programmes online for a week after broadcast.

(Submitted by John Everingham of www.elviscostello.info)

Posted by Post Master at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Just back from the HMV signing.Elvis played four songs with just him on the piano. One was a Johnny Cash song that I can't remember the name of. He played "Still" and "I'm in the mood again" from the new album and at the end he played "Still" again saying that he wanted to play it without all the camera lights flashing in his face. He signed copies of the new cd for everyone who wanted it signed. I asked Elvis about the lack of "Elvis" dvd's there is to buy and suggested a live one would be great. He said "We've got plans for that". All in all a nice way to spend an afternoon in London. Cheers.
(Submitted by Michael Deasy)

Posted by Post Master at 11:58 AM | Permalink

Wondering how you'll come to buy all the EC albums again, for the 4th or 10th time, after the lastest set of re-re-releases are complete? Hopefully when they do them up like Columbia just did 15 Bob Dylan albums. With not only remastering, but SACD and in many cases 5.1 mixes on the same CD. (Like the recent Rolling Stone remasters). These 15 Dylan discs, spanning his entire career, and gaining jaw-dropping reviews for their sonic improvement, in all three modes - mono/stereo - SACD - 5.1. You can pick up the whole group in a limited edition boxed set for $225. No word yet on when the Elvis SACD/5.1 remixed re-re-re-re-remaster are due.

Posted by Post Master at 08:27 AM | Permalink

Another chat show, another transcript.

---------------
Full Text
---------------

J: Hello Elvis, I feel ridiculous calling you Elvis because it's a stage name really isn't it.

EC: Aah but you don't want to confuse the public. I'm quite pleased about the fact that people know my family name because it's good to keep hold of it.

R: What is it?

EC: McManus...Declan McManus. People come up to me in the street and say 'Hey Declan'.

J: Do they really?

EC: Yeah, but then I never answer them. They're not members of my family...maybe they are, following me around.

R: What do you think Trudy Stiler calls Sting? Sting?

J: I don't even know Sting's real name.

R: Oh, Gordon Summner.

J: She probably calls him Gordie.

R: I think she calls him Sting.

J: Let's get back to this American thing...(starts laughing at what a prick her husband is)

EC: you're off now aren't you...I'll just pretend I'm not here.

R: It's the first show back.

EC: Yeah I know, I can tell. You're very tanned.

R: Cornwall! You know what you (Judy) were asking about America...do popstars have summer holidays like the rest of us do in the summertime?

EC: We're working all the time.

R: Did you get away? I mean, do you have summer breaks?

EC: I've been on tour.

R: So you wouldn't say to your family 'For summer this year, I am..', because you don't work on that schedule.

EC: Summer time is a lot of touring.

J: Before we talk about your new album North, let's just talk a bit about your success in the States, because it's notoriously difficult to achieve, for British musicians anyway, to achieve any sort of success over there isn't it?

EC: So they tell me. But you've got to get it in proportion though. I don't sell a lot of albums, I don't have big chart successes, I've had a couple of hits, but I did do a tremendous amount of touring very early on, and I seem to have made people connect. The cultures a little bit different over there, it's a lot more diverse because the country's huge of course. You can be known in one town, but not known in another, or another state, and I'm getting to the point now where I am getting whole families coming.

R: Yeah, but if your in the Simpsons mate, if you get in that, that's it.

EC: Between that and Austin Powers, a lot of kids know me from that, but they don't necessarily go and buy my records.

R: What was the episode you were in? I've seen them all...I can't remember.

EC: You've seen them all?

R: Yeah, I honestly have seen them all, and so has my dear wife.

EC: It was one where Homer had to go to Rock'n'Roll camp...

R: Oh I remember.

EC: it was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Tom Petty, I looked particularly yellow.

J: He stole your glasses..

EC: He did steal my glasses yeah...."My image"...

R: And how long did you do Letterman for?

EC: Oh just the one night. David Letterman was taken sick, and they had a series of actors, Paul Schafer who's the musical director did it one night, and I think I was the only musician who did it. so I had to announce myself at the end of the show.

J: (laughs raucously) 'Ladies and gentleman...me!'

EC: It was literally, 'ladies and gentleman, me'. As you know, most programmes in England are hosted by someone called either Holland or Jools (they laugh). Back in the '60s pop singers all had their own shows, Cliff and Cilla and Lulu, and even Clode Rogers, Bobby Gentry, who's even been the guest on a couple of your shows. But it sort of ran out, light entertainment and pop music went different ways in 1977.

J: It was like a saturday night usual thing wasn't it.

EC: Yeah, but it doesn't happen now. So I kinda knew I could do it. I talk on stage, and I had a good monologue, a few friends and scriptwriters, including Mike Scully from The Simpsons gave me a joke, rang me up and said 'Why don't you say this.'

R: Excellent.

EC: So I had a few ringers in the scriptwriting team, and I just went out there and did my impersonation of Eric Morecambe.

J: (laughing) Actually your glasses are getting more and more like Eric Morecambe!

EC: I'm gettin more like Eric Morecambe. You know, I'm starting to look more and more like Phil Silvers.

J: You've actually met, and maybe even written for and performed with Johnny Cash haven't you?

EC: I met Johnny a couple of times yeah, his stepdaughter, June Carter's daughter, Jolene Carter was married to my friend Nick Lowe, who produced all my early records. So John and June came over and stayed with them in the late 70s/early 80s. We actually recorded a track together but thankfully it was never released because it wasn't very good. But meeting him was amazing, and when we recorded in Nashville in 1980, he had us come to his house and made us very welcome, it was almost like we were extended family because of this connection. Tremendously generous man, huge huge talent.

R: Cause of death then, was really 'having a good time' wasn't it? He had a really good time didn't he.

EC: Well he didn't go and suddenly repent, I mean he was a religious man, but he didn't repent in the sense of he didn't say 'I shouldn't have done all that'. He did what he did, and he with some consequences of that I suppose, but look what he achieved in that time.

R: We've got two clips to show, we've got 'Still', one of the tracks from North, the album. Just to sort of encapsulate the album, I'm generalising here, and I know you'll say it's not strictly this, it sort of charts your ascent from unhappiness and a broken marriage to happiness in a new relationship. That's kind of it isn't it?

EC: Well...it's certainly informed by my own experience, but I offer it to everyone else for themselves. It goes from a place of desolation, through all the little changes of love, bewilderment, even embarrassment, you know the first time you realise you're in love, and if you're out with someone... I never thought I would write a sing about when bore your friends by talking about the person you're in love with. There's something of the rapture of the first moments of it, and gradually little by little, a renewed sense of dedication. So by the end of the record it's gone from sombre to more joyful.

R: Where are you by 'Still'?

EC: I think if you listen to the lyrics you'll tell.'

'STILL' PLAYS

J: I went quite goosepimply for a minute there.

EC: That's good. Music is supposed to affect you, I don't mind. It's a very intimate record in the way it's recorded and I'm very proud of it.

J: You're going on tour aren't you?

EC: Yeah I'm starting, in fact, next week in New York, I'm touring with Steve Nieve, just the two of us, although that track features the Brodsky Quartet and some of the record features orchestration, which I wrote and conducted. The live tour is only going to be with piano, which is really intimate, and we're going to involve other songs which I've written, obviously not 'Oliver's Army' 'cos that's a rock'n'roll song. Other ballads I've written that people know, obviously the centre of the concerts is the songs from North. We go through New York, Japan...and I think there's 6 here, Glasgow and then..London

J: Manchester.

EC: Manchester.

R: Very quickly we must finish with a novelty item.

EC: Oh.

R: You once did a recording with your old man didn't you?

EC: I did, the only one I've ever done.

R: Okay...it was an advert...

EC: And he's here tonight!

R: Is he really?

EC: (laughing) No he's not, no.

J: Oh Richard!

R: Anyway.. I'm rusty..

EC: He's been on holiday.

R: Anyway here it is, you'll all know this one, it's your dad singing the lead, and you're in the background.

PLAY 'SECRET LEMONADE DRINKER' AD

R: I never knew your dad did that! Fantastic!

EC: I mean he sang with Joe Loss for 16 years, but he also did the commercials, and when I was about 17 he did that one.

R: Well everytime you open a fridge your head must go (says something like weep weep weep positive...i cant understand Richards fast voice very well)..so we thought we'd wipe the memories by having a special fridge like this.

(he opens a miniature fridge and it plays 'Watching the Detectives'')

R: That's yours!

EC: Thankyou. I'll cherish it always.

R: Don't strain your back.

J: Declan, Elvis, thankyou very much indeed.

R: Lovely to see you, it's been too long!

Posted by Post Master at 09:23 PM | Permalink

Someone who went to the radio station show taping reports, very enthusiastically, here.

Posted by Post Master at 01:10 PM | Permalink

ELVIS COSTELLO - North - Deutsche Grammophon

HOP, HOP, hop. See Elvis hop. Elvis hops across
genres. Twist, twist, twist. See the critic twist
uncomfortably in his chair, because he wants Elvis to
sell lots of records, but he can’t really recommend
North. Costello is one of the last artists still given
the freedom to make the music he wants to, so it’s
important that he’s successful enough to continue.
That said, North’s collection of slow piano ballads
hardly plays to his strengths. Lines that might
impress if buoyed up by a guitar racket — “I wasn’t
very conversational/Except to say that you’re
sensational” — sound strained here. Costello has
decided he’s a crooner. I’m not buying it. But I’d
like a few of you to do so. One star
MARK EDWARDS
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Elvis Costello, "North" (Deutsche Grammophon, Sept. 23) The alter ego to last year's rocking "When I Was Cruel," Costello's new album is an intimate chronicle of love lost and found (with fiancee Diana Krall) -- beautifully orchestrated and tenderly delivered. <here>

Posted by Post Master at 02:53 PM | Permalink

From the Grand Rapids Press, on Johnny Cash and EC's The Big Light:

"Bruce Parrott, news director at WLHT-FM has fond memories of meeting Jonny Cash in the Mid-1980s. "He was Playing at DeVos Hall, and I was working at WCUZ-FM and emcee-ing the show. " Parrott said. Elvis Costello's "King Of America" album had just come out, and, as I was standing next to him backstage, I said, "There's song on the new Elvis Costello album that you should do; it sounds like it was written for you."

Knowing he had to pick up Cash at his hotel the next day. Parrott says he copied the lyrics to the song and made a tape of it to give to the singer. "Two months later, I got a letter from Cash thanking me and telling me that he had recorded "The Big Light" for his album "Johnny Cash is Coming to Town." Parrott said.

The next time he came to grand Rapids, which was about two years later, he did that song onstage at DeVos and dedicated it to me" He said Proudly."
(Submitted by James Bleeker)

Posted by Post Master at 12:57 AM | Permalink

Elvis Costello - North - Deutsche Grammophon

"Twenty-four albums in 26 years and still no sign that our Elvis is running out of puff. Taking off at a sharp tangent from his rocking 2002 collection When I Was Cruel, this year's model finds him behind a piano singing the kind of ballads his mum and dad might have smooched along to when they were stepping out. Fifty-odd years later, their son has done everybody proud. Writing and arranging all the songs himself and even waving a baton in front of a 48-piece orchestra on a few tracks, this is Costello at his most impressive - for better or worse, according to taste.

North sustains a mood of languorous romantic reverie quite brilliantly – so brilliantly in fact that the songs tend to blur into one long sequence of
tastefully chosen jazz chords: only Someone Took the Words Away and the closer I'm in the Mood Again leave a strong melodic trace. A similar conundrum surrounds his perfectly pitched vocal performance. Costello has
the moves down pat, but that nasal twang, which works so well in front of a rock band, suffers a bit here from over-exposure." - Robert Sandall

Posted by Post Master at 02:45 PM | Permalink

Very Interesting article on songwriting, with brief EC appearance.

Excerpt: "So then we have to ask: are we talking great individual moments or an impressively deep catalogue? I asked Elvis Costello recently how we should judge great songwriters. He argued that one great moment could be enough. Can this hold? Well, Percy Sledge, who co-wrote When a Man Loves a Woman and is pretty much known only for that moment, might say yes.

...big chunk skipped here...

