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Costello, creativity - and Cash
Rockin' new album came from a song Elvis wrote for the Man in Black

By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
September 23, 2004

Even the biggest and best songwriters follow something of the same creative route. They wait for some songs to come. They flesh them out. They record a few, see what works, what holds together. Eventually an album comes together.

This, however, is Elvis Costello.

So he had this sort of musical play in mind called The Delivery Man, but instead of putting it on a stage, he wrote songs. He plucked a main character from an obscure song he wrote for Johnny Cash years ago. He came up with a scenario.

Then he decided he'd record it fast in a tiny studio in the South, soaking up roots influences along the way.

Then he threw out half the songs, including key points of the story line. He put the rest together in no particular chronological order, and released The Delivery Man this past Tuesday as one of his most rocking albums since 1986's Blood and Chocolate.

Oh, and an entirely separate album - his classical interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream as played by the London Symphony Orchestra, Il Sogno - was released the same day.

"People tend to say, 'Which is really you? This art-music person or this rock 'n' roll person?' They're both me. And they're both me simultaneously. How about that?" Costello says from his New York home. "I'm 50 this year. I wanted to do something to celebrate that. I love all this music. I don't expect everybody who likes The Delivery Man to like Il Sogno, or vice-versa. But some will be able to follow my train of thought through both."

Costello gave himself and his band The Imposters (drummer Pete Thomas, pianist Steve Nieve, and bassist Davey Faragher) a tight set of tasks for The Delivery Man.

"My original plan was to go out on tour, play live, then go in the studio for five days in various Southern locations," Costello says. "I was quickly persuaded that I'd go bankrupt before I'd ever get the record made doing that. I had to choose a town and chose Oxford (Mississippi), with a backup plan to go to Memphis for a week."

That backup was never needed; Costello was a huge fan of two Buddy Guy albums - one rocking, one acoustic - that had been recorded in Oxford. "The main reason was Sweet Tea Studios just sounded like a place where we'd get this record made with the least pain," he says.

So the touring plan was pared down.

"We played in the tavern in the middle of Oxford, two nights, two sets a night like a regular club band," he says. "We went in the studio the next week to record."

The five days of recording was cut to about two, and the record was done, save for one last track put down in Clarksdale, Miss.

"It's not really like any other record I made. It uses existing forms of American folk music and country and R&B as a starting point, so it has a counterpart in King of America. In the sonic approach, its closest relative is Blood & Chocolate," he says.

As for the story line, it's unlike anything Costello has done, even if the casual listener never realizes there's a story being told at all.

"At one point I did think about doing it like a theatrical piece where it would all be told in a logical order," he says. He exploded that idea and let the pieces fall wherever.

In a nutshell, the original tale was of three women - Vivian, a bitter divorcee with a vivid fantasy life; her friend Geraldine, a war widow; and Geraldine's daughter, Ivy.

One day an enigmatic deliveryman, Able, comes to town. Each thinks they vaguely recognize the mysterious stranger and each imposes their own impressions on him.

"What they don't know about him and what's not said anywhere on the record is I've imported this character from a song I wrote for Johnny Cash years ago, a song called Hidden Shame," Costello says.

That hidden shame was that as a child, Able killed his friend. "The secret that Able carries is that he was a homicidal child. He's been rehabilitated into society. That's why they recognize him. They have a vague memory of having seen his picture in the paper when he was a child. That's why he has this edge to him."

Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams were brought in at points to sing harmony or duets, giving a flesh-and-blood feminine presence to the women in the play.

"It's not a story you've got to follow from beginning to end," Costello says. "Most of the narrative is contained in the song The Delivery Man." He didn't lay it out in a linear fashion as originally planned because "it's supposed to be something that can work on your imagination. . . . With a record, you can put things in an unusual order, and you can hear the songs by chance and get drawn into the story or you can ignore the story and just enjoy the songs as songs."

Songs like Bedlam and Monkey To Man don't relate directly to the story line, but can be interpreted as the residents of the town watching the rest of the world go by, especially the theme of man's war-infused innate cruelty in Monkey to Man.

"I didn't want these characters to be living in isolation to reality," Costello explains.

The sounds range from driving rock (Monkey to Man, Needle Time, Button My Lip) to exquisite Costello ballads (including the closing Scarlet Tide).

Il Sogno is the release, finally, of a project finished two years ago where Costello scored A Midsummer Night's Dream, and oversaw the recording by the London Symphony Orchestra with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

"You reach the time in life when you have the patience and the form" for classical music, he says. "What seemed like a bewildering long story when you were 8 or 9 years old suddenly becomes something that you can find the time to live with. Around 1982 I started listening a lot to Debussey and Ravel. Later on I became really interested in Schubert."

The same sounds and themes run through music, even Beethoven, Costello says.

"If you listen to one of the movements, he's suddenly playing ragtime. And it's 100 years before ragtime," he says. "The human spirit kind of leads you a certain way to express something."

Costello fans can watch for a full tour to come after the first of the year. In recent days, he played two nights in Memphis to record his first-ever concert DVD. It'll come out next year too, accompanied by a DVD of early television appearances with the Attractions as well as videos of his classic early works. He'll treat the latter with new commentary and a sense of humor, he says, as "the theatrical conceits in them, such as they are, are so ludicrous that you can only have fun with them."

Mark Brown is the popular music critic. Brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2674