CostelloNews.com

Stereophile , Nov. 2004
Unbound Curiosity

by Jim Bessman

FROM NEW WAVE ROCKER TO NEW MADE BALLET
COMPOSER, ELVIS COSTELLO REMAINS THE
DEFINITION OF RESTLESS CREATIVity

When Elvis Costello was inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, he was accompanied by his
bandmates the
Attractions, whose debut in 1978 on Costello’s classic
second album, This Year’s
Model, at the, height of the punk rock/new wave era,
established a ferocious rock
intensity that remains Costello’s trademark.
But even at this early stage of his now renowned
career Costello displayed artistic aspirations that
seemed downright reckless, at least from a pop music
standpoint. For example, owners of the first rush of
import versions of This Year’s Model still prize the
bonus single that came with it and included “Stranger
in the House,” the country gem that Costello
re-recorded the following year with George Jones prior
to the making of his own full-fledged, 1981 Nashville
country album, Almost Blue, which was produced by
Billy Sherrill.

Country music, as Costello fans have long since
learned, was merely his first divergence from rock
constraints, though the 1978 live compilation Live
Stiffs which also starred Nick Lowe and Ian Dury
(members of the Stiff stable), also hinted at
Costello’s creative ambitions and foretold his
sure-handed grasp. On that compilation a cover of “I
Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” demonstrated
Costello’s affinity for the pop of Burt Bacharach and
Hal David, and his mastery of its vocal mechanics.
Twenty years latei he would deftly collaborate with
Burt Bacharach on Painted from Memory, having already
co-written songs with Paul McCartney.

Indeed, by l982’s Imperial Bedroom - his seventh album
in his prodigious first five years as a recording
artist—Costello was being hailed by rock critics as
his generations answer to George Gershwin and the
other great popular songwriters of the first half of
the 20th century. This came three years after he’d
released a sparse version of Rodgers and Hart’s “My
Funny Valentine,” and 22 years before he jovially
performed Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave” in the
Porter biopic De-Lovely. In between he had performed
with Tony Bennett on the pop-jazz giant’s landmark
Unplugged album (1994), and enlisted legendary jazz
trumpeter Chet Baker for his 1983 album Punch the
Clock. He would soon collaborate with contemporary New
York jazz group the Jazz Passengers, and earlier this
year he co-wrote material for jazz vocalist Diana
Krall, who is Costello’s new bride.

Most ambitious, though, are Costello’s efforts in
classical music, which commenced with his 1993
recording and touring affiliation with English chamber
group the Brodsky Quartet, and a lesser-known 2001
collaboration with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter.
But these projects now pale next to II Sogno (The
Dream), his first full-length orchestral work, which
was released on the prestigious classical label
Deutsche Grammophon the same day (September21) his
latest rock album, The Delivery Man, was released by
Nashville’s Lost Highway Americana label. Both were
effectively premiered in three extraordinary concerts
in July during the annual Lincoln Center
Festival in New York, Costello’s new home town.

“That was unprecedented, really, having just arrived
in the city and suddenly being given the opportunity
to perform at Lincoln Center —its central performing
place,” reflects Costello, midway between the Lincoln
Center Festival and his new albums’ release date.
For the first concert, Costello employed Holland’s
famed jazz big band, the Metropole Orkest, in a
wide-ranging program that gave his songs a modified
punch and swing. The second night offered a more
standard Costello rock show with his band, the
Imposters: former Attractions Pete Thomas on drums and
keyboard virtuoso Steve Nieve (who accompanied
Costello all London Symphony three nights), and
bassist Davey Faragher. This group highlighted new
blues-inflected songs from The Delivery Man.
The grand finale was the North American premiere of II
Sogno, performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and
conducted by Brad Lubman. The piece is an
adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
commissioned by Italy’s Aterballeto ballet company in
2000. The hour-long score was then recorded with the
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson
Thomas.

“The chances of repeating those first and third
concerts are remote compared with the ease of doing
concerts with the Imposters,” Costello continues.
“This doesn’t mean that the music won’t be heard in
concert again — or on record: I’d love to make an
album with a lineup like the Metropole, because it’s
such an exciting sound.” Costello had previously
played with the Metropole at the North Sea Jazz
Festival.
“I had a lot of material that had appeared in
different guises going back to the mid-‘90s with the
Brodskys, and I’d worked with the Mingus Big Band,” he
says, citing his collaborations with the late Charles
Mingus’s surviving band. “So I’d had the opportunity
to explore different groupings of musicians, and at
the same time develop the necessary skills to clearly
communicate the arrangements.”