Nonetheless, Costello is a prime example of why the argument for longevity of quality holds greater sway. Any discussion of who are the best modern songwriters throws up some key names, all of whom have been writing and releasing music for more than a decade, or even more than two.

Costello began as a wordy country/rock singer in 1977 and, since then, has consistently produced the highest standard of musical and lyrical output across pop, country, rock, soul and, more recently, classical music.

Along with Costello, you could name Nick Cave, who began as a gothic punk in 1978 but become one of our finest ballad writers in the past decade; Texan country writer Lyle Lovett, who, like Costello, is a master of both melody and lyric; and Bruce Springsteen, who has few peers for his ability to capture the conflicted soul of America.

At least as high would be Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, who are possibly the finest lyricists today. Williams has a poet's ear and a sensualist's soul, while Earle's leaning towards the storytelling tradition is flavoured by a short-story writer's lean prose and eye for detail. Though sometimes erroneously called alternative country writers, their songs are not genre songs and they cross boundaries effortlessly."

-------------
full text
------------
The Dylans and Lennons of our age are out there, but they'll never be household names, writes Bernard Zuel.

It sounded easy enough really: tell us who today are the great songwriters of the age, titles once held by the likes of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. However, working out how to work that out is more than half the battle.

What are the objective measures for greatness? For example, do you consider sales as a criterion? If so, Dianne Warren and Max Martin must rank highly. Although little known or feted outside the industry, Warren is probably the most successful songwriter of the past 20 years, with scores of international top-10 hits across pop, country and R&B charts. As well as being the backbone of Celine Dion's career, she has written No. 1 hits for, among many, Christina Aguilera, Bad English, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill and Cher.

Martin, and the Swedish songwriting/production factory that he has set up, have been the prime force behind pop music since the middle of the '90s. Like Stock, Aitken and Waterman a decade before them, Martin and his crew work on a strict formula that emphasises accessibility, instant sex appeal and a smooth link between hip-hop and pop. It has worked for *NSync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and even Bryan Adams and Dion. It has also worked for millions of music buyers.

advertisement

advertisement

Of course, money-spinning writers such as Martin and Warren are universally derided by music critics as creators of formulaic, emotionally empty songs. The argument is that anyone could have written one of their songs, in the sense that the personality of those songs have nothing to do with Warren or Martin.

To my mind, the distance between Warren and Martin and their songs takes them out of the realm of great songs and places them in the category of great pieces of craft and skill. They are the workaday architects of music - they can tailor a song to your needs but they can never give you something that comes from their heart and enters yours. In other words, they are artisans not artists.

Some argue that the process, rather than the pulse, also wins in the work of R&B producer/writer teams such as Timbaland (aka Tim Mosley) and Missy Elliott and the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). Both pairs have contributed some of the best songs recorded by modern pop figures such as Spears, Justin Timberlake, Aaliyah, Elliott herself, Michael Jackson and Beyonce Knowles.

Certainly, they appear to be more geared to rhythm and construction of beats than melody, structure and lyrical meaning, but they have put together some of the most innovative sounds and irresistible tunes of the past five years, drawing on soul, funk, pop, rock and hip-hop. Why should they be excluded, particularly when, given that hip-hop and R&B have been the basis of pop music in the past decade, their influence is massive?

Which brings us to another possible criterion: influence. Even if you believe he was not a technically great writer, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was probably the most significant rock songwriter of the past decade. His style - cribbed from pop and punk as much as '70s hard rock - and the fact he got that style onto radio, television and the charts, either inspired or made possible much of the past decade's rock.

Likewise, the combination in Public Enemy of rapper Chuck D and the music production/construction crew the Bomb Squad was probably the most important non-rock/pop writing team of recent years. Chuck D's political and social activism created the template for modern rapping; the Bomb Squad's sonic palette did something similar for production.

Realistically, though, influence is a related but separate issue and it might be too early to say if the relatively short careers of Timbaland, Elliott and the Neptunes are enough to put them at the top.

So then we have to ask: are we talking great individual moments or an impressively deep catalogue? I asked Elvis Costello recently how we should judge great songwriters. He argued that one great moment could be enough. Can this hold? Well, Percy Sledge, who co-wrote When a Man Loves a Woman and is pretty much known only for that moment, might say yes.

But surely we should look for more evidence than one, possibly fluked, moment? The idea that we should look at quality over a long period as the mark of a great songwriter sounds reasonable at first. In sporting terms, it's the career average that matters rather than one glorious season (or album). The argument goes: give him 10 years, see if he can keep it up.

Yet look at the songwriters we call the greats of the '60s and '70s. Dylan, Lennon, McCartney and Wilson did much, if not all, of their greatest work in the intense seven or eight years before they turned 30.

Depending on your fondness for jazz, Mitchell could be said to have had a decade of consistent brilliance, while Burt Bacharach and Hal David, possibly the finest songwriting pairing of the postwar years, lasted only a decade.

And, while, like Dylan, Bacharach had a stunning comeback (in partnership with Costello) in the mid-'90s, it is his work during the '60s that marks him as a genius.

Nonetheless, Costello is a prime example of why the argument for longevity of quality holds greater sway. Any discussion of who are the best modern songwriters throws up some key names, all of whom have been writing and releasing music for more than a decade, or even more than two.

Costello began as a wordy country/rock singer in 1977 and, since then, has consistently produced the highest standard of musical and lyrical output across pop, country, rock, soul and, more recently, classical music.

Along with Costello, you could name Nick Cave, who began as a gothic punk in 1978 but become one of our finest ballad writers in the past decade; Texan country writer Lyle Lovett, who, like Costello, is a master of both melody and lyric; and Bruce Springsteen, who has few peers for his ability to capture the conflicted soul of America.

At least as high would be Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, who are possibly the finest lyricists today. Williams has a poet's ear and a sensualist's soul, while Earle's leaning towards the storytelling tradition is flavoured by a short-story writer's lean prose and eye for detail. Though sometimes erroneously called alternative country writers, their songs are not genre songs and they cross boundaries effortlessly.

Who might be working their way to that status? Ron Sexsmith, Aimee Mann, Ryan Adams, Julie Miller and Jeff Tweedy all have strong claims and a solid body of work behind them already. (Of interest, for another day maybe, is the fact that none of these is British and only Costello of the older guard is from the sceptred isle. Where have the great British songwriters gone?)

At this point, it might be clear that some, and maybe all, of these names mean little to you and your friends, or are, at best, marginal figures in the public's understanding of the music industry. If they are that good and that significant, why aren't they as central to the charts and people's lives as the great figures of the '60s and '70s?

What we have to acknowledge is that we might never again have circumstances where individual songwriters have as much impact and influence as they did in the 1960s. It has little to do with quality and more to do with the fact that today's record industry is so large, so spread out and so diverse that for any artist to have an impact across the board requires a combination of events that is almost impossible to imagine.

Remember, you had one chart in 1965. Today, you can have a dozen charts. And, while top 40 radio dominated the airwaves then, now you could listen to the radio all day, every day, and not have the faintest idea who is on the charts, or who is selling to someone outside your demographic.

So, it might well be that today there are songwriters of equal standing with the greats of the past. I would argue there are. But, with dissipated music industry influence, wide diversity in options and tastes, and the evacuation of many fine writers to the fringes, the chance of there being anything like a consensus on who they are is small and likely to get smaller.

Posted by Post Master at 02:39 PM | Permalink

BBC Radio appearance with Steve Nieve earlier today.
Read the Transcript - Listen Online
(Submitted by John Foyle)

----------------
Full Transcript
----------------
JR = Jonathon Ross, host
A = Andy, co-host/producer
EC = no prizes for guessing who
SN = one and only Professor Steve Nieve

JR: We have with us Mr Elvis Costello and Mr Steve Nieve, we couldn't be happier. It's always a treat when talent of such magnitude comes in.

A: Yeah.

JR: You know, without blowing his trumpet, unnecessarily...shall i start again. that's an unwieldy phrase and there's only men in the room, it all sounds a bit...

A: Slightly awkward.

JR: It all sounds a bit dutch. What I mean to say is, I think, one of the most talented singer-songwriters of the last twenty/thirty years, no doubt about it, you know? HUGE talent, sitting right here now.

A: Yeah.

JR: And lost a bit of weight, so not as huge as the last time we saw him (EC laughs). Elvis it's great to have you back though, and congratulations on the new album.

EC: Thankyou.

JR: We played a track earlier (they played When Green Eyes Turn Blue), beautiful.

EC: Thankyou very much.

JR: Who's produced this?

EC: I produced it with Kevin Killen.

JR: Sounds great.

EC: Thankyou.

JR: So now what's the decision here, where you do...the last album was kind of a return to rock'n'roll form I guess. It was the standard setup we know from a rock'n'roll combo unit. This time it's you, piano, some orchestration on some of the tracks, but others sort of stripped down to the bone. What prompts you? What steers you in that direction?

EC: A group of songs that just wouldn't be denied. You know? I was writing them as fast as I could get them down, and didn't know I was making a record, just thought I was writing some songs. We were on the road actually, with the Imposters, after When I Was Cruel came out as you say, and towards the end of last year, sort of late September, we were in the last stage of a world tour touring America for the second time. We were doing two and a half hour shows, the most ferocious shows I think that band has done.

JR: I'm surprised that Pete Thomas, on drums of course, survived! Man of his age, when you get to some of those faster tracks! (EC laughs) You know, I saw, he did, he got very red in the face. I thought 'That's it..get me a defibrulator!'

EC: He was doing pretty good, I have to say.

JR: But that must be exhausting for all of you, doing that kind of tour?

EC: Yeah, we're pretty..you know, you can get stronger in certain key ways Jonathon. I'm sure you know.

JR: (laughing) As you get older.

EC: I have hidden strengths... anyway these songs were coming to me, and they were waking me up at night. So, sometimes you put songs aside, and you let them, you know, sort of, rattle around the head till you get the lines that finish them, other times it's essential, and that was the case with these ones. So by new years day I had a group of songs, and I took a little step back and I realised that that was the next record.

JR: And how do you compose? Do you conmpose on guitar, or at the piano?

EC: These particular ones were all written on the piano, which is...Steve is here thankfully, you know it's not an instrument I really truthfully play, but it's an instrument I can compose using.

JR: But you pick out the chords I guess?

EC: Oh, I can hear a lot of stuff. I did all the orchestration on the record as well, so I can hear complicated stuff, I just don't have technique as a pianist. I can play when nobody's looking.

JR: But you wouldn't wanna do it live?

EC: I do occasionally play piano on stage, but we thought for you we'd bring Steve in from Paris.

JR: And then we have Steve laughing by the side when you're on stage.

EC: Yeah.

SN: I think he's being very modest because he's got very particular piano style, Mr Costello.

JR: And what grade would you put him at in the piano grading? (everyone
laughs) I've got my number 1 coming up soon.

SN: I'd put him pretty highly up there actually.

JR: What, four? Five?

SN: Much higher than that.

JR: Can he cite read?

SN: I don't think...

A: He's in the room, you could ask him!

JR: No, no, we'll talk about him as if he weren't. (EC laughs) You know in the old days when you used to talk about...

EC: I can't actually cite read. I learned to read music down about ten years ago, and that helped me be able to communicate to people who only get their information off the page. But we do a lot of stuff..

JR: People like Steve, who are almost autistic. (EC laughs) But you went back to college to learn, didn't you?

EC: No I didn't, no, I just had a friend who got me... I had a mental block about that, all that F A C E stuff you know, that they teach you at school, and I just never learnt it properly. Once I learnt it, it just becomes another way to communicate. Sometimes you show people, sometimes you write it down, that's as simple as that. It's just code, it's only code.

JR: Yeah. Yeah but it is quite tough to master isn't it? When you're playing, is your left hand weaker than your right hand?

EC: No, my left hand is much stronger 'cos I'm left handed.

JR: So you're more of a boogie woogie?

EC: Err yes.

JR: But thankfully you don't play that. Isn't it about time Jools Holland got the message? (everyone laughs) We don't wanna hear it anymore! When's the last time you thought 'You know what I want? Some good old boogie woogie. Where's my Jools Holland album'? (everyone laughs). I won't draw you on that.

EC: (laughing) Yes.

JR: These are very personal songs though aren't they?

