CostelloNews.com

Love actually
Dan Cairns
The Sunday Times

When Diana Krall embarked on a 'fearful experience' with her husband, Elvis Costello, there was no knowing it would produce her most exciting album yet, says DAN CAIRNS

Even the most diehard Elvis Costello fans will admit to reservations about the great man's forays into crooning balladry. Costello himself has suggested it's the gap in his front teeth that makes his singing sound, to some, more like spitting, and can render even his most tender lyrics diatribes written in someone else's blood. Try as he might, the vituperative ranter of Pump It Up and I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea has rarely succeeded in making songs born of heartache or romantic rapture sound anything but very, very angry indeed.

Well, Diana Krall has arrived at a solution. Not only did she marry Costello last Christmas (and doubtless her new husband will see this as the crucial intervention). More resonantly, for fans of both, the couple began writing songs together in the first flush of a romance that began shortly after they met at the Grammy awards in 2002. And six of those compositions form the heart of Krall's new album, The Girl in the Other Room. In retrospect, it seems obvious: pair one of the most original lyric-writers alive with a vocalist who sings like Kathleen Turner speaks, and you have torch songs of love, loss and renewal that have been forged in the flames.

"You set out to write one tune together and you end up with about 10, then six of those go on an album," laughs Krall, recalling the first tentative steps she and Costello took towards a collabor- ation, with him sitting with pen and paper in one room, and her at the piano next door (hence the album's title). At first glance, the two musicians seemed unlikely writing partners. But how often do first impressions and glib assumptions stand up? If they did, the Canadian's career would have been defined by her critics' dismissal of her as a calculating purveyor of smooth jazz for the masses, as Joan the Baptist to Norah Jones's jackpot-hitting Messiah. Instead, as her CV demonstrates, it has ranged from classical training and piano-bar performances as a teen in British Columbia, via distinctive and original slants on the jazz standards and, later, bigger budget albums of perhaps overslick arrangements -to this, the 39-year-old's most intriguing and least categorisable record to date.

Wife and husband duly embarked on a process Krall has described as potentially a "fearful experience". Instead, it took flight, as Costello's famous work ethic and musicianly empathy encouraged Krall to push herself in a situation she found far from comfort-able. She was, after all, an artist who had up to that point built her career entirely on her interpretations of others' songs. But the process was made much more fraught by the fact that it was taking place after a period of trauma in her life, during which she lost her mother to cancer, followed just weeks later by the death of her great friend and mentor, the singer Rosemary Clooney. A further four months on, her relationship with her then boyfriend collapsed.

Krall is clearly wary of her new album being received as a personal diary and nothing else. "Unfortunately," she says, "people are sort of writing more about that than the music, and that's new for me." Never the most expansive of interviewees, she sounds as if she views the task of promoting her new album as a particularly unwelcome and intrusive one. "All the talking," she begins. "You start overanalysing. You start to go, 'What the hell am I talking about? What am I doing this for?'"

It is a rare musician -and usually only the absolutely nuts ones -who doesn't say something along the lines of: "Don't ask me, it's all there in the songs." Partly, this comes from an unwillingness to constantly revisit a moment they need to think represented the lancing of the boil. Sometimes, it's because the most eloquent lyricists are in person the least coherent. Often, it's as if the daily reminders of their "public" faces cause them to shield their private ones in horror. Krall is a bit of all three.

Thus, she will comfortably shoot the breeze about the jazz greats she has met and worked with since she left Canada on a music scholarship to America. "It's typical," she laughs, "especially for an artist from a small town. You want to go to New York and be a jazz musician." Or about taking Costello to an old New York club haunt -a visit described on the track I've Changed My Address -and recalling being there, aged 24, "seeing someone like Freddie Hubbard sitting at the bar, and it being completely a jazz dream come true". And she either has no inkling, or, you suspect, has a very strong one indeed, that this is not what her millions of non-jazz-schooled fans want to read about. They want the salacious stuff about letters from Bill Clinton, a rumoured liaison with jazz nut Clint Eastwood, the friendship with Sir Elton.

Her reticence is surely also shyness, though it can suddenly bare its fangs. At one point, venturing to suggest that her collaboration with Costello must have been an intense experience for a new couple under the same roof, and hearing her verbal shutters begin their descent, I said that I didn't mean intense as in mad.

"No," she barked back. "I don't either."

Yet the standards applied to Krall seem not so much double as multiple. On one level, her looks have, perfectly sensibly, been deployed as a means of bringing hesitant jazz loiterers over the commercial threshold. On another, the occasionally over-the-top leggy-blonde artwork apparently robs her of the right to be taken seriously. And on yet another, the sting and bite of the attack in her piano-playing, and in that gloriously rumbling and conspiratorial, nearing tenor voice, are glossed over, as if a music student from Vancouver couldn't possibly know what she's singing about.

To which the only answer is:

listen to The Girl in the Other Room. And there, after her multilayered and -textured readings of songs by Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Mose Allison, as well as her husband's Almost Blue, immerse yourself in the closing quartet of tracks that she and Costello wrote. If you need any proof that Krall "knows what she's singing about", you will find it here, in the forlorn cadences of Narrow Daylight, the brutally candid and self-knowing Abandoned Masquerade; above all on Departure Bay, where Krall returns home for Christmas, shortly after her mother's death, and finds hope and renewal amid the calamity of loss.

"It's what we do as artists," she says, reflecting on her compulsion to make sense of things through music. "That's why we don't sit around and talk about it. That's why we do it.

The Girl in the Other Room is released on April 12 on Verve MICHAEL O'NEILL/CORBIS, OUTLINE Listen to excerpts from The Girl in the Other Room on April's The Month CD Rom

(C) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2004