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.
Why is it that I increasingly find myself drawn to 80s music? Every time I hear one of these big 80s tracks by some British one-hit wonder, the decade rises higher and higher in my esteem.
Honestly, if I were putting together a list of the best 50 songs in the world, I’m pretty sure something like A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’ would show up pretty high.
Perhaps it’s just nostalgia for my formative decade. That’s probably the simplest explanation. These songs are no longer just songs but little time machines that bring me back to a time in my life that is now bathed in warm memories.
After the unsettling dream interaction with Taylor Swift, I’m moving on to the woman who is in every way my type — the true dream girl, Beyoncé.
Every couple has “the list.” My wife’s contains George Clooney and Clive Owen and a few others who circulate in and out of the next few slots. I think the guy from Hawaii Five-O is probably camping out on there right now.
I have Beyoncé. She’s in slots one through four, and these days let’s say slot five goes to Amy Adams in The Fighter form. But mostly it’s just Beyoncé because, really, who else do you need?
I had a dream about Taylor Swift last night.
Not last night, February 8, but last night as I’m writing this. I write these in advance, sometimes well in advance… hope that doesn’t shatter anybody’s illusions. I’m writing this on January 29, so last night was January 28.
And last night I had a dream about Taylor Swift.
It wasn’t that kind of dream, and the truth is I’ve never thought of Swift in that kind of way. She’s attractive, I suppose, but also kind of awkward and lanky. Unlike most teenagers in the music industry who look and act like they’re 25, she’s a 21-year-old who looks and acts like a teenager.