EC: They are yeah, I think they come...all songs are personal though aren't they? They all come out of your head.

JR: But these seem more so than others.

EC: Yeah, I think there's no denying that. They are... I wrote them in these low keys, and sometimes when you write songs late at night, you're singing to yourself but imagining a much louder sound. With these I didn't, I was imagining the sound of this record, orchestra and everything, while I was writing them. I kept them close to me, they're very direct lyrically, they're not... there's no irony, no kinda games with words, no disguises. So what you hear is what they're saying.

JR: But that's interesting, because that's one of the things that, as a lyricist, has always marked you. The fact that you've always been brilliant with words, you've always had the ability to create situations, set up puns, and ironic asides and comments and write about things...

EC: Thankyou. There's also...yeah...also, one is I've done it a lot, and two is some of those devices, there appeal is somewhat juvenile.

JR: Of course. That's why we love 'em!

EC: (laughs) But these are, in the words of Muddy Waters, 'I'm a full grown man'.

JR: Well, yeah, that's it. What we're gonna do is play you a bit of music, go the news, after we can chat some more and then we'll give you a chance to warm up your fingers Steve, we're gonna insist that you do the playing today, and that'll all be happening after this.

THEY PLAY BEN FOLDS GREAT VERSION OF THE CURE'S 'IN BETWEEN DAYS', THEN TO THE 11AM NEWS, THEN PLAY THE SPECIALS 'HEY LITTLE RICH GIRL'

JR: That's The Specials. That was a great time, when people were making that music and you guys were rocking out. What a great time. Do you remember it fondly? When was that, early 80's I guess? 81/82?

EC: Err the first Specials record was 1980 I think, I produced it.

JR: I forgot you produced it! Yeah...I remember it being quite bad.

EC: Down under... in a basement under a launderette in Fulham Road.

JR: But it can't be hard producing an album, can it? You just say 'Off you go fellas' and record it don't you?

EC: I can't remember. I think that's why I did it actually.

JR: That's how Nick Lowe did all your early stuff, 'You sing over there and I'll put it on tape'.

EC: 'And I'll drink some Bliue Nun'

JR: Yeah, exactly...class act. Erm, are you friendly with Nick Lowe still?

EC: Oh God, yeah yeah yeah, I don't see him though as often as I'd like. Last time I saw him it was halfway up a mountain in Japan. We palyed the Fuji rock festival, and when we got there, there was a rather bewildered looking chap in a mac, and it was Nick. He'd played earlier in the day, and I think he was quite pleased to see us turn up.

JR: He does have a sort of bewildered air about him these days doens't he? I think it's just being sober for a while must do that to him.

EC: I think it's just finding yourself there, and people that here him they go 'How is this guy not incredibly famous, 'cos he's written all these amazing songs, produced all these amazing records. Half the new rock'n'roll groups in America want him to be producer and he's just not interested, because I guess he doesn't feel that kind of music.

JR: Yeah, but he is a HUGE talent, and when he preforms he's great of course. Er, can I ask you a question? Do you think I'm being temperamental at all by insisting on new lighting here?

EC: (laughing) New lighting? Yes, it's angle poise.

JR: Look at this you see? Steve's forced to play piano over there with an old angle poise. He looks like he's in the corner of a pub!

EC: An old angle poise yes. It's come down, it's definetely from the Hugh Carlton Green era that lighting.

JR: Well this is what I'm talking about. I feel embarassed to welcome our guests in. It's like it's shabby. I'm sitting on a chair with a hole in, you're standing, and you're sitting at a piano with a lamp you can barely see your fingers.

EC: I used to like coming to the BBC, because they always used to have some of that water from when Winston Churchill was here.

JR: (laughing) Mixed with Churchill's phlegm.

EC: (laughing) Nice bit of dust on the BBC water.

JR: Little bit of Legionnaires disease knockin 'round here still. You're gonna play from the album now, let me just ask you something. Do you think this is one of those albums which when I listen to it, I listen to it from start to finish in the order it appears in. Although we played a track earlier, and we took it out and it sounded great. But I think it benefits this album from listening to in that order. More so than most albums.

EC: I think when you're alone with it, or with someone you like to listen with, I think it will work. Because it does, I didn't realise this when I was writing it, but it sort of tells a kind of story. It starts out in a sort of desolate place, and gradually gets more towards joy.

JR: It's warmer yeah.

EC: Yeah. It's all about... all the songs are about love, but as we know there are different facets to that story. Sometimes when you have feelings you don't admit them to yourselves, and you know, you're bewildered by them, and little by little you have to except your own failures and joy can enter your life when you least expect it. That's sort of what the songs sing about, so if you here a song in isolation, one of the darker songs might sound really bereft, but that doesn't mean that people might not see themselves in them. People are having all sorts of experiences at different parts of their life, they're in different parts of... even a relationship. So I wrote them for other people to hear as much as they're personal to me. I'm looking forward to performing the songs in concert because we've got a decision to make. Whether we do perform them in sequence, because I didn't sit down and say 'I'm going to write a sequence, a song cycle or something'. I just wrote it as they were songs then realised they fitted together and it can be heard in that way, but we'll just sing one of them now.

JR: Yeah, it does seem to me that listening to it, if you do listen to it in sequence as you said, it's like you're going on a journey. There's an emotional journey.

EC: Definetely. Just saying that doesn't make it grandiose...it's just truthful, and I'm proud of it, in the directness of the words, and there are some joyful moments in it. There's even a bit, when people fall in love they often realise realise that they make themselves seem ridiculous because they never stop talking about it, you know, it's their only topic of conversation, and there's a song called 'Let Me Tell You About It' that talks about that. So it's not all intense in the most melnacholy aspects, there are different sort of moods in each song.

JR: There's light and shade.

EC: I hope so.

JR: You're going to play which track for us now, and where does abouts that fall in the album?

EC: This is where the album starts to look into the more optimistic view, it's a song called Still, and really I don't think I should say what it is, I should just sing it shouldn't I?

JR: Let's do it then...

'STILL' IS PERFORMED

JR: As I said, far too classy for this show! That sounded great.

EC: Thankyou.

JR: And Steve, congratulations, those lessons are paying off. (SN laughs) I'm really looking forward to growing with this album, to playing it more. It's one of those albums that I think you have to listen to a number of times, it's not the most immediate album. It is delightful...

EC: Well there's a world where we live in, where everything is screaming and shouting for attention, whereas we made a record where we are trying to draw people into it, and I hope that they can spend a lot of time like you say. Too many records you wanna throw them out the window, they might be attractive at first and then they're maddening aren't they. So we're trying to do a different thing.

JR: But is it a less commercial venture something like this, do you feel?

EC: I don't necessarily think so. The history of my records tells me that all my biggest hits have been with ballads. I didn't make it because of that, over the years I've had more success with ballads than rock'n'roll, though I may be known for it. People...a small critical chorus in this country gets highly excited, you know it's mainly men in their late thirties who live alone with a cat and don't know any women, and I don't mean to say that they're gay, you know, who write for music papers, tend to get very..kind of..rather..perspiring when we make a rock'n'roll record. When you address a record like this perhaps, to all of humanity that will listen, you just don't know what's gonna happen. I think if you do something you believe in and it's in your heart, you really can't go wrong.

JR: Yeah. I always love hearing ballads though, I love people singing about emotions. I love Charles Aznavour and people like that.

EC: I had a hit with one of his songs you know.

JR: Of Course you did, and you murdered it.

EC: I've been trying to live it down ever since (laughing).

JR: (does EC impression) Sheeeeeeee. That was the one I remember.

EC: Richard Curtis, who you know, asked me to do that for Notting Hill, actually said 'I'm going to ruin your reputation'.

SN: Came close.

JR: OK, Elvis, you and me know, we'll do 'She' together. Come onnn..one, two, three...(both sing Sheeeeee) People in France tuning out.

EC: (laughing) People in France can probably here you, what are you talking about!?

JR: The album it's a tremendous...it's what critics would say is a mature piece of work. That's what people say about it.

EC: I don't think mature...mature always sounds like cheese to me, it's adult, it's adult music. You know, I'm 49, and I'm an adult and I don't have any embarassement about that. It's real emotion, there's real stuff in it, whether it's your life or mine or somebody elses. It's not a grandiose thing, it's not an art record that nobody can understand, the lyrics are very direct, the tunes as you can hear are comprehensible and I hope memorable.

JR: It's interesting because ballads tend to be about emotions and more complex issues. Rock'n'roll and R'n'B and stuff that tend to be about sex. Did you thing about putting a bonus track on here, you know like 'Booty, booty, booty'?

EC: Actually you know I think they have done in Europe (laughs).

JR: 'I've been through the journey, now I'm gonna get me some good stuff!'

EC: Yeah, I think that only comes out in certain territories or through specific internet sites.

JR: I'd like a copy of that.

EC: Meet Ukranian girls.

JR: I know the ones you mean. I'm delighted you came on the show, thankyou so much again. Steve, it's always lovely to see you. Elvis, you sounded great, you're voice seems to be getting better as you get older.

EC: I hope so.

JR: Which is a great thing.

EC: Yeah Im enjoying singing, and I really love singing these songs. They feel like something as you sing them, I don't ever drift away as I'm singing them you know?

JR: May I also congratulate you on your new glasses.

Ec: New glasses.

JR: Look at that.. there's a bit in the middle, which is alarming at first 'cos you think soemthings fallen out, then you realise it's a design feature.

EC: (laughing) That's my nose!

JR: (laughing) You do sometimes look like as if you take the glasses off the nose will come with them.

EC: That's the size of it yeah, it's a big target!

JR: Well, with Steve as well, it's two of the biggest noses in show- business, and mines getting bigger!

EC: Have you ever seen us and Pete Townsend in the same room?

JR: The three of us together could make a Jimmy Durante competition, or WC Fields, what a marvellous lineup! For ladies who like the bigger nose, this is the place to be! (everyone laughs) Andy look at your tiy little nose!

A: I'm out of pace!

JR: You know what they say, big nose, big........glasses rest (everyone laughs). Elvis thanks for coming in, lovely to see you. Steve take care and best of luck with this album, I'm sure it'll do well. I'm certainly glad you made it whether it sells a lot or not.

EC: Yeah so am I, that's the way it is.

JR: And it's also beautiful packaging...even better!

EC: Thankyou.

Posted by Post Master at 02:36 PM | Permalink

From Elvis Costello: "I'm saddened and very sorry for all Johnny's family. He was a great, great man. He made me feel very welcome in his home and I will never forget that."

Quotes below are from The Essential Johnny Cash CD-jacket.

There's nobody remotely like him.
-- Elvis Costello

God is not making any more.
-- Nick Lowe

When Johnny Cash comes on the radio, no one changes the station.
-- Tom Waits

Locusts and honey ... not since John The Baptist has there been a voice like that crying in the wilderness. ... Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.
-- Bono

Posted by Post Master at 10:26 AM | Permalink

Andy Gill (author of several great Dylan books) looks at North in the Independent:

"Elvis Costello can be his own worst enemy - or at least, that part of his personality that keeps pushing him into fringe endeavours can be. Clearly unsatisfied with being one of rock's leading singer-songwriters, little over a year after the splendidly waspish When I Was Cruel, he's off into the backwaters again for North, an album of torch songs that plays as resolutely to his weaknesses as previous incongruencesDeep Dead Blue and The Juliet Letters, his collaborations with Bill Frisell and The Brodsky Quartet respectively. The latter appear again here, though the musical backbone of the album is supplied by the drummer Peter Erskine, the bassist Mike Formanek and the Attractions pianist Steve Nieve, whose achingly poignant playing on tracks such as "You Turned To Me" furnishes the set's best moments. Alongside this core group are horns, vibes and a platoon of strings, caressing Costello's brooding laments and melancholy reflections, which would be fine were they employed in the service of a better singer. His habit of sharping notes, rather than flatting them like blues singers, gives the impression that he's straining beyond his range, a distraction that spoils most performances, leaving the likes of Lee Konitz to rescue a track such as "Someone Took The Words Away" with a contemplative sax solo. And Costello's writing here seems mannered and awkward: if you're going to claim "all the words you say to me/ have music in them" as he does in "When It Sings", it's perhaps best not to have the subsequent two lines rhyme the harshly unmusical "prism" and "magnetism". "

Posted by Post Master at 10:10 AM | Permalink

The London Times doesn't want to go North

ELVIS COSTELLO - North (Deutsche Grammophon) (1/5 stars)

WITH typically breathtaking audacity, Elvis Costello has recast himself in the role of a jazz supper-club singer on North. Rather than do a Robbie and cover Rat Pack standards, he has written his own collection of ersatz piano ballads and orchestral torch songs. They are a pretentious, ponderous homage to a bygone era, rendered in deadly earnest. It rings sadly hollow. - David Sinclair
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 10:05 AM | Permalink

The Guardian gives North 4 out of 5 stars today:
"Long-time Costello watchers who welcomed the return of the old bile-spewing Elvis with last year's When I Was Cruel will be spitting with rage at North.
It's an album of crooned love songs in a similar orchestrated style to Nat King Cole. However, from 1981's country Almost Blue to 1999's Burt Bacharach collaboration, Painted From Memory, Elvis has constantly confounded his own followers' expectations.

