CostelloNews.com

A man for all seasons

MARY DICKIE, SUN MEDIA

North, south, east, west, ballads, blues, ballet - Elvis Costello has certainly been busy over the past year. This month the singer/songwriter/composer/iconoclast will release two very different albums. The Deliveryman, a semi-conceptual rock 'n' roll album recorded with his band the Imposters, is out Tuesday, while Il Sogno, the orchestral score for a ballet inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, comes out Sept. 28.

These works come barely a year after Costello's last major opus, the song cycle North, which was written about falling in love with pianist Diana Krall, who's now his wife, and whose recent album he also worked on.

In addition, over the past year Costello made a appearance in the Cole Porter film biography De-Lovely - singing Let's Misbehave - was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was even nominated for an Oscar for The Scarlet Tide, a song from the movie Cold Mountain.

It's a remarkably varied creative outpouring - and would be even if the new albums weren't both so dazzling.

After the moody, '50s-style pop ballads of North, which topped Billboard's jazz charts for five weeks, The Deliveryman represents a literal switch in direction. Costello went south to record it in Mississippi, employing a more raw sound and including vocal contributions from Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams.

The album's 13 songs - which include The Scarlet Tide and The Judgement, originally written for Solomon Burke, as well as hurtin' country songs like Heart-Shaped Bruise and Country Darkness, the soul stirrer Either Side of the Same Town and the raucous single Monkey to Man - draw from country, blues and Memphis soul and hold together, more or less, in a kind of Southern gothic storyline.

On the surface, the gorgeous Il Sogno is about as different as can be - pristine, orchestral and instrumental, and recorded in London with renowned classical conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. But on closer listening it reveals itself as a rich, playful and, dare I say, accessible mix of just as many of its composer's musical interests - classical, big band jazz, soul, old Broadway musicals, folk dances, even circus music.

The remarkable thing is the way that one vibrant musical brain can juggle so many different styles without getting overwhelmed,

"These two albums did overlap," Costello admitted recently, during a phone interview. "I wrote the story outline of The Deliveryman about five years ago, as well as a couple of songs. Then I got the commission to write Il Sogno, which was unprecedented - having the opportunity to respond to not only the Shakespearean narrative but to the dances. I had to learn all these things, and hope that my instincts about orchestral writing were correct.

"And the day that I started recording Il Sogno, I was rehearsing the Imposters to go out on the When I Was Cruel tour. So in the daytime it was the orchestra, and in the nighttime it was rock 'n' roll. Luckily, I can keep the two methodologies in my head at the same time, as well as my appreciation for different types of music."

When he was ready to record The Deliveryman, Costello took his Imposters - keyboardist Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Davey Kerragher - to Sweet Tea studio in Oxford, Mississippi, to work with Tupelo native Dennis Herring.

"I had a strong feeling that I wanted to record my next album in the South, I think because the response of the audience there seems less governed by their knowledge of my past," he explains. "Pete and Davey had played on a Buddy Guy record called Sweet Tea, which had turned me on to the studio. So we set up in Oxford, played the songs in a club as soon as we learned them, went into the studio and cut the record in a matter of days. We also went to a radio studio in Clarksdale, where a phenomenal number of musicians came from, to do Monkey to Man.

"The trap you can fall into by making music in the South is to feel that's giving some sort of authenticity to your work," he adds. "But I think you can hear that's not really what we're doing. Even when we take a song form as a model, we always subvert it."

The Deliveryman is, loosely, the story of a shadowy figure named Abel who's a source of fascination, love and danger for three women - Vivian, Geraldine and Geraldine's daughter Ivy. Only seven of the 13 tracks are specifically about them, but the others kind of fit in thematically, and anyway Costello likes things to stay open-ended.

"I decided that I wouldn't tell a final version of the story on this record," he explains. "I wanted to leave some threads trailing. I didn't feel its strength was having a beginning, middle and end so much as moments that hung off the narrative in the title song. And the related songs are the points of view, the emotional experiences of the other characters.

"But I realized that if I made it all about these characters, it'd be a claustrophobic drama. And I'd just recorded North, a series of very emotional, very personal, completely honest songs that didn't admit the presence of the outside world - they were concentrated totally on an emotional transformation. I realized that telling another story that was sealed off from the world wouldn't be realistic. So the world comes into this one."

That's not to say Costello wrote about the Iraq war or anything particularly timely, just that he made sure the songs remained open to interpretation. The Scarlet Tide, for instance, was about the U.S. civil war in Cold Mountain, but it could be about Iraq, or any war.

"And the scope of the story is greater than this record," Costello adds, "because I imported the Abel character from a song I wrote for Johnny Cash about 15 years ago called Hidden Shame. It's based on a true story about a man in prison for 30 years, who confesses to the childhood murder of his best friend. That got me thinking about children who commit murder, and where they go.

"I thought maybe the reason Abel is familiar to these women is because they saw his picture in the paper as a child. And the unresolved aspect of the story is that he may still contain a homicidal intent. The song Button My Lip, for instance, gives you an idea that he's not exactly in control of himself.

"I told the story out of sequence deliberately, to make it upsetting and mobile and free-form. And I've got other songs about the characters I didn't record that I can bring into concerts, or even future records."

Indeed, Costello is fond of writing sequels. Monkey to Man, for example, is a response to Dave Bartholomew's R&B hit The Monkey, and he added an updated version of American Without Tears to the Blood and Chocolate reissue.

"I think it's interesting to have information that lies just off the stage and maybe gives extra weight to the song," he says. "In this case it could carry on in a number of ways.

"I like the freedom of not having everything explained. It's a rock 'n' roll record - I don't want it to be all tied up with a ribbon."

Costello won't be touring North America until next year, but two shows he recorded in Memphis with Emmylou Harris this weekend will become his first-ever concert DVD.