Elvis Costello followed the covers album Kojak Variety with an album of original material just a year later. 1996’s All This Useless Beauty was originally conceived as an album of songs Costello penned for other singers but somewhere along the line that concept fell through.
The finished album does contain several such tracks (including ‘Complicated Shadows,’ written for Johnny Cash, and ‘The Other End of the Telescope,’ written with Aimee Mann and recorded by ‘Til Tuesday eight years earlier) but it also features quite a few songs seeing light for the first time.
I’ve always found All This Useless Beauty a but too mature and restrained for its own good. The title song, for example, follows a woman through a museum full of lovely antiquities as she compares her lackluster lover to the gods of old. And as lovely a melody as Costello writes for it, the song feels like it, too, could be hanging on the wall in a museum.
Several of the ballads here have that effect and while those songs are great when you’re in the mood for them, they are a bit too detached for casual listening.
I prefer the rowdier, faster songs on this album and I’ll feature two of them this weekend.
First up is ‘You Bowed Down,’ originally written for (and recorded by) Roger McGuinn. You probably could have guessed that on you own after hearing the very Byrds-ish opening guitar.
I believe I read somewhere that this is a kiss-off song not to a woman but to a record company (and Costello was indeed nearing the end of his contract with Warner Brothers at the time). The mentions of contracts and the final line support that interpretation.
With acquaintances scattered all over the land
I’d promise you now and again that I’d honour the contract
If it hadn’t crumbled away in my hand
So we broke that vow independently now
But I don’t know why you absolutely deny
You bowed down
You bowed down
When you first looked away I might say it was really a kindness
It must have hurt you to see how dreams sour
Now they say that justice and love are the next things to blindness
Well you’re getting plenty of both of them now
And so you parade where appointments are made
And never meant to be kept
Unless you accept
You bowed down
You bowed down
You value the burnt amber of falling leaves
And you long to delay
As you feel their breath as they whisper
It won’t hurt you now to betray
If you just bow down
And now every time that we meet on the edge of hysteria
You’re helping them sell off some new party line
I remember a time when you would have seemed so superior
Now you say Will you please meet this good friend of mine?
So you’re in demand as long as you kiss their hand
But all the applause is for their name not yours
You bowed down
You bowed down
Meet Me In Montauk 
I think you’re being a bit harsh on this album. I find it to be one of the better ones from his 90’s output and, in many ways, more accessible than others.
This is certainly one of the better tracks on the record, but I also like the ones you are dissing.
I can listen to this song continuously. It showcases many of the signature qualities found in E.C.’s best output: Excellent melodic structure, an inherent, bitter cynicism and it R O C K S. Best thing is that the listener really hasn’t much clue as to what he’s so angry about. A relationship?
I figure that maybe it was written for McGuinn as; a) an homage to his influential, jangly work with the Byrds and/or b) the fact that he refused to join his fellow ex-bandmates in a bid to re-unite and play for a presidential candidate during a campaign. Were that the case, the jangle may have become jingo…….