Elvis selects faves for The Word mag
The Word features Elvis in Word Of Mouth ('People we like...and the things they
like')
MUSIC:
I don't play it incessantly, I absorbed it really quickly, but The Streets album (A grand don't come for free) is great, especially Dry your eyes. It's the Madness thing, in terms of the stories, but with melancholia. It's a very melancholic record, but in a great way. It might be a funny thing to say, but it reminds me of Tony Hancock, 'Sunday afternoon at home' - that sense of England confining you. It's raining, you're outside, it's Sunday and everything's shut. You know that one where he goes "I have to go and get the money for that thing" and it all goes wrong. You know that feeling. It doesn't have to be the same details.
There's a group out of Los Angeles called Rilo Kiley who've had a couple of records out that are really good. Pete Thomas' daughter has a band (The Like), they're all teenagers, and Rilo Kiley are friends of theirs. They're a little bit older, but they're on the LA scene. Some of those bands have a similar sound but Rilo Kiley have a couple of really good songwriters. The girl that sings (Jenny Lewis) is a really good lyricist. They record in Ohio or somewhere (Nebraska actually). I just got sent a white label of their new one (More Adventures) and the songs are tremendous. They have that eye for detail The Street's songs have, but it's a totally different culture. I don't know where the stories are coming from but one of the songs is about a girl having a conversation with a friend. She's saying "Remember when we said if you weren't free, that was the end of our lives? And now you're settled down, you're married and you've got a place that sells antiques and your baby's on the way. Meanwhile I've got this man who writes to me twice a week and says he's gonna come and see me out in California". And it goes on, and the song turns round again, and the next verse says something like, "You called me up and you were crying and you said that you only married cause you thought your time was running out, and you heard your husband on the phone to some woman saying 'I love you baby, I'll leave her, I'm coming to California'..." You realise at the very end it's her friend who's betrayed her. Totally amazing. And it's all in a three-minute song. And the melodies! They're young, but the melodies are like Nilsson or George Harrison melodies. From a weird place that you'd never imagine a band their age relating to. Popular songs, not trying to be hip or pounding or anything. Just really well written.
Olabelle I really like. They're a group that play traditional gospel. They have about six singers and they're great. Amy Helm is one of them, she's Levon Helm's daughter, so I don't know, maybe they grew up around Woodstock. They're on DMZ, which is T-Bone Burnett's label, and they're on tour with Diana (Krall) just now. It's a different thing for her to have that kind of group opening up for a jazz concert.
And hey - I like my wife's record too!
BOOKS:
East of Nowhere by my friend Robert Chalmers is a great book about a tabloid editor who falls spectacularly from grace, and is improbably redeemed. It's fantastic, really funny. I actually wrote a note for the book: "This is the book that justifies the use of the words 'dark' and 'savage' that they attach to so many books, falsely"
I'm reading a Hans Christian Anderson biography at the moment, but that's more for research (for a piece of musical theatre Costello is writing to mark next year's bicentenary of the birth of the Danish author) but it's still a pleasure to read. His life was extrememly odd, very interesting, very bizarre.
FILM/DVD:
There's one Hank Williams documentary (Honky Tonk Blues) which I loved - it has all this footage of him singing which they found recently. Is it warts and all? You can't avoid warts when he died in the back of a car! He didn't die a very glorious death - it's a sad story - but you get a lot of interviews with people that really knew him, family and one of his ex-wives. You know, he was young when he died (29); he could still be alive now.
I went to the movies to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore's saying a lot of things that we knew already, but he's making sure the story gets across. Things in it were fantastic, but as a piece of filmmaking it's got flaws - the weight attached to certain things was sometimes questionable. The right-wing press used that to devalue the argument. But it doesn't mean it's worthless, it just means he's not Orson Welles or Hitchcock or Renoir. He's a propogandist, a provocateur, and as that, he's great. Somebody has to do that right now. If it get's the guy out, if some people actually wake up and question something, even if not every argument holds up, that's good. A hundred million people didn't vote last time, and if they all vote, that's the best thing that could happen. They've got to vote this time. And not for the wrong guy.