It’s common knowledge that falling in love is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a musician. And on the flip side, a painful breakup is great news. I’m speaking from a fan’s perspective, of course — no doubt the musician sees it differently.
Elvis Costello married jazz singer Diana Krall in 2003 after a brief engagement. That same year, swept up in the fever of that new romance, Costello released North, his only album of original material I’ve ever sold back.
When I Was Cruel is full of great, off-kilter songs, from the title track (which samples a vocal snippet from a French song in a loop), ‘My Little Blue Window’ (a track I’d call country only to be loudly contradicted by regular readers of this blog) and the blistering ‘Daddy Can I Turn This?,’ which got its title from the purported final words heard on the black box recording from a crashed plane in which the pilot’s child was accompanying him in the cockpit.
One of the oddest, and best, songs on When I Was Cruel is the late-album spoken-word diatribe ‘Episode of Blonde.’ Costello rips into this beauty like a beat poet on open-mic night, spewing the verses like acid.
Three years after his Burt Bacharach collaboration, Elvis Costello released 2001’s For the Stars, an album recorded with Swedish soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter. And there was a great disturbance in the Force, as hordes of Elvis Costello fans sighed and rolled their eyes.
Branching out into new musical directions is one thing, but when a one-time punk star puts out his second album of easy listening material that would fit nicely in your grandmother’s CD collection, there’s a problem.
When would Costello rock again?
Back in the early days of the Internet, when newsgroups were still in vogue, I used to frequent alt.fan.elvis-costello where I conversed with a group of smart, literate music fans/computer nerds who shared my fondness for Elvis Costello.
The Web has become so much about images and sounds that it’s hard to believe there was a time when people engaged each other on the Internet primarily through words.
It reminds me of the Infocom video games I loved in the 80s, which consisted of text descriptions of your adventure and simple prompts where the player would type things like “Walk west” and “Pick up the key.” Compared to today’s cinema-quality games, those things are like cave paintings.
In 1998, Elvis Costello followed up All This Useless Beauty with Painted From Memory, a collection of songs co-written with Burt Bacharach. Even longtime Costello fans, accustomed to the man’s musical detours, were understandably taken aback.
My initial reaction to Painted From Memory was along the lines of the old guy at the Past Lives Pavilion in Defending Your Life: “What the hell is this? What the hell’s going on here?” [To see what I’m referring to, check out this clip, and as an aside, if you haven’t seen Defending Your Life, you should do so right away.]
Meet Me In Montauk 