I’ve said before that I like Elvis Costello doing country better than Elvis Costello doing almost anything else. And here’s another song that supports that opinion.
‘Starting to Come to Me’ is treated like a throwaway on All This Useless Beauty. It’s tucked away toward the end of the album, a rare upbeat track on a record full of portentous ballads. But this is the song that hit me first and has stayed with me more than any other on the album.
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 don’t have much to add about Kojak Variety other than to say it’s odd to be in the dark about an Elvis Costello album.
My Bob Dylan Weekends gave me a chance to familiarize myself with some of the albums I’d missed over the years, but Dylan had amassed a huge discography before I was ever a fan, so that was to be expected.
Costello, on the other hand, has put out the lion’s share of his albums since I discovered him so there aren’t many blind spots.
In 1995, Elvis Costello followed the previous year’s Brutal Youth with his second album of covers. The first, 1981’s Almost Blue, was dedicated to country songs. Kojak Variety, on the other hand, was all over the map.
Costello recorded the album in Barbados, and introduced it like this in the original liner notes: “This is a record of some of my favourite songs performed with some of my favourite musicians.” And that pretty much sums up the laid-back vibe of the album. Its title comes from the name of a grocery store down the street from the recording studio in Barbados. It’s also the most memorable thing about the record.
During the course of these Costello Weekends, I’ve made a lot of references to the inscrutability of Elvis Costello’s lyrics. Often I’ll love a song of his despite having no idea what it means.
I do consider Costello a master lyricist despite that difficulty, usually because of a masterpiece of a line that he’ll drop into a song here or there, some play on words that works on three different levels. He might be a bit too cerebral for his own good sometimes, but you can’t deny that the man has tamed his mother tongue.
Meet Me In Montauk 