Regarding Il Sogno , Costello
notes his involvement in orchestrating his last album,
North, the 2003 classical/jazz art-song cycle that
evoked his work with the Brodskys after he’d
temporarily laid off the Imposters. “11 Sogno was
bigger-scale in terms of writing on a page in order to
motivate a group of musicians who don’t necessarily
share your musical
knowledge. I couldn’t just go, ‘Play it like that
Garnet Mimms song that we all know and love,’ which I
did all the time with the Attractions and Imposters.”
Rather, classical musicians “work off the page,”
Costello learned, and respond live to “hand signals
and threats and creative bowing.” At Lincoln Center’s
Avery Fisher Hall, where all three Costello Festival
concerts took place, he listened to II Sogno from the
balcony, much as he had at the premiere in Bologna,
where it propelled the ballet dancers. With input from
Tilson Thomas, Costello made revisions before the
score was recorded, the goal being to achieve an album
that could be appreciated on its own, since the visual
cues of the dancers would no longer pertain.

“He asked me a lot of proper, creatively critical
questions of what my intentions were with the score,
so he could then proceed instinctively based on his
own scholarship [concerning] the many other ballet
versions [of A Midsummer Night’s Dream],” says
Costello. (Mendelssohn’s music, for instance, has been
choreographed by the likes of George Balanchine and
Sir Frederick Ashton.) “He made me rethink some of the
sections, and I was grateful for the revisions. Some
were as simple as [marking them with] others needed
rewrites. But that’s what creative criticism should
be: It should inspire and not discourage.”
Costello contrasts the constructive suggestions of
Tilson Thomas with the opinions of music critics, his
relationship with whom has long been, at best,
tenuous. “It’s different because he’s a musician, for
one, and I don’t know competent musicians who are
critics,” he says, not without lingering irritation,
perhaps — and prideful defiance. “There’s the sense of
a jaded palate among some writers, who seem incapable
of finding joy in music any more — and a cultural
suspicion as well. That can be really discouraging for
some groups, but I actually don’t give a damn what
anybody says — other than, being human, I’m bound to
be exasperated by boneheadedness or flat-out lies. But
certainly I’ve never changed anything motivated by
what anybody thought — least of all critics. I write
solely for myself, and shape my music in some way to
open it up to an audience, and the amount of thought
given to critics — — or, for
that matter, record companies — I could write on the
back of a postage stamp! Maybe I’m the poorer for that
financially, because I’m ruthless in that regard. But
it’s never bothered me that much.”
Warming to the subject, Costello credits his
audience’s ability to “make up their own minds” when
it comes to supporting the many tangents his career
has taken since This Years Model “They’re not easily
swayed by fashion and my idiotic commentary,” he
jokes, then turns at least semiserious again in
confronting Il Sogno’s potential, perhaps inevitable,
dismissal by classical purists.

“To attach a classical label [Deutsche Grammophon] to
it says more about the label people that Ii Sogno is
on their label than it says about me, I think. It
shows a desire to expand their range and embrace new
pieces written for orchestra rather than just existing
repertoire. But I don’t think of Il Sogno as a
classical piece: It just happens to be on a classical
label. It’s more an orchestral piece commissioned by a
ballet company — or, more accurately, a dance company.
Now it has a life of its own as a piece of orchestral
music.” In fact, Tilson Thomas has said that Ii Sogno
contains elements of pop and jazz, as well as
classical.

“It’s very similar to working with a rock’n’roll
band,” continues Costello. “It’s all about writing
songs and then arranging them with a band —whatever it
is —by making reference to a shared knowledge of
music.”

He illustrates with a hypothetical surmountable
challenge for his own rock bands:
“Take an Al Green record, for instance, and join it to
a George Jones song. I know I can’t do something like
that with quite the same spontaneity with orchestras
because the music has to be written down, but there
are still references to a shared knowledge of musical
history in order to make a recognizable point with the
audience.”

