I admit, I’m not as familiar with The River in Reverse as I’d like to be. I guess that’s because half of it is a covers album and the other half is a collaboration with an artist I don’t know well.
But the few times I’ve listened to the record, I’ve always liked what I’ve heard. It’s funny… I’m bothered when I like an album too much to write it off but not enough to really learn it. Albums like this live in a musical purgatory.
Elvis Costello’s next two releases after The Delivery Man were Il Sogno, a symphonic ballet score, and a live recording of a piano jazz session first heard on a radio show. You have to love the man’s versatility.
I’m not featuring either of those albums this weekend because a) I don’t own them, and b) neither features much of Costello as a performer. So I’m skipping ahead to another unorthodox recording, a 2008 collaboration with New Orleans piano man Allen Toussaint called The River in Reverse.
Elvis Costello missed a shot at an Oscar nomination for his song ‘God Give Me Strength,’ co-written with Burt Bacharach for the 1996 film Grace of My Heart. That song is a thing of beauty, far superior to the schlock that wound up nominated (though I am a fan of ‘That Thing You Do,’ the Adam Schlesinger-penned title track from that Tom Hanks film).
But the Academy made up for their oversight eight years later by nominating today’s track, ‘The Scarlet Tide,’ which Costello wrote for the film Cold Mountain. He didn’t win (the award went to some forgettable tune from Return of the King, piling on to that film’s sweep) but he did get the chance to perform, with Alison Krauss, in front of one of his largest audiences ever.
Elvis Costello followed up the disappointing North just a year later, with 2004’s The Delivery Man. And where North felt stilted and mannered, the new album was bursting with energy.
Another of Costello’s half-baked concept albums, The Delivery Man purports to be the story of the title character and his relationships with three different women. Those women are played on the album by Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris, each of whom duets on at least one track. The narrative is really quite flimsy, though, as if Costello abandoned the idea midway through recording.
I’m breaking the rules today by not featuring a second song from Elvis Costello’s North. I couldn’t find any more of its tracks on YouTube and I’m not about to throw good money after bad and download one.
Instead I’m going back a few years before the release of North to highlight a performance in a similar vein that I find far more effective. Costello recorded this cover of the Charles Aznavour song ‘She’ for the soundtrack to 1999’s Notting Hill. The song played over the opening and end credits of that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant romantic comedy, adding a nice romantic sheen.
Meet Me In Montauk 