These 11 songs loosely document the breakup of his marriage to ex-punk Cait O'Riordan and engagement to jazz sophisticate Diana Krall, from dark despondency towards what initially sounds like cloying sentimentality.

The 48-year-old singer seems as alarmed as anybody, lacing the particularly gooey Let Me Tell You About Her with hilarious lines that debunk the notion of Costello as lover, not fighter. However, with every play the album becomes, like love itself, impossible to fight off - an irony that must amuse the lingering subversive in Costello no end. "

Order North - w/ Bonus DVD - @ Amazon.com

Posted by Post Master at 09:50 AM | Permalink

Posted by Post Master at 07:14 AM | Permalink

Elvis asked me to ask you to read this. And/or this.

Posted by Post Master at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You can finally stop screaming 'Coal Train Robberies' at the top of your lungs from row 'KK'. Just log in here and Elvis will play whatever you want.

Posted by Post Master at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Glenn Tilbrook in Billboard, on his solo career and writing with Elvis again.

Excerpt:"I'm still writing for the record, and I still want to do some songs with other people," he says. "Elvis Costello has said he'll do a song with me, and I, rather stupidly, haven't done anything about that yet, but I will. He is brilliant. And he's a very nice man and I would like to write something with him."

====================
Full Text
====================

Tilbrook Plans Second Solo Set

Glenn Tilbrook has begun recording songs for his second solo album, which he hopes to release in the spring. The former Squeeze singer/guitarist recently recorded several songs in a Nashville studio during a break on his just completed seven-week U.S. club tour in support of his 2001 set, "The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook."

In Music City, Tilbrook linked with friend/Dash Rip Rock drummer Bill Davis, "who put together a band of some other guys who were fantastic," he tells Billboard.com. "We worked really hard for five days, recorded for three-and-a-half, and I've got eight songs. Considering that 'The Incomplete' took me a year of assing about, to go in and do it that fast is amazing."

Tilbrook issued "The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook" through his own Quixotic Records label. In the U.S., the set was distributed through Colorado-based What Are Records? For his second solo venture, Tilbrook has recorded some of his own material and songs written with his former Squeeze writing partner Chris Difford, as well as Chris Braide and Steve Poltz.

"The Steve Poltz thing is quite surreal, but I like that, because it's not a place that I go to normally," Tilbrook says. "I gave him a title that, actually, Aimee [Mann] had come up with it for a bandname: 'Hot Shaved Asian Teens.' It's such an unlikely song title and, not in an at all straightforward way, I like what it can conjure up. [Poltz] made it very, very evocative."

Tilbrook has also covered the humorous song "The Genitalia of a Fool" by the Cornell Hurd Band. "I'd never been aware of them before," explains Tilbrook, who stumbled upon one of their shows while on a tour break in Austin, Texas. "Cornell Hurd's a brilliant songwriter. I'd love to record with them at some point."

Tilbrook finished his fourth U.S. tour since the release of the album with a show last night (Sept. 9) at New York's B.B. King's Blues Club. Following a brief respite at home in England, he'll tour Australia before turning his concentration to finishing the album.

"I'm still writing for the record, and I still want to do some songs with other people," he says. "Elvis Costello has said he'll do a song with me, and I, rather stupidly, haven't done anything about that yet, but I will. He is brilliant. And he's a very nice man and I would like to write something with him."

Although they've never written together, Tilbrook previously guested on Costello's "From a Whisper to a Scream," which appears on the latter's 1980 album with the Attractions, "Trust," reissued yesterday (Sept. 9) by Rhino in a deluxe edition.

Once the album is released, more touring will follow, "with a full band," Tilbrook promises. "It's fantastic being in charge and traveling with only a few people along to help," he says of his recent solo outings. "But I love playing with a band and want to present these songs the way I intended when I wrote them."

Posted by Post Master at 10:08 AM | Permalink

Enter Here.

Posted by Post Master at 10:04 AM | Permalink

The Los Angeles City Beat takes a thoughtful look at North.

Excerpt:"Though tenderness is not entirely unknown in his work, Costello will always be best known for his vengeful, bile-spitting tunes about the lovers who have trampled him. North should blow away that conception once and for all. It’s a mature and beautifully measured statement about the pain of romantic loss and the glowing possibilities of romantic rebirth. Emotionally, it’s the most grown-up album he’s ever made. To that, some might say, “About fucking time.”

=============
Full Text
=============

His Aim Is True Love - by Chris Morris

Even longtime fans familiar with Elvis Costello’s musical adventuring over the last decade – a restless, not always satisfying odyssey that has included collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet, Anne Sofie von Otter, Burt Bacharach, and the Mingus Big Band, among others – may be surprised by Costello’s new album, North.

The record, due in stores September 23, is unusual on a number of accounts. It can be called a concept album: In 40 economical minutes, Costello whips his listeners through the terminus of one love affair and the blossoming of another. (One might surmise that the subject matter is inspired by the end of the musician’s long marriage to Cait O’Riordan and his wooing of his bride-to-be, singer-pianist Diana Krall, but we’ll leave that to the tabloids.)

In a sharp volte-face from last year’s rock-based set When I Was Cruel, Costello sets down his guitar on 10 of the album’s 11 tracks; the songs are dominated by Steve Nieve’s subdued piano, and embellished on some numbers by a 48-piece horn and string ensemble. There isn’t a rocker to be heard: Ballads comprise the entire album.

Clearly, the sound of North was inspired by Costello’s longtime affection for classical American pop songwriting; the album resounds with echoes of such keystone works as Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours and Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin. He attempted to demonstrate his affinity for and facility with that style on his 1998 duo recording with Bacharach, Painted from Memory, but, with the exception of the potent “God Give Me Strength” (actually composed for Allison Anders’s 1996 film Grace of My Heart), the partnership produced music that was fussy, mannered, and meandering.

On North, however, everything works brilliantly, thanks to the simplicity and almost unsettling nakedness of the lyrics, and to the warmth, vulnerability, and humanity Costello projects on every song.

Though tenderness is not entirely unknown in his work, Costello will always be best known for his vengeful, bile-spitting tunes about the lovers who have trampled him. North should blow away that conception once and for all. It’s a mature and beautifully measured statement about the pain of romantic loss and the glowing possibilities of romantic rebirth. Emotionally, it’s the most grown-up album he’s ever made. To that, some might say, “About fucking time.”

The record divides fairly neatly down the middle. The first five songs confront the effects of a relationship’s end – the staggering moment when one realizes it’s all over, the speechlessness and sleeplessness that follow, and the breath-stopping understanding that a season has changed in the soul. The last six tracks examine the unfolding of a new love – its unexpected arrival, the giddiness and almost adolescent exhilaration of it, and the sweetness of surrender.

In an unprecedented gambit, Costello keeps a tight grip on his pen. Especially in recent years, he has seldom been able to resist a baroquely turned phrase, even if it obscured the meaning or dulled the impact of his song. But on North, Costello opts for directness above all else. You may never have expected to hear him sing “I long to hear you whisper my name,” but, by God, he does on “Can You Be True?”

Some arrangements are big, even enormous, but they never swamp the proceedings; the focus is always on Costello’s ardent voice and Nieve’s pitch-perfect keyboards. There are a couple of lovely instrumental contributions: Jazz veteran Lee Konitz offers a wonderful alto coda on “Someone Took the Words Away,” and Lew Soloff contributes a Miles Davis-like muted flugelhorn to the exuberant “Let Me Tell You About Her.”

In all, it’s an amazing, powerfully affecting record – one of those rare midnight-to-dawn albums that pierces you right where you live. North is not an artless record – in fact, the complexity of its creation is on display in every cut – but it projects the feeling of artlessness, for we are hearing Elvis Costello alone with his bruised but healing heart.

Posted by Post Master at 10:03 AM | Permalink

"Elvis Costello will be on the following TV & Radio shows in September"

TV
11th September Channel 4 News, ITN
15th September Richard & Judy, Channel 4
16th September Terry & Gaby Show, Channel 5

Radio
10th September The Robert Elms Show, BBC Radio London
11th September The Steve Wright Show, BBC Radio 2
13th September The Jonathan Ross Radio Show, BBC Radio 2
15th September Simon Mayo Chart Show, BBC radio 2

US Dates
Letterman 9/23
Regis and Kelly 9/26
Access Hollywood- New Releases Segment on 9/23
Late Show with David Letterman- Tuesday, September 23, 2003- 11:30 PM EST
CNN Headline News- live in- studio 9/24
CNN Live Today- live In-Studio- 9/24 10:00AM-12:00 PM
Featured in the "Eye On Entertainment" segment at 11:45 AM.
A&E- Live By Request- Thursday 9/25- Midnight EST/ 7-9 PST
Two Hour world Premiere Airs Live From New York
Encores Sunday, September 28, 10:00 AM Noon ET/PT
Regis & Kelly- Friday, September 26- Check local listings for time
Conan O'Brien - November 20th

Posted by Post Master at 02:59 PM | Permalink

One track in MP3 from the new CD 'The Wind'.

Posted by Post Master at 11:57 AM | Permalink

The Detroit Free Press Reports: FROM THE VAULT - Elvis Costello
"Get Happy!!" FOUR STARS out of 4 stars
"Trust" FOUR STARS out of 4 stars
"Punch the Clock" THREE STARS out of 4 stars (Rhino)

The bountiful Costello reissue program continues with two-disc revisits to three albums. On "Get Happy!!" (1980), the originally generous 20 tracks of Motown and Stax-styled R&B are supplemented with 20 alternates, outtakes, single B-sides and demos. "Trust" (1981) gets nine more bonus cuts added to eight that appeared on a Rykodisc reissue. "Punch the Clock," (1983) adds a whopping 25 bonus tracks to the original 1983 lineup.

Most of the bonus material has Costello trying out different arrangements of songs like "Watch Your Step" and "Human Touch," both of which get subjected to a ska beat, and "From a Whisper to a Scream," heard in two very different attempts that only make the song's lack of a melody more pronounced. Bringing in Squeeze's Glenn Tilbrook as a duet partner for the officially issued "Trust" version pretty much saved the song. "Punch the Clock" was Costello's first blatant attempt to penetrate America's Top 40. He succeeded with the bouncy "Every Day I Write the Book," which can be heard in a less ornate, Beatlesque arrangement now. The real treat is a pair of BBC radio performances: a cover of Percy Mayfield's "Danger Zone" and a medley that segues from "Big Sister's Clothes" to the English Beat's poppy protest "Stand Down Margaret."

For Costello fans, this treasure trove actually justifies buying the titles for a third time.

