CostelloNews.com

Costello never one for a musical niche

By Charles Passy, Palm Beach Post Arts Writer
Friday, February 20, 2004

Just when Elvis Costello fans thought they could
breathe a sigh of relief that the eclectic rocker had
returned to his loud, angry roots with 2002's When I
Was Cruel, the British-born artist has unearthed
another facet of his creative persona.

Meet the jazz balladeer.

Such is the Elvis Costello you'll hear on North, his
latest album featuring 11 songs in a mostly
melancholic, slow-paced mode. And it's also likely the
Elvis Costello you'll hear in person, when he brings
his North-inspired tour, featuring his longtime
keyboardist Steve Nieve, to the Mizner Park
Amphitheater on Saturday night.

But the 49-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer
insists it's a mistake to see this as a new twist in
his three-decade career, which was launched in 1977
with My Aim Is True, his widely praised,
punk-influenced debut. If anything, his early success
may be an aberration.

"I'm a ballad singer who happens to sing rock 'n'
roll," he said by phone last week.

And in the same toying-with-expectations manner, he's
quick to dismiss any arty notions of North being a
"song cycle."

"It summons up grand images when you use those words,"
he says.

At the same time, Costello admits the North songs are
generally unified by a relaxed style. In that respect,
it's easy to see the kind of influence his new (and
third) wife, the jazz singer Diana Krall, might have
had on the project.

Says Costello of the songs: "They don't have easy hook
lines. They're more like a monologue. And they're very
contained in the low register and very still in terms
of tempo and rhythms."

Costello (birth name Declan McManus) also makes the
point that he asked the performers on the album,
including both jazz and classical musicians, to take a
less-is-more approach. "I don't have the musicians do
dazzling things because that would have been a
contradiction to the mood of the record.... I was
asking them to play with such stillness."

Costello's head trip

Can North come from the same artist who gave us such
raucously pointed tunes as Radio, Radio, Pump It Up,
(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea and (What's So Funny
'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?

"With me, the different voices I employ represent
different kinds of moods," Costello counters. But he's
quick to add that they "all come out of the same
head."

And it's a head that's always been quick to embrace a
challenge. Costello first surprised his listeners with
Almost Blue, his 1981 album of country covers. In
1993, he teamed up with the Brodsky Quartet, a
classical ensemble, for The Juliet Letters, a
pop-meets-chamber music mélange. The inspiration for
the partnership? A string quartet offers distinct
advantages over a rock group, Costello says.

"You're able to turn corners less consciously," he
explains. (Costello also joined forces with another
classical artist, opera singer Anne-Sofie Von Otter,
in the 2001 album, For the Stars.)

Perhaps Costello's most famous collaboration was his
1998 album with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory.
And don't forget his partnership with Paul McCartney,
which resulted in Veronica, one of Costello's few
songs to crack the Top 20.

From these two pop greats, Costello says he learned
the value of "extreme attention to detail." And the
importance of staying true to a song, especially
musically.

"With both of them, once the melodies are established,
they're unyielding rhythmically. They won't
accommodate additional notes.... They want the melody
to be the shape it was," he says of Bacharach and
McCartney. It's in stark contrast to Costello's more
literary-minded approach to songwriting. "My first
impulse is (to focus on) what is being said, not how
it's being sung," he adds.

OutKast, Schubert

But for all Costello's gifts as a songwriter, his
contributions as a singer may be just as significant.
His voice has a blunt edge, but it can be used to
rhapsodic effect. Consider his lilting rendition of
Charles Aznavour's She, which was on the soundtrack to
the Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant comedy, Notting Hill.

It was an opportunity that Costello, who describes
himself as the vocal equivalent of a character actor,
couldn't refuse. "It's like being William Bendix or
Walter Pidgeon and suddenly getting to play the Cary
Grant role," he says, continuing the cinematic
analogy.

He jumped on a similar chance to record Smile for
Japanese television. "I don't write many songs with
that kind of romantic purity to them," he says.

Costello keeps up-to-date with the latest musical
happenings. He mentions OutKast's Hey Ya! as a record
that has particularly impressed him.

"It's fantastic, not so much as a song, but as a great
piece of recording," he says.

But he's just as likely to listen to jazz or classical
as rock. Ask him to name some of his favorite
composers and he'll quickly mention Ralph Vaughan
Williams, John Dowland and Erich Korngold.

Oh, and don't forget Schubert, who practically
invented the art song as we know it. "He's the
greatest songwriter in history," Costello says.

ELVIS COSTELLO: 8 p.m. Saturday, Mizner Park
Amphitheater, Boca Raton. Tickets: $43-$55. Phone:
966-3309.

charles_passy@pbpost.com