But the nature of Costello’s piece must not be
overlooked, as he hastens to explain. “The point is
being lost that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy,
and that the music was originally composed to support
dancing — but now it tries to express a narrative and
give an aural picture of the characters. Every
composer’s take on this conundrum is how to represent
the narrative and the characters in a different way. I
made certain choices: Some music borrows from known
orchestral idioms, like fanfares and rather grandiose
flourishes, but my conceit was to make the fairies
swinging fairies, accompanied by a big band. But
obviously there are moments of tenderness in the story
allegiances that are transformed and the bewilderment
that that brings — and a celebratory resolution. So
there are huge possibilities for a writer, and none of
them begin and end as I would have done in a song.”

Costello was actually asked to write songs for the
ballet — one conceit he rejected outright “not because
there aren’t potential lyrics, but they wanted me to
write my own lyrics — and I thought it would be
ludicrous to add anything to Shakespeare! I’ll be
happy for people just to listen with their own
imaginations.” Few, however, will likely imagine the
amount of work that went into Il Sogno. Costello, who
has been writing using music notation for only 10
years, eschewed computer tools, writing out in pencil
a 200-page score in approximately 10 weeks. In
addition to the standard orchestral configuration, the
score include parts for vibraphone and a cimbalom (a
Hungarian hammer dulcimer).

“I had in my head which instruments would achieve the
best colors and effects, and the results surpassed my
imagination,” says Costello. “So I feel very lucky to
have had this opportunity—to sit in that theater and
have that music that you only imagined emerge in the
darkness before the dancers came out. You never have
that perspective on your own material, hearing it
played live by a group of musicians that are beyond
your technical ability to play. It’s a magical
experience that I highly recommend for anyone with the
ambition to do [it]. The greatest fairground ride in
the world.”

He is reminded, however, that he first recorded with
an orchestra — the Royal Philharmonic - back in 1982,
at the Royal Albert Hall, for a live UK single version
of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “I’m Your Toy”— an
Almost Blue album track.

“That was the first time I played the Albert Hall!” he
marvels. “There was still a gap in the culture between
rock’n’roll and so-called legitimate music, and we had
to edit the contents of the album because the
management had banned rock’n’roll after a Mothers of
Invention concert! But an album of country ballads
wasn’t that dangerous, and it was really an exercise
in dressing the music modestly with a tiny string
section in really grand clothes and a big pageant.”

Later that year came the heavily orchestrated Imperial
Bedroom, with Steve Nieve arranging and Beatles
engineer Geoff Emerick behind the board.
“It was quite rich in instrumental detail,” Costello
recalls. “We said, ‘Let’s beat the Beatles!’ in a
charming, childish way, but part of the beauty of
popular success is being able to go with a big pop
folly. Fortunately, we carried it off, taking a lot of
cues from the Beatles’ sense of ambition in bringing
in classical people because of the colors involved.”
The remainder of the l980s and ‘90s likewise involved,
for Costello, “learning how to bring in colors with
intricate arrangements —without writing them down,” he
continues. “I consciously thought of [the eclectic
1989 album] Spike as being arranged by trial and error
in the studio: I’d put things in and arrange them if
it didn’t work, which is what I’d read how Brian
Wilson did it — because he didn’t write stuff down,
but made conflicting elements agree.”
Costello learned basic music notation when he met the
Brodsky Quartet. “Then, over the next 10 years, I
commenced writing for one group or another. In between
I also made rock’n’roll records: I wrote songs for
Wendy James [Transvision Vamp singer’s entire 1993
album,
Now Ain’t the Time for Your Years] in a really raw
punk style that led to the reassembly of the
Attractions with Brutal Youth [1994]. Then I had the
idea of being able to make retrospective records in
the time of life you’re in, and that’s what All This
Useless Beauty [1996] achieved: It couldn’t have been
written when I was 22.”

By now, however, the Attractions were disintegrating
for the last time. “We weren’t firing like an engine
as we had done up to 1986,” concedes Costello, who
then turned his attention to his Imposters. “The
fortunate thing is that since I made When I Was Cruel
[2002], I’ve spent a lot of time on the road with the
Imposters — which is a totally different band, even
with two of the same people [as the Attractionsl,
because we’re different people now, and life has
taken us to different places. Three of us spend most
of our time in North America, and Steve’s in Paris,
and where you hve affects how you experience music day
to day, both as a listener and working musician.”

The “virtue of the Attractions,” Costello volunteers,
“and the reason they didn’t mature as a band, was that
it was all about youthful ego and soloing, much like
the Who and other English rock bands, with people
trying to grab the spotlight.”
He then speaks of Davey Faragher, who performed in a
sibling group and with John Hiatt before hooking up
in Los Angeles with Pete Thomas in Vonda Shepard’s
backup band (they’ve since formed a country trio, Jack
Shit, which plays regularly in L.A.):
“He’s locked in with Pete, but he also sings, which is
great because the Attractions never had a reliable
harmony singer.”