Posted by Post Master at 09:25 AM | Permalink

The October `03 issue of Esquire (U.K. edition) has
an `email` interview with Elvis (P.147). Done on July
18th when Elvis was in Vegas ( the intro. sez) it
doesn`t have anything sensational in it . He mentions
seeing Woody Allen in concert in one of Allen`s famous
pub. gigs. He also laments missing the White Stripes
in concert `cos recording on North ran late one
Saturday. It finishes with a cheeky question about
Elvis and Diana making `sweet music into the early
hours`, to which Elvis gamely responds `You cheeky
blighter! This is Esquire , not Hello! `

The same issue has an interview with Neil
LaBute which includes the following comment :
`Smashing Pumpkins were my choice for `The Shape Of
Things` , but when I made the film I opted to use
Elvis Costello instead. On film , where you can cut
from one scene to the next in an instant , those
Smashing Pumpkins couldn`t even get started while
Elvis Costello writes such strong , hooky and acid
thoughts about relationships. In three or four bars ,
he could set the tone for the scene . `
(Submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 09:19 AM | Permalink

Elvis is on Steve Wright`s show today - wednes. - the official site seem to have - surprise , surprise - got it wrong .
(submitted by John Foyle)

Posted by Post Master at 09:18 AM | Permalink

Posted by Post Master at 08:18 PM | Permalink

See lots of them here. Let's hope for the DVD...
(Submitted by Chris Wright)

Posted by Post Master at 04:59 PM | Permalink

From NJ.com: (Warning: Log On & Pop-Ups)

"He wrote tremendously well throughout his entire career," said Elvis Costello yesterday. "I don't know whether 'humor' is the right word, but the way in which he faced his end ... he didn't exactly change his view."

Zevon's recent music, Costello said, "is consistent with the way he wrote right in the beginning. That's not to say he didn't move forward, but he didn't suddenly become falsely pious, or start retracting positions that he clearly held."

===
Full Text
====

Warren Zevon chronicled life and death in song

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

BY JAY LUSTIG
Star-Ledger Staff

In August 2002, Warren Zevon received a grim diagnosis. Terminal lung cancer, and about three months to live.

Zevon, who died Sunday afternoon at the age of 56 in his West Hollywood home, lived longer and accomplished more than anyone expected, recording a final album, "The Wind," in late 2002 and early 2003. The album -- a sometimes rowdy, sometimes poignant collection of farewell messages -- was released on Aug. 26.

From Our Advertiser

"Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath ... If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less/Keep me in your heart for a while," he sang on the album's most devastating song, "Keep Me In Your Heart."

Yet there was joy on the album, too. "The Rest of the Night," for instance, was a call to "party for the rest of the night" since "we may never get this chance again."

Throughout the album, Zevon seemed remarkably clear-headed for someone who was staring straight at death. Then again, Zevon -- best known for songs such as "Werewolves Of London," "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" -- has never shied away from dark subjects, and often put a humorous spin on them. His last two, pre-diagnosis albums, 2000's "Life'll Kill Ya" and 2002's "My Ride's Here," were full of meditations on mortality.

"Compared to a lot of people, I'm a happy person, but you can be cynical and be happy," he told The Star-Ledger in 2000. "It's a question of saying, 'Everything's (messed) up, but there's still a lot of beauty or fun to have -- a lot to appreciate.'"

Zevon was a lot of things. A minor celebrity and a major talent. A road warrior and a devoted father. A wild man on stage, and a poetic songwriter with a flair for reflective ballads. A voracious reader who co-wrote songs with novelists Carl Hiassen and Thomas McGuane, as well as Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne.

"He wrote tremendously well throughout his entire career," said Elvis Costello yesterday. "I don't know whether 'humor' is the right word, but the way in which he faced his end ... he didn't exactly change his view."

Zevon's recent music, Costello said, "is consistent with the way he wrote right in the beginning. That's not to say he didn't move forward, but he didn't suddenly become falsely pious, or start retracting positions that he clearly held."

Zevon was born in Chicago, but grew up primarily in California. His father was a Russian immigrant and a professional gambler. Classically trained, he befriended composer Igor Stravinsky as a teenager, but gravitated to pop music.

He released his debut album, "Wanted Dead Or Alive," in 1969, but it bombed. Zevon soon found work, though, with the Everly Brothers, backing them and serving as their musical director.

The duo, Zevon told the Los Angeles Times in 1976, "would always go out and perform with passion ... I learned that when you go out on-stage, you give your all even if you have been doing it for 15 years and are sick of giving your all."

The Everlys broke up in 1973, and though Zevon continued working with both of them individually, he also returned to his solo career. His second album, a self-titled effort that came out in 1976, revealed that he had bloomed into a fully mature artist. Its mixture of quirky rock songs ("Poor Poor Pitiful Me," "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead") and beautiful ballads ("Carmelita," "Mohammed's Radio") and Zevon's willingness to look at the crazy, seedy, violent side of life established him as a maverick in the laid-back Southern California music scene. An unusually poetic maverick.

"If California slides into the ocean/Like the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/Until I pay my bill," he sang in "Desperados Under the Eaves."

"He's the first and foremost proponent of song noir," Jackson Browne, who co-produced the album, once said.

"Excitable Boy," released in 1978, was Zevon's commercial breakthrough, yielding his only Top 40 hit, "Werewolves Of London," and reaching the Top Ten on Billboard's albums chart. Linda Ronstadt also scored a Top 40 hit with her cover of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" that year.

Zevon developed a substance-abuse problem, and though he remained a dynamic concert attraction, his recordings suffered. He reemerged sober with 1987's "Sentimental Hygiene," one of the strongest albums of his career. By all accounts, he stayed away from alcohol and drugs since then, though he continued to smoke.

"When we were talking once, he described it as he got to be Jim Morrison for the first half of his life, and Ward Cleaver for the second," his son, Jordan Zevon, said in August.

He continued to record regularly, and frequently toured in solo-acoustic format, backing himself on piano and guitar. He also recorded an album with three members of R.E.M. under the name Hindu Love Gods in 1990, and had small parts in the movies "She's Having a Baby" (1988) and "South of Heaven, West of Hell" (2000).

In the summer of 2002, Zevon started suffering from shortness of breath. When he visited a doctor, he learned about his illness almost immediately. The news became public, and Zevon put out a statement: "I'm okay with it, but it'll be a drag if I don't make it till the next James Bond movie comes out."

He also began working on "The Wind" (working title: "My Dirty Life and Times") with his longtime collaborator, bassist-producer-songwriter Jorge Calderón, and friends such as Browne, Springsteen, Don Henley and Tom Petty.

"I think this is something he wanted to give to everybody he can't speak directly to," said Jordan Zevon in August. "People have been so supportive, but you get overwhelmed (dealing) with everyone you've known for all these years, or even people who met him once. This is an album dealing with those things that can't necessarily be said to each individual."

"The Wind" debuted at No. 16 on Billboard magazine's albums chart, making it Zevon's highest-ranking album since the late '70s.

Touring in the fall of 2002, Bob Dylan often performed Zevon's songs in concert, as a tribute. Zevon himself attended a Dylan concert in October, at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater, and Dylan sang three of his songs. "It's a big thrill, but beyond the honor, it's just so strange, beyond even computing," Zevon told the New York Times.

Also in October, Zevon performed in public for the last time, on "Late Show With David Letterman." Over the years, Zevon had often appeared on the show, and this one was devoted exclusively to him.

One of the songs he chose to sing was "Mutineer," the title track of his 1995 album.

"I was born to rock the boat," he sang. "Some may sink but we will float/Grab your coat, let's get out of here/You're my witness/I'm your mutineer."

Zevon, who was married and divorced twice, is survived by Jordan Zevon and a daughter, Ariel, both of Southern California, and two grandchildren. No information on burial plans or memorial services was available at press time.

Posted by Post Master at 08:48 AM | Permalink

New York Times, MTV, Billboard, 130 More Articles...

Posted by Post Master at 10:16 AM | Permalink

From the Subscription-Only online version of the Wall Street Journal:
"Elvis Costello - Sept 22, 24 The Town Hall (etc)
The consummate singer-songwriter of his generation, Elvis Costello made his reputation with incisive lyrics about love and breakups as well as a delivery of those lyrics with a musical sneer. He turns his pen inward with his new album "North," which charts the breakup of one relationship and the joyful beginning of his new one. No names named, but fans can follow along. It's filled with languid songs about What Went Wrong, and hopeful tunes about his new life."
(Submitted by Rozy Stevens)

Posted by Post Master at 04:24 PM | Permalink

From USAToday:"Now that sultry jazz singer Diana Krall and rocker Elvis Costello are engaged, will they do anything musical together? - Howard Rosenbloom Branson, Mo.

Yes. We hear Krall, 38, who is working on her eighth jazz album, may include on it a song the couple wrote together. That CD should be out early next year. Wish we could tell you when the wedding will be, but reps for both singers, who got engaged earlier this year, are mum. Whenever it is, it will be the second marriage for Costello, 49, who split with his wife of 16 years, ex-Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan, in November. It will be Krall's first. "

(Submitted by Chris Wright)

Posted by Post Master at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From Australia's TheAge
Except:"When Elvis Costello emerged in the late 1970s, he was truly shocking - a seething, bitter, sarcastic, post-punk poet who spat two-minute tirades of sexual jealousy and betrayal into his mic, slashed with his guitar and gave great chorus. Over the years, Costello has reinvented himself again and again - when he went country, when he went soul, when he went French balladeer, when he went classical. But this. Well this takes the biscuit. Costello has just made a whole album of melt-your-heart love songs."

This is a reprint of an article from the UK from last week.

===
FULL TEXT
------------
Elvis Costello started out writing post-punk songs about lost love and 25 years later he’s still going strong. Simon Hattenstone reports.

When Elvis Costello emerged in the late 1970s, he was truly shocking - a seething, bitter, sarcastic, post-punk poet who spat two-minute tirades of sexual jealousy and betrayal into his mic, slashed with his guitar and gave great chorus. Over the years, Costello has reinvented himself again and again - when he went country, when he went soul, when he went French balladeer, when he went classical. But this. Well this takes the biscuit. Costello has just made a whole album of melt-your-heart love songs.

It's not the love that is shocking. Of all the "new-wavers" in the late 1970s and '80s, he probably did love better than any. But from the start his love was cheated and disgusted. For Costello, love has never been far removed from hate.

But not on the new record, North. Costello himself admits that North isn't easy to describe. It's certainly not one of those overstuffed hotchpotch albums he's produced in recent years: sagging with tunes and words and seemingly interminable, for all the good bits. On North, there are 11 songs, all written at the piano, most of them two or three minutes long. They tell of love lost and love found. The early songs are low, melancholic and regretful. The later songs are ecstatic. The album works as a song cycle, a lieder for the 21st century.

advertisement

advertisement

Elvis and I go back a long way. He helped me through adolescence. I listened to him in my bedroom - he sang about all sorts of things, but the ones I remember best are the tales of woe about those beautiful girls who would go off with someone else.

Elvis was made for misunderstood young lovehearts - to some extent literally, because he was a construct. It was his manager, Jake Riviera, who suggested Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus change his name to Elvis Costello for the sake of his art and his bank balance. The name was soaked in attitude. No one in real life dared call themselves Elvis, let alone this computer programmer with a disproportionately big head. The real Elvis splayed his legs and wiggled his hips, while this Elvis was stiff, sexless and ludicrous. With his skinny drainpipe legs and those massive specs, he played up his dweebishness.

Before he knew it, he was on Top Of The Pops, feted for being so uncool he was cool. He had been playing music for years to little acclaim, and here he was finally hailed an overnight success at 23. Costello thought it was funny. He'd always had a thing for irony. He orders tea. He's in his late forties, and ever so grown up these days. Brown suit, brown shoes, striking pink silk tie, elegantly receding brown hair. He is not as skinny as he was in the '70s, nor as rounded and shaggy as he became a few years ago. He looks healthy and strangely content.
Costello has reinvented himself many times over the years

Is he surprised to have made North? "Yeah, well everything came as a shock to me." He doesn't specify what the everything is, but I assume he's referring to the subject of the album - the break-up of his 16-year marriage to former Pogues member Cait O'Riordan, his subsequent desolation, and his new relationship with glamorous jazz chanteuse Diana Krall. He swiftly moves on to the album's genesis.

"I was on the road last September, and the songs just came to me one after another. Sometimes you're not even thinking this is a group of songs, whereas I knew right away these were. They were immediately a different language, a different register, different emotion, different lyrics."

Yes, I say, it does all seem so different, not least the openness. As soon as I agree with him, he politely disagrees. "I don't think it's that different, actually," he says. I'm not sure if Costello is arguing with me or himself, but it's good to see a trace of the traditional bristle. Perhaps, I say, open is the wrong word, it's more that these songs are irony-free. "Yes, there is no irony," he says. The trouble is, he says, you get known for one thing, and then the media leaves you frozen in aspic.

