‘Stripping Paper,’ track four of Elvis Costello’s Look Now, is my favorite on the album so far. It is top notch both musically and lyrically.
Costello’s songs are often hard to analyze, between the British aphorisms (mostly lost on a Yank like me) and his flights of linguistic fancy. ‘Stripping Paper’ is a refreshing exception, easy to decipher and emotionally resonant.
Track three of Elvis Costello’s Look Now is another song told from a woman’s perspective. More notable is that it was co-written by one of the great songwriters, man or woman — Carole King.
Costello and King wrote this track 20 years ago and he has played it live over the years, but this is the first time the cut made its way onto an album.
Continuing my track-by-track appreciation of Elvis Costello’s Look Now…
Track two, ‘Don’t Look Now,’ is the first of three songs co-written by Burt Bacharach. This song slams on the brakes after the wild ‘Under Lime’ and takes us back to Painted From Memory territory. That Bacharach collaboration is not among my favorite Costello albums but it does have its charms, and this song does as well.
Wonder of wonders, the musical gods have graced us with a new Elvis Costello album, his first proper release since 2010’s National Ransom. He did drop 2013’s Wise Up Ghost alongside The Roots, but that collection of reworked tracks hardly counts as new material.
But this album, Look Now, is a dive back into the deep, lovely waters of classic Costello. It contains shades of his masterpiece Imperial Bedroom as well as underrated 90s gems Mighty Like a Rose and Brutal Youth. It also owes more than a little to Painted From Memory, his 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, and indeed Bacharach co-wrote three of its songs.
The Random iTunes Fairy has a thing for Elliott Smith. Today’s SOTD is the seventh Smith tune to pop up on Random Weekends, and the third from the double album New Moon.
I don’t know how that stacks up against other artists. I’ve long regretted that I never kept detailed stats of Random Weekends so I could do exactly the kind of analysis I’m wondering about now. But my gut tells me Smith is better represented than most.
Meet Me In Montauk 