It was Faragher’s and Thomas’s participation on Buddy
Guy’s 2001 album, Sweet Tea, that led to the recording
of The Delivery Man at Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford,
Mississippi. “They came back and said what a great
studio it was, and I had a lot of songs that seemed to
need a musical world outside New York or L.A. or
London or Dublin. It really made them sound more
authentic.”
Costello had been “looking for a framework” to lay out
the loose story of The Delivery Man, whose title track
concerns a vaguely defined character and his effect on
the lives of three disparate women.

“I decided not to make it into a strict narrative
form, and instead start out with the most dramatic
song [“Button My Lip”] and then go back, so that in
the process of listening to the album as a whole, if
it doesn’t make literal sense, it hopefully makes
imaginable sense,” he says. “In the end, it’s just
about life and things that I felt moved to write
about.”

He singles out “Monkey to Man,” which he has called a
sequel to pivotal New Orleans rock‘n’roller Dave
Bartholomew’s 1954 single “The Monkey.” The song
likewise lambastes Homo sapiens, this time from a zoo
monkey’s imprisoned perspective. He also cites
“Bedlam,” “a sort of Nativity story about refugees”
that has contemporary implications relating to Middle
Eastern affairs.
“We’re all in the same boat or town as people,” he
says.

“Ordinary people, not politicians or figureheads or
prophets or bogeymen, but people dealing with life and
death —though we have a few more trinkets and
luxuries. And we have the huge privilege of saying
things out loud without getting our heads chopped
off—but by no means should we be happy with our state
of affairs. [“Bedlam”] has no moral point of view as
such to offer, but just reports what comes on
everybody’s television —including the characters’ in
the story.”

The observation begs a question regarding Costello’s
feelings for his new hometown, particularly in light
of the current political climate.

“It’s lovely to wake up to the sound of whirling razor
blades overhead,” he says, referring to the
omnipresent helicopter noise accompanying the
Republican National Convention. “But I think of the
realities of countries that are being liberated or
occupied I can’t remember which! and realized that
this is day-to-day Belfast, the West Bank, Warsaw 50
years ago, Soviet Russia, Chechnya. These things go on
all the time manipulations and deceptions and
suspension of civil rights — and it makes me really
wary and despairing of people’s lack of suspicion of
how much they’re giving up in order to fight a
contrived and unwinnable war.
“But we can’t resolve it in the length of an
interview. That’s why a song like ‘Bedlam’ isn’t a
simplistic chorus: We’re really in desperate straits
and need things to be laid out in a lot of different
ways by a lot of different artists and responsible
commentators for sentient beings to experience and
draw their own conclusions.”

Costello’s settling in New York was a major life
change. So was his marriage to Diana Krall. “To share
life with somebody of this caliber and an artist of
this level is obviously a great influence,” he says.
‘While he discounts the common assumption that North
was stylistically influenced by Krall — “It may sound
like a jazz album, but it’s a composed and arranged
record that owes as much to lieder” — he acknowledges
that North, which documented the failure of a love
affair followed by the hope of a new one, marked “a
transition in my life that I’m not always comfortable
about expressing.”

But courage, he adds, “is an overused word in
describing art. ‘Courage’ is an innocent man facing a
firing squad! But you’re emboldened to do things that
you feel are the best you’ve done in your life, and
that comes from having the love I do in my life — and
I’m not bashful about saying that, and I hope she
feels the same.”

The famously knowledgeable singer-songwriter credits
Krall with encouraging him to explore new territories
as an artist, and feels fortunate to be afforded such
options in his own career.

“I began in rock’n’roll and have stayed —though it may
seem that I detour because of my interests and
curiosity. But I’ve been given opportunities that I
never dreamed of that just came upon me while keeping
my mind open to other possibilties of music than what
I started with. But I always knew there was more — I
just didn’t find a way of incorporating it into my
first album” (the instant classic My Aim Is True, in
1977).

“I feel pretty lucky,” he concludes. “I just caught
the tail end of when you could be an artist in this
business and be immediately recognized. Now the
industry is too impatient:
It’s taken several records for Rufus Wainwright to
establish himself. The days of [an artist such as]
Randy Newman’s first record being recognized are
probably gone."