I tell him that I love so many of his songs, even though I don't have a clue what they are about. Fair enough, he says, neither did he. "I don't see any reason why you should have to understand them. I would always defend the right to create a vague picture, or a blurred picture with words that add up differently to different people because I've done it countless times. It's like the chance Polaroid that is better than the sharp-focus, well-taken photograph."

He comes to a stop, but not for long. "In the case of North I don't think people will have that problem because it is pretty damn clear what's going on, y'know. I can tell you how I did it, when I did it, but I can't tell you more about what it is, because everything is in there. I'm not saying I won't answer any more questions, but - " It seems like a pre-emptive strike. Costello hates talking about his private life.

"I think people will assume that it is about romantic loss, but it is actually about bereavement. It is about someone contemplating the last loving thing said by someone who has gone."

He's still not mentioned any names, so I take the plunge. In the first half of the album there is the sense that you can't understand how your relationship with Cait has ended, I say. Silence. "It's entirely at your discretion to mention her name, but I very much want to be respectful of her independence as a person. It's really important that I don't say anything that puts her in the public focus. It's not fair, she didn't ask for it. (Pause.) Then there is the other side of that equation, which is I write, that's what I do, I draw on personal experience. (Pause.) But as I keep saying, the importance to me is that people see themselves in the songs rather than pore over them as voyeurs would."

In recent years, Costello has reissued old albums with detailed essays about the history of the songs. "If you look at the sleeve notes of the reissue of Blood & Chocolate, I said, very honestly, when I wrote that record I felt I had put aside f---ing up my life, which is what the first seven years of my career were about, so I could write songs about it." (That's when he started doing the pop star thing - drinking himself silly, being loud and abusive, leaving his first wife for a model.) Later, the songs were less immediate, more reflective. It felt a natural evolution - he was married to Cait, in a stable relationship, and he wanted to explore anger rather than live it.

"You know," he says out of the blue, "the thing that I never, ever got was misogyny and that was attached to me a lot early on. A lot. And I could never get that." A lot of the songs early on were more disappointed that anybody would fall for the cliche of romance or a cheap version of love. He once said his driving forces were guilt and revenge.

"Shall I tell you something? That much-repeated quote was said after 14 Pernods, in one of those kind of fits of beautiful drunken bravado when you didn't throw up and you didn't fall down and you suddenly had a moment of clarity that you thought was like the most original thought."

I remind him of another time when he was drunk, this time in America in 1979, and he described Ray Charles as "an ignorant, blind nigger". He doesn't need reminding. In the past, he has called that the low point of his career. "Read the sleeve notes to Get Happy! I'll get it sent to you, and that's what I'm going to say about that." A few days later the album arrives. In the sleeve notes, Costello describes how, after the success of the album Armed Forces, he was embraced by the corporate pop machine and was spoiling for a fight. "This would come to an end in April 1979 at Columbus, Ohio, where a ridiculous drunken argument would culminate in me speaking the exact opposite of my true beliefs in an attempt to provoke a fight that inevitably arrived - It was the product of crazed indulgence." Afterwards, Costello received more than 100 death threats, his records were pulled from US playlists and his shows were picketed.

After writing all those songs about being a loser, about not being able to get the girl, what was it like when he realised that he could get her? "Well, I hated that. You start to feel wretched about it. For a short period of time I think it brings about a certain self-satisfaction and greed, and then you start to hate yourself pretty quickly." For what? "For being everything you said you didn't like." I ask him if he feels more secure with age.

"Well, you can become more insecure because you've got more to lose. History teaches us that people become more conservative with a small c, more pragmatic or cautious, or timid, whichever word you want to use for not taking chances, and I sort of feel the opposite."

Costello has a grown-up son from his first marriage. What does he do? "He writes -" And he stops himself. His son is another person whose privacy he doesn't want to invade.

Then he's on to the intolerant political climate in America and how the Dixie Chicks were lambasted for saying that they were ashamed of coming from Texas. As for British politics, he says, they are also just glorified ad men. "In the old days there was an establishment against which people railed. Even up to the Margaret Thatcher days there was an establishment. Although it was a new establishment, it was still an establishment. Now there isn't." Typical Costello - detests the establishment, and complains when it disappears. "Obviously there is a big and bad world happening out there, and maybe there is another time to sing of those things, but I cannot think of anything better to do than to sing of love right now."

North is released on September 21.

Posted by Post Master at 04:19 PM | Permalink

"The Duchess of York is to join Steve Wright as a co-host on his BBC Radio 2 show. The Duchess will spend three days in the studio from Tuesday, interviewing a clutch of celebrities including Cilla Black and Sir Richard Attenborough.

Steve Wright's afternoon show draws in a regular audience of 6.3 million listeners. Guests during her stint on the show will also include Westlife and Elvis Costello.

Posted by Post Master at 04:16 PM | Permalink

From the Jazz report: "ELVIS COSTELLO Recording mostly with piano, upright bass and brushed drums — as well as the jazz soloists Lee Konitz and Lew Soloff, and the Brodsky String Quartet here and there — Mr. Costello is doing slow songs with cabaret dynamics on "North." It's a set of songs about a breakup, and finally about finding love again; in related news, he has become engaged to the jazz singer Diana Krall. Sept. 23. Deutsche Grammophon. (Mr. Costello will perform at Town Hall on Sept. 22 and 24.)"

Posted by Post Master at 10:01 PM | Permalink

Sign the petition here.

Posted by Post Master at 08:54 AM | Permalink

A radio station in Dallas reports on the demise of the bowling-alley-concert-venue. I saw EC there once - Brutal Youth Tour I think - strange place with pretty bad sound as I remember it.

Excerpt: "Artists ranging from Elvis Costello to Ani DiFranco to Limp Bizkit played their most memorable local concerts to date there, but the theater was, of course, still adjacent to a working 22-lane bowling alley."

Posted by Post Master at 08:50 AM | Permalink

An informed source tells CostelloNews that Demon Records intends to release CD boxsets of Elvis' singles. Details on which label / years (Stiff/Radar/Demon/Columbia/etc.) would be included were unavailable. Each single will be a facsimilie of the 45" original sleeve art, but in CD format.
(Reported by Will)

Posted by Post Master at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Boulder Daily Camera (July 17, 2003)
So what's up with Elvis Costello? Just an hour into his show last night at the Universal Lending Pavilion, Costello and his band skittered offstage without saying a word to the crowd. After a few minutes of cheering, the house lights came back up and music started playing to puzzled looks in the audience, and sporadic boos. Suddenly, though, the lights went out again, and Costello finally reemerged for about 75 minutes worth of encores. First time I've seen a show where the encores last longer than the main set. It was an otherwise stellar performance, although Elvis — who's normally a chatterbox on stage — never did say what happened. Weird.

Posted by Post Master at 08:43 AM | Permalink

Posted by Post Master at 11:35 PM | Permalink

Posted by Post Master at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

120 REASONS TO GET HAPPY

Rhino Releases Elvis Costello's Get Happy!!, Trust, and Punch The Clock With 73 Bonus Tracks On September 9

Rhino hits a new high in value-packed expansions with the fourth wave of reissues of the Elvis Costello catalog, with expanded, remastered versions of GET HAPPY!!, TRUST, and PUNCH THE CLOCK due September 9. All three titles are double-disc releases and will be available at all retail outlets, as well as at www.rhino.com, for a suggested list price of $17.98.

This batch of discs emphasizes the evolving sound of the Attractions; originally released within three years of each other, the albums demonstrate an incredible diversity of styles and sounds. Adding 73 bonus tracks to the original albums' 47 cuts (for a staggering total of 120 songs), each Rhino release consists of the album as originally released, plus a disc consisting exclusively of archival material from the Costello vaults, much of it previously unreleased. Every title contains liner notes by Costello himself as well as printed lyrics for all Costello-penned cuts, a first for GET HAPPY!! and TRUST.

Steeped in Stax/Motown sounds, GET HAPPY!! took everyone by surprise when originally released in 1980-the album marked the first time Costello radically remade himself, and it would not be the last. Its 20 tracks featured 18 Costello originals -- including "King Horse," "Clowntime Is Over," "New Amsterdam," "High Fidelity," and "Riot Act" -- and two outstanding covers (Sam & Dave's "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," and "I Stand Accused," a Top 40 U.K. hit for The Merseybeats in the early '60s). The bonus disc on this reissue packs in an astounding 30 cuts, making GET HAPPY!! a 50-song set. Highlights include a drastically different take on "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" (much closer to Sam & Dave's version), a more rocking version of "Girls Talk," early versions of songs that would appear on TRUST ("New Lace Sleeves," "From A Whisper To A Scream," "Watch Your Step"), and demo, live, and alternate versions showcasing songs from GET HAPPY!! in a dramatically different ! light.

TRUST (1981), the last rock album Costello would make for five years, Marked by Costello classics "Clubland," "New Lace Sleeves," and "From A Whisper To A Scream." TRUST's bonus disc provides two versions of "Black Sails In The Sunset" and "Big Sister," a raucous take of "Watch Your Step," a different alternate version of "From A Whisper To A Scream" than on Get Happy!!'s bonus disc, an alternate recording of "Clubland," an instrumental piano demo of "The Long Honeymoon" (which would end up in finished form on Imperial Bedroom), a solo demo version of the Billie Holiday classic "Gloomy Sunday," and an early glimpse of Imperial Bedroom's "Boy With A Problem."

With production by the '80s pop production team of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley (Madness, Dexy's Midnight Runners, The Teardrop Explodes), PUNCH THE CLOCK (1983) saw Costello traffic in a more contemporary pop style, giving him his first taste of chart success with "Everyday I Write The Book." The album also housed the classic "Shipbuilding," featuring jazz legend Chet Baker on trumpet. While the original album held 13 tracks, the bonus disc here offers up another 26 cuts, for a grand total of 39. Among the standouts are the "Studio Merseybeat Version" of "Everyday I Write The Book," BBC live versions of "Big Sister's Clothes/Stand Down Margaret" and Percy Mayfield's "Danger Zone," two drastically different versions of "Heathen Town," preproduction home demo versions of most of Punch The Clock's songs, and five live tracks featuring the TKO Horns (including a rousing version of "Back Stabbers/King Horse").

It's a virtual boxed set's worth of material, so clear your CD player!
(Submitted by Micheal Hernadez)

Posted by Post Master at 10:13 PM | Permalink

Rock on TV lists Elvis as appearing on A & E's "Live by Request" show on Sept 25th. It says it will be aired from John Jay College in New York City!

This is a show where people call in and request songs for the artist to play. It airs live (and then is rerun a lot).
(Submitted by Dave Farr)

Posted by Post Master at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Billboard takes a look at North and the upcoming tour, the DVD, the downloads, the invitation only concert and simulcast, and all things promotional.

Posted by Post Master at 06:28 PM | Permalink

From FoxNews:

Costello's Ex-Manager Goes Nuts

Maybe the smartest thing rocker Elvis Costello ever did in his long career was fire his manager, Jake Riviera. During their time together, Costello was considered difficult, unpleasant, and self-defeating.

Since the two split, Costello has had nothing but success and good relations with his record labels. Case in point is the excellent new Costello release, "North," which will come out in a couple of weeks through deals drawn up for him by his current manager, Danny Bennett, and another Danny, Danny Goldberg, who brought Costello to Mercury Records a few years ago.

Riviera has many enemies in the record business, not the least of which is probably beloved rocker Dave Edmunds. He and Nick Lowe, Costello's best producer, once had a popular band called Rockpile. But after one album, Edmunds reportedly couldn't take Riviera's interference and ended the relationships.

The last time I saw this failed amateur pugilist was in 1986, backstage at the Broadway Theatre before a Costello show. He was as advertised: rude, nasty, vulgar and violent.

Cut to last night, when Lowe, whom I've praised in this space in the past, played an acoustic set at GQ magazine's big coming out party for new editor Jim Nelson.

Lowe and behold, there was Jake Riviera, now white haired, but still looking for a fight, cursing in his Cockney accent, baring widely spaced teeth, looking very much like a rabid pit bull. Seventeen years had not mellowed him.

