Elvis Costello Song of the Week

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ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re Moving to Trunkworthy!

Greetings, faithful