W INTERVIEW
L
AN INTERVIEW WITH
ELVIS COSTELLO
Wirral’s own Elvis Costello is back with his new album
‘Look Now.’ It has been 20 years in the making and sees
the songwriter work with his heroes Burt Bacharach and
Carole King.
He’s heading home in February to play the Olympia in
Liverpool and thanks to Wirral Life’s close contact with the
Liverpool based Sodajerker podcast, we’re able to share with
you some of the songwriter’s thoughts on how it came about.
Elvis, thank you for sitting down with us in Liverpool, no
less.
No better place!
So, tell us about the new album, it’s another big slab of pop
alchemy isn’t it?
A big slab of pop alchemy. I think we should put that on
a sticker, I like that. Well, it’s definitely pop music. Rock
and roll is a brew and every time we get to make a record,
there's some kind of story going on, this record is more like
one where I worked it out in advance, so I wanted all these
sounds.
I think it’s more like what they did in pop music when I
was growing up. You could have a magical sound, it could
be a few voices, it could be some strings, it could be a horn
section, but the most important thing is that it’s got to have
the feeling from the bass and drums and you’ve got to sing
well!
You recorded the album in just a few weeks, which is quite
a feat, but did you have some of the songs for a while?
Some bands will build the songs from when they go into the
studio you know, they get a gem of an idea from a rhythm
and then the music is added, I mean, there's lots of famous
bands that write like that and it's great stuff.
I've never written like that, the songs are always worked out,
so whether we’re taking the simple approach or something
a bit more widescreen. The reason we could do it in three
weeks, despite the fact, as you hear, it’s quite a detailed
picture musically, is because we just prepared really well.
That way we knew that when we went in, when the red light
went on for the real recording, we knew what we wanted to
do. I have to say, when I first did that kind of approach, I just
kept going until I filled up all the space, so it doesn’t always
work, but it did for this one.
Do you have notebooks filled with titles and possible lines
for songs, is that a way you work sometimes, or will you
just be prompted by a title?
I definitely work like that. I used to carry notebooks all the
time and every page would just be lists of titles or one line
that seemed to be something, like somebody’s conversation,
an overheard remark, all of those would swirl around or I'd
write them out again until they found company in other
lines. I would also write the same lyric out over and over
again.
I left school at 17, I didn’t go to university, I certainly didn’t
go to music college, I never learnt to write music until I was
in my late thirties or early forties, so some things I was always
having to delegate to musicians. I'd say, can you do it like this
and I'd sing something and when it would be written out, it
wouldn’t be quite like I imagined. So, here we are all this time
later and I've learnt how to do that now.
Suspect My Tears was a song that I wrote immediately after
Painting From Memory, so I can hear in it the things that I'd
learnt, you know, the things I'd carried with me after writing
with Burt Bacharach. But it’s also got all those other things
in the arrangement that have come down the years from
me and I’m pleased I know how to write that out now and I
know how to make those strings do that.
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