Within minutes of our meeting he was tempting fate, barking and inviting temporary restraining orders. At last -- here was an explanation for Nick Lowe's lack of a career.

"You're just a corporate fu--," he screamed at me for no apparent reason, "just like everyone else here!" Blood vessels popped under his pasty complexion. "I'm sorry Nick, I shouldn't have let you play here! I hate all these a--h----!" There was more, but it's not possible to type it up. You get the picture.

Then Riviera sent his other client from a time warp, Richard Hell, out to make some retro punk noise. None of it was pretty.

As for Lowe, he performed valiantly in front of an ardent crowd of fans that included Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and actor Peter Gallagher, star of Fox's great hit show, "The O.C." Lowe also had some good media heavyweights digging his scene, including Conde Nast editor-in-chief James Truman and new Cargo magazine publisher Alan Katz. Before the evening was over, actor Benjamin Bratt showed up -- sans Talisa Soto -- but with his pal, Paolo Mastropietro, husband of pregnant actress Jill Hennessy.

"Why isn't he a bigger deal?" asked one of Lowe's happy fans during the set.

Now I guess we know.

Posted by Post Master at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Official Web Site has been updated for North, and they're promising more to come. Right now, a bunch of new photos in each section of the site, plus a comprehensive tour schedule, are the best features.

Posted by Post Master at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Post Master at 10:56 AM | Permalink

The Rubio Quartet (http://www.rubioquartet.be) and Patrick Riguelle will perform EC's "The Julliet letters" in LA on the 9th, the 11th and the 12th of November and in Connecticut on the 15th of November. I've seen the show 4 times and it's really great. Next to ‘The Juliet Letters’ they usually play the Eighth String quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich.
(Submitted by Istvan Hajnal)

Posted by Post Master at 10:52 AM | Permalink

From USA Today: "Rhino hopes to sell out its entire pressing of No Thanks! The '70s Punk Rebellion, a four-CD box set devoted to punk's heydey, kicking off with The Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop in 1976. The 100-track $65 collection, due Oct. 28, hits most essentials (The Clash, Dead Kennedys, X, Generation X, but no Sex Pistols), as well as acts that outgrew the genre (Blondie, Elvis Costello, the Boomtown Rats)."

Posted by Post Master at 10:14 PM | Permalink

World Cafe - Wednesday, September 3
Soul Singer Howard Tate joins host David Dye on the World Café. Tune into hear about his cult classic 1967 album, a lost decade, and his new release “Rediscovered.” Howard recorded the original version of the song “Get It While You Can” that was later released by Janis Joplin & he still has one of the
sweetest falsettos in contemporary music. Plus there’s music from Shelby Lynne, Steve Winwood, & Santana!

Posted by Post Master at 04:08 PM | Permalink

Posted by Post Master at 04:06 PM | Permalink

From the 'Be Careful What You Wish For' Dept: TicketMaster (AKA TicketBastard) will soon begin auctioning off the best seats to the highest bidder. From the NYTimes.

====
September 1, 2003

Ticketmaster Auction Will Let Highest Bidder Set Concert Prices

By CHRIS NELSON

hree years after Ticketmaster introduced ticketFast, its online print-at-home ticketing service, consumers have so
embraced it that the company now sells a half-million home-printed tickets for sporting and entertainment events each month in North America. Where ticketFast is available, 30 percent of tickets sold are now printed at home, said the company, which is by far the nation's largest ticket agency.

But consumers — many of whom have complained for years about climbing ticket prices and Ticketmaster service charges — may be less eager for the next phase of Ticketmaster's Internet evolution.

Late this year the company plans to begin auctioning the best seats to concerts through ticketmaster.com.

With no official price ceiling on such tickets, Ticketmaster will be able to compete with brokers and scalpers for the highest price a market will bear.

"The tickets are worth what they're worth," said John Pleasants, Ticketmaster's president and chief executive. "If somebody wants to charge $50 for a ticket, but it's actually worth $1,000 on eBay, the ticket's worth $1,000. I think more and more, our clients — the promoters, the clients in the buildings and the bands themselves — are saying to themselves, `Maybe that money should be coming to me instead of Bob the Broker.' "

EBay has long been a busy marketplace for tickets auctioned by brokers and others. Late last week, for example, it had more than 22,000 listings for ticket sales.

Venue operators, promoters and performers will decide whether to participate in the Ticketmaster auctions, Mr. Pleasants said. In June, the company tested the system for the Lennox Lewis-Vitali Klitschko boxing match at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The minimum bid for the package — two ringside seats, a boxing glove autographed by Mr. Lewis and access to workouts, among other features — was $3,000, and the top payer spent about $7,000, a Staples Center spokesman, Michael Roth, said.

Once the auction service goes live, Ticketmaster will receive flat fees or a percentage of the winning bids, to be decided with the operators of each event, said Sean Moriarty, Ticketmaster's executive vice president for products, technology and operations.

Along with home printing, auctions are central to "a new age of the ticket," Mr. Pleasants said. In the second quarter of this year, tickets sold online, with or without home printing, represented 51 percent of Ticketmaster's ticket sales. The rest were sold by phone or at walk-up locations.

Ticket Forwarding allows season ticket holders for several sports teams (including the New York Knicks, Rangers and Giants) to e-mail extra tickets to other users, with Ticketmaster charging the sender $1.95 per transaction.

TicketExchange provides a forum for season ticket holders to auction tickets online. The seller and buyer pay Ticketmaster 5 percent to 10 percent of the resale price, a fee the company splits with the team.

In the case of the ticketFast home-printing service, buyers pay an additional $1.75 to $2.50 per order, with the fee set by the event operator. Home printing has won converts among people who want tickets immediately, instead of receiving them by mail or a delivery service or having to stand in line at a will-call window.

One satisfied customer is Brian Resnik, 29, of Tampa, Fla., who says the home-printing fee is a bargain compared with the $19.50 that Ticketmaster charges for two-day shipping through United Parcel Service.

But some other users, who praised the convenience of home printing, objected to being charged an extra fee.

"It's kind of mind-boggling to me," said Joe Guckin, 41, of Philadelphia, who used ticketFast to buy tickets for a Baltimore Orioles home game last season. "You're printing up the ticket, on your printer at home, your paper, your ink, etc. — and you have to pay for that?"

The company replies that home-printing consumers are helping to pay for the technology that makes the service possible.

Ticketmaster has spent $15 million to $20 million to outfit almost 700 stadiums, arenas, theaters and concert halls in this country and Canada with bar-code scanners that read and authenticate the tickets and computers that capture information such as which seats are filled and which doors have the most traffic, Mr. Moriarty said. In 2003, the company has sold 400,000 to 600,000 ticketFast tickets each month.

Some ticketFast customers, like Diane DeRooy, 52, of Seattle, complain that Ticketmaster assesses a lot of fees even before levying the print-at-home charge. A ticket to see Crosby, Stills & Nash on Friday at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., for example, carries $13.80 in venue, processing and convenience fees, plus a $2.50 charge for the home-printing option. Without the fees, a ticket costs $30.25 to $70.25.

Many of those customers are skeptical about Ticketmaster's plans to auction the best seats to concerts.

"The band's biggest fans ought to have the best seats, not the band's richest fans," said Tim Todd, 47, of Kansas City, Mo., who used ticketFast recently to buy tickets for a concert by the rock group Phish. Ticketmaster would be, in essence, official scalpers, Mr. Guckin said, voicing a sentiment expressed by some other customers.

Industry watchers agree that auctions will affect all concertgoers. Prime seats are undervalued in the marketplace, said Alan B. Krueger, a professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, who has studied ticket prices. He predicts that once auctions begin revealing a ticket's market value, prices as a whole will climb faster.

Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert industry trade magazine, Pollstar, predicted that all ticket prices would become more fluid. After a promoter assesses initial sales from an auction, remaining ticket prices could be raised or lowered to meet goals.

The notion of ticket auctions is annoying, Mr. Resnik said, but he is resigned to them.

"I guess the capitalist inside me would say, `Hey, if that's what they can get for tickets, I guess that's just something I can't afford, like a yacht and a Learjet.' "

Posted by Post Master at 12:43 PM | Permalink

Large EC Article in the Guardian today.
Except: "Over the years, Costello has shocked us again and again - when he went country, when he went soul, when he went French balladeer, when he went classical. But this. Well this takes the biscuit. Costello has just made a whole album of melt-your-heart love songs. "

=================
The blissed out curmudgeon

Elvis Costello once admitted, drunkenly, that his main motivations were guilt and revenge. But now that angry young man has grown up, is in love and has made a work of beauty. So what's up, asks Simon Hattenstone

Saturday August 30, 2003
The Guardian

Peace, love and understanding: Elvis Costello, at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (top) and with girlfriend Diana Krall. Photo: Getty

When Elvis Costello emerged in the late 1970s, he was truly shocking - a seething, bitter, sarcastic, sneering, verbose (he would have used just as many adjectives) post-punk poet who spat two-minute tirades of sexual jealousy and betrayal into his mic, slashed with his guitar and gave great chorus.

Over the years, Costello has shocked us again and again - when he went country, when he went soul, when he went French balladeer, when he went classical. But this. Well this takes the biscuit. Costello has just made a whole album of melt-your-heart love songs.

It's not the love that is shocking. Of all the "new-wavers" in the late 1970s and 1980s, he probably did love better than any. But from the start, and for all the tenderness of Alison, when he whisper-wailed, "I heard you let that little friend of mine take off your party dress," his love was cheated and disgusted.

A decade or so later, he wrote another classic love song, I Want You. It begins as a honeyed statement of desire, but becomes something tormented and tormenting, as the gentle words are repeated till they become a screaming sneer. For Costello, love has never been far removed from hate.

But not on the new record, North. Costello himself admits that North isn't easy to describe. It's certainly not one of those overstuffed hotchpotch albums he's produced in recent years: sagging with tunes and words and seemingly interminable, for all the good bits.

On North, there are 11 songs, all written at the piano, most of them two or three minutes long. They tell the story of love lost and love found. The early songs are low, melancholic and regretful. The later songs are ecstatic. The album works as a song cycle, a lieder for the 21st century.

Elvis and I go back a long way. Elvis helped me through adolescence. I listened to him in my bedroom - he sang about all sorts of things, but the ones I remember best are the tales of woe about those beautiful girls who would go off with David Watts, oblivious to Elvis's sincerity and burning soul. Elvis was made for misunderstood young love-hearts - to some extent literally, because he was a construct.

It was his manager, Jake Riviera, who suggested Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus change his name to Elvis Costello for the sake of his art and his bank balance. The name was soaked in attitude. No one in real life dared call themselves Elvis, let alone this computer programmer with the disproportionately big head.

The real Elvis splayed his legs and wiggled his hips, and was the personification of sex, while this Elvis was stiff, sexless and ludicrous. With his skinny drainpipe legs bent at 10 to three, and those massive specs, he played up his dweebishness. He looked like an Etch-A-Sketch cartoon.

Before he knew it, he was on Top Of The Pops, feted for being so uncool he was cool. He had been playing music for six or seven years to little acclaim, and here he was finally hailed an overnight success at 23. Costello thought it was funny. He'd always had a thing for irony.

He orders tea for us - English tea in a hotel suite. He's in his late 40s, and ever so grown up these days. Brown suit, brown cod-crocodile shoes, striking pink silk tie, elegantly receding brown hair. He is certainly not as skinny as he was in the 1970s, nor is he as rounded and shaggy as he became a few years ago. He looks healthy and strangely content.

I ask him if he's surprised to have made North. "Yeah, well everything came as a shock to me." He doesn't specify what the everything is, but I assume he's referring to the subject of the album - the break-up of his 16-year marriage to songwriter and former Pogues member Cait O'Riordan, his subsequent desolation, and his new relationship with glamorous jazz chanteuse Diana Krall. He swiftly moves on to the album's genesis. "I was on the road last September, and the songs just came to me one after another. Sometimes you're not even thinking this is a group of songs, whereas I knew right away these were. They were immediately a different language, a different register, different emotion, different lyrics." For the first time, he says, he wrote the songs on the album in sequence. The album was recorded in New York, where he spends much of his time these days.

