This year's model
Self-effacing Elvis Costello keeps his music fresh

By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
July 16, 2003

When Rhino Records undertook the definitive remastering of Elvis Costello's vast catalog, they hired writers to pen the liner notes evaluating his career.

Costello, widely considered a songwriter rivaled only by Bob Dylan for sheer output and quality, saw the drafts and put a stop to it. The problem? The writing was far too kind.

"It was mortifyingly embarrassing to read the results - not because the writers were bad, but they wrote about it all too glowingly," Costello says. The notes, he decided, "needed to be more humorous and more critical, so that's the tack I've taken. They shouldn't be too precious. I enjoy writing them, but I am writing them if not about a different person, then a person in a different time of life."

So Costello is merciless on himself, using the liner notes to skewer myths and set the record straight (six have been released so far; the next set is due next month with Trust, Get Happy and Punch the Clock).

"I'm not going to scandalize anybody if I talk about the background of a record and say 'This was a record that was recorded on the ends of my nerves' because that's the truth. The Trust liner notes that are going to come out are very truthful about the frame of mind and the physical condition that I was in, emotional and every other kind of condition," he says with a rare laugh.

He's looking back while looking forward; last year's When I Was Cruel was hailed as a great new album in Costello's canon, and he's already finished the next album, North, due out in September. Costello plays the Universal Lending Pavilion at the Pepsi Center tonight with The Imposters, the successors to his legendary band The Attractions.

He can be self-effacing, but pity the poor original liner-note authors. Costello has released consistently strong albums since day one. He has a number of classics - My Aim is True, This Year's Model, Imperial Bedroom - and his latter-day work is almost as strong, including the nearly flawless All This Useless Beauty. He's changed styles and players and genres seemingly effortlessly.

The sheer number of greats who have either cowritten with him or had him share a stage is staggering: Dylan, Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Chet Baker, Burt Bacharach and countless others. He's received virtually every music honor is, including a March induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The sheer variety of his live performances in the past decade has given him new insight into his own work. Whether touring with Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet, acoustically with pianist Steve Nieve or in the full band, he's re-examined his songs from all angles. So fans are seeing some of the strongest shows he's ever done.

"I think it's a combination of those things. I've got a great band and we get along great. We've been through enough and done enough things that the tensions of years ago with the Attractions (are gone)," Costello says, calling from his New York City home last week hours before headlining at Central Park.

Indeed, the Imposters are really just the Attractions with Davey Faragher taking the place of bassist Bruce Thomas, who simply could not get along with his famous boss through the years.

"As good as that band was at its best, it stopped being fun onstage with that combination of people," Costello says. "There were people pulling in different directions. It got more and more erratic as time went on and I just couldn't tolerate that. You can always be defeated by bad sound or any number of reasons why a show doesn't work out as you planned. It shouldn't have anything to do with the four people who walk up there."

As for the various side projects, "I was working my voice quite a bit with the record with Burt Bacharach. Those songs were right on the edge of my ability, really," Costello says.

"I definitely developed my voice a lot by singing those things. Your voice can get like a well-worn reed that goes into a particular riff very easily but won't do other things if you don't try to learn other music. I think that's what happened - I was doing those other kinds of music with Burt Bacharach, with the Brodsky Quartet, where the voice was completely exposed."

Part of the change is merely stylistic. When Costello burst out of England in 1976, he was singing short, sharp, new-wave/rock songs. It wasn't till years later when he started developing ballads such as Almost Blue that fans realized what a singer he was.

"I always had a lot more vocal range than I displayed. I just found a pocket where my voice worked on those early songs and heaven knows they seem to do the right thing," he says. "I'm not going to go on about why I sang in that manner. But I didn't hold any notes.

"Nobody knew if I had any vocal tone, which I do have. And as you get older and get physically bigger, you build up more resonance. You learn from the experiences of everything you do."

Costello has breathed renewed life into older songs, whether it's an acoustic version of the early Little Triggers or especially the 1986 betrayal ballad, I Want You, which has become increasingly frightening and paranoid in each performance.

"I'm able to still get inside songs I wrote 25 years ago. I never play any song from a nostalgic point of view," he says. "A song is written in a moment of emotional response. Then you have the task of reliving it, like an actor does. You have to be completely believable in the song, otherwise it has no reason to exist. If you're being a real purist, you'd sing them once and never again."

Fans who saw his Fillmore show are in for a different set list at ULP.

"I have to balance it. There are people who would be very happy if we came out and played nothing but B-sides from 1978, but there are other people who don't know you that well that would be bewildered.

"You can't please everyone in the audience. When the tunes are to the rafters and everybody's standing on their seats, there's still somebody sitting in the back saying 'Who let this idiot onstage?' That's human nature."

When you create such an affecting catalog of work, problems inevitably come. Costello has had his share of borderline stalkers, though such fans have waned over the years.

"I probably don't get it as badly as other people in terms of the scrutiny of my life. I wouldn't want Bob Dylan's mail. He's written these beautiful songs and people project all sorts of crazy things into . . . them."

Of his own work, he says, "obviously songs are being taken very much to heart. The danger is there is a kind of neurosis often seen in sports fans that they imagine because of their cheering, they kicked the ball over the goal or into the hoop.

"There is a sort of neurosis where it tips over from enthusiasm into this kind of sense of ownership and this odd expression where there's a spurned-lover kind of reaction when something departs from the mental picture they have of you."

Brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or (303) 892-2674

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