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.
Costello followed Brutal Youth with Kojak Variety, a forgettable covers collection that felt more like a contractual obligation than a new Elvis Costello album. But a year later he was back with the strong All This Useless Beauty, an elegant collection of songs he’d mostly written for other people.
Some had been recorded by other artists, some had been turned down, some were written new for the album… the whole concept was kind of half-baked from the start. The important thing was that Costello was back with a new batch of original material, keeping up the enviable pace of one release per year that he’d maintained since his debut.
Meet Me In Montauk 