Yes, I say, it does all seem so different, not least the openness. As soon as I agree with him, he politely disagrees. "I don't think it's that different, actually," he says. "King Of America and Blood & Chocolate, for example, are both different in tone from this, but there's a lot of similarity."

I'm not sure if Costello is arguing with me or with himself, but it's good to see a trace of the traditional bristle. Perhaps, I say, open is the wrong word, it's more that these songs are irony-free. In the past, Costello often used irony as an emotional safety net - on one level, he exposed himself but on another he didn't because so much of what he sang was double-edged (Hope You're Happy Now when he doesn't hope you are, I'm Not Angry when he is).

"Yes, there is no irony," he says. The trouble is, he says, you get known for one thing, and then the media leaves the young you frozen in aspic. "For instance, I don't think there's been a single pun on any of my records for 10 years and yet I'm known for that because of the first few albums. And the same with irony - it's an overplayed hand and it's also a juvenile hand. The deliberate seeking of darkness and the sardonic, and the denial of feeling and the denial of trust and belief, it's something that you do when you're younger and it's something that is right - part of it's genuine and part of it is insecurity. I'm not saying that was all wrong. I love a lot of the songs I wrote then, I still sing them, but there's room in the world for lots of different points of view, lots of different types of expression, even inside the repertoire of one songwriter and singer."

In the early days, the songs he covered by other writers couldn't have been more different from his own - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding and My Funny Valentine were straight from the heart and totally unambiguous. In their openness, they seemed to be an acknowledgment of his own limitations.

I tell him that I love so many of his songs, even though I don't have a clue what they are about. Fair enough, he says, neither did he. "I don't see any reason why you should have to understand them. I would always defend the right to create a vague picture, or a blurred picture with words that adds up differently to different people because I've done it countless times. It's like the chance Polaroid that is better than the sharp-focus, well-taken photograph.There's a song on the last record, Tart, that doesn't make any sense at all."

He comes to a stop, but not for long. "In the case of North I don't think people will have that problem because it is pretty damn clear what's going on, y'know. I can tell you how I did it, when I did it, but I can't tell you more about what it is, because everything is in there. I'm not saying I won't answer any more questions, but... " It seems like a pre-emptive strike. Costello hates talking about his private life.

The first songs are incredibly painful. The album starts with a track called You Left Me In The Dark. Before I ask the question, he answers. "I think people will assume that it is about romantic loss, but it is actually about bereavement. It is about someone contemplating the last loving thing said by someone who has gone. Y'know, people always assume that love happens detached from other realities. But other realities happen concurrently with changes in the heart. Whether or not these songs happened exactly as they appeared to happen to me doesn't matter in my opinion. It doesn't make it better to listen to, it doesn't make it more authentic." He's still not mentioned any names, so I take the plunge. In the first half of the album there is the sense that you can't understand how your relationship with Cait has ended, I say. Silence.

"I've got to say, Simon, and I want to really stress, it's entirely at your discretion to mention her name, but I very much want to be respectful of her independence as a person. And one of the things you have to say when you part with somebody is that they have the right not to be drawn into the consideration of your life. It's really important that I don't say anything that puts her in the public focus. It's not fair, she didn't ask for it. [Pause.] Then there is the other side of that equation, which is I write, that's what I do, I draw on personal experience. [Pause.] But as I keep saying, the importance to me is that people see themselves in the songs rather than pore over them as voyeurs would. I think that would be a fairly dissatisfying listen, frankly."

There is something of the schoolmaster about Costello. But he has a point. The record works beautifully because it tells a universal story. There are no names named on the album, no tales told, no scores settled. The lyrics of North are incredibly personal, but the details could apply to any of us who has been in love (the coat he wraps around her shoulders, the way he can't stop telling friends about her and becomes the ultimate love bore). Has Cait heard North?

"I don't know. I'm not being evasive... but I have very consciously not written an album about any unhappiness I lived through, or any bitter feeling I have." Instead, he says, he wants to express the hope that there is for anybody. "You've reached an impasse and something else can happen." He often takes the most circuitous route to answer a question, but he does answer. Actually, by his standards he is being a right old gossip. He says there are wonderful records that document relationships, but they only mean anything to us because they transcend biography.

"Take Blood On The Tracks [Bob Dylan] or Blue [Joni Mitchell], they are two albums that appear to be rooted in very, very painful personal experience, yet they have humour in them, some sense of joy as well as desolation. And at least one of those albums has a tremendous amount of anger that my record doesn't have." He smiles, amazed at what he's just said.

"That's the biggest shock - that it doesn't have any anger in it. That's useless to me, to have anger or recrimination in my songs because I have spent such a long time talking about matters of anger."

In recent years, Costello has reissued old albums with detailed essays about the history of the songs. "If you look at the sleeve notes of the reissue of Blood & Chocolate, I said, very honestly, when I wrote that record I felt I had put aside fucking up my life, which is what the first seven years of my career were about, so I could write songs about it." (That's when he started doing the pop star thing - drinking himself silly, being loud and abusive, leaving his first wife for a model.)

Later, the songs were less immediate, more reflective. It felt a natural evolution - he was married to Cait, in a stable relationship, and he wanted to explore anger rather than live it. But, of course, it's never as simple as that. "Then you have to start questioning whether you are doing that to avoid emotional truths, and whether you're all wearing disguises for a good or bad reason."

And, even as he talks, the great contrarian seems to be arguing it out in his head. I ask him if all the bile of the early days was heartfelt. "Well, I don't actually agree with that..." No, no, I burble, there was tenderness there as well. "Yeah, that's the thing. I'm not complaining about it retrospectively, I think it's understandable that it makes good copy and I play along with it and up to it sometimes, so I can't complain that the lasting impression of those first few years focuses more on the anger than the tenderness. There have been outbursts of much more profound anger since. Y'know, Tramp The Dirt Down, the whole of Mighty Like A Rose are much angrier than the first three albums put together. And specific and focused anger. And honed. And, y'know, watered and fertilised anger."

The lyrics to Tramp The Dirt Down, dedicated to Margaret Thatcher, are possibly the most bilious he has written.

... there's one thing, I know, I'd like to live
Long enough to savour
That's when they finally put you in the ground
I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.
He's still thinking about his reputation. "You know," he says out of the blue, "the thing that I never, ever got was misogyny and that was attached to me a lot early on. A lot. And I could never get that. A lot of the songs early on were more disappointed that anybody would fall for the cliché of romance or fashion or a cheap version of love. And that's a consistent theme... "

Not a misogynist, I say, but you did come out with some right bollocks. "Oh, absolutely. Tons of bollocks." He grins. He once said his driving forces were guilt and revenge. "Shall I tell you something? That much-repeated quote was said after 14 Pernods, in one of those kind of fits of beautiful drunken bravado when you didn't throw up and you didn't fall down and you suddenly had a moment of clarity that you thought was like the most original thought."

I remind him of another time when he was drunk, this time in America in 1979, and he described Ray Charles as "an ignorant, blind nigger". He doesn't need reminding. In the past, he has called that the low point of his career.

"Read the sleeve notes to Get Happy!! I'll get it sent to you, and that's what I'm going to say about that."

A few days later the album arrives in the post. In the sleeve notes, Costello describes how, after the success of the album Armed Forces, he was embraced by the corporate pop machine and he was spoiling for a fight.

"This would come to an end in April 1979 at Columbus, Ohio, where a ridiculous drunken argument would culminate in me speaking the exact opposite of my true beliefs in an attempt to provoke a fight that inevitably arrived. That I was speaking in some absurd, exaggerated, supposedly ironic humour, in which everything is expressed in the reverse of that which one knows to be true, is no excuse. There was nothing sparkling or glorious about the wordplay, just the seed of madness. It was the product of crazed indulgence."

Afterwards, Costello received more than 100 death threats, his records were pulled from US playlists and his shows were picketed by the very anti-racist organisation for which he had appeared six months earlier. "The humour of outrage never did sit that well with people and is particularly useless if the intent is garbled drunkenly," he explains.

Get Happy!! was released the following year, and was his tribute to the soul music that had been such an inspiration for him. It was something of an apology. But he never said as much. Pride got the better of him. Costello says that the only time he has ever really been in fashion was in 1979, and he was determined, wittingly or unwittingly, to screw it up.

"I hated just about everything in my world, reserving the greatest disdain for myself," he writes on Get Happy!! After writing all those songs about being a loser, about not being able to get the girl, what was it like when he realised that he could get her? "Well, I hated that. You start to feel wretched about it. For a short period of time I think it brings about a certain self-satisfaction and greed, and then you start to hate yourself pretty quickly." For what? "For being everything you said you didn't like."

I ask him if he feels more secure with age. "Well, you can become more insecure because you've got more to lose. History teaches us that people become more conservative with a small c, more pragmatic or cautious, or timid, whichever word you want to use for not taking chances, and I sort of feel the opposite."

Security, for Costello, is the willingness to flirt with insecurity. Music is in his bones. He talks about growing up in Liverpool and London with his mum Lillian and his dad Ross McManus, the singer and trumpet player. (The only recorded song they ever sang together was I'm A Secret Lemonade Drinker for the R White's advert when he was 17.)

His grandfather had been an army musician who became a ship's musician. "He went to America in the 20s, Kyoto, India. The only ambition I ever had was to see the world, and I've done that." He has apartments in New York and Dublin, but he says he doesn't really feel as if he lives in any one particular place these days. Costello has a grown-up son from his first marriage. What does he do? "He writes..." And he stops himself. His son is another person whose privacy he doesn't want to invade.

What he really loves talking about is music. He tells me how Burt Bacharach, with whom he recorded Painted From Memory, taught him the importance of paring down words ("Three or four years ago I was telling anybody who would listen that my ambition was to not write any words at all"); how he recently heard a wonderful album by the lost soul star Howard Tate; how he and the Attractions were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame along with the Clash and the Police ("The Police were so bad, so appallingly bad, really bad," he says with relish. "It was so funny. It was all the weaknesses of the band amplified by time. Sting just looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. Actually, the unthinkable happened - I felt sorry for him"); how he learnt the importance of phrasing through listening to Sinatra. Then he's on to the intolerant political climate in America and how the Dixie Chicks were lambasted for saying that they were ashamed of coming from Texas, the same state as George Bush.

"The media is so contrived and hysterical. It's terrible. The political debate is so belligerent, all shouting, just like a cartoon, it's all about logos and slogans." As for British politics, he says, they are also just glorified ad men."In the old days there was an establishment against which people railed. Even up to the Margaret Thatcher days there was an establishment. Although it was a new establishment, it was still an establishment. Now there isn't."

Typical Costello - detests the establishment, and complains when it disappears. "Obviously there is a big and bad world happening out there, and maybe there is another time to sing of those things, but I cannot think of anything better to do than to sing of love right now." Has he ever written about love in such a way before? "No, either because it didn't occur to me or because it just didn't happen."

I ask him if he ever steps back and asks how the young nerd who lost Alison could end up with Diana Krall. "Well, people will always say that, won't they?" And he decides to answer a different question - one that he seems to have asked himself. "Well, we just all want to find some peace. You can entertain dark thoughts, you can retain your sense of indignation, disgust with things that deserve those responses and still have some sense of peace..."

He asks me if I think people will listen to the record for what it is, rather than as a piece of potted biography. Well, I say, it's inevitable that people will be interested in the story behind it. "I hope it doesn't crowd anybody," he says. "My intention was not to crowd. It was to make something beautiful. It's the only record I've ever made that aspired to beauty as the prime objective. That's really all I was trying to do. Make something beautiful."

What amazes me about North is Costello's state of total bliss in the second half of the album. While in the first half he was astonished to find himself so lost, now he is even more astonished to find such love. I'm sure he'll probably strike me down for saying so, but I've never heard such rapture in his songs. For once he doesn't disagree. "Well, that's a nice word. I think it is rapturous. Yeah, I'll accept that, thank you."

· North is released on September 15. Costello's UK tour goes to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (October 7), Newcastle Opera House (8), Manchester Bridgewater Hall (10), London Royal Festival Hall (11) and Birmingham Symphony Hall (November 7).

Posted by Post Master at 11:51 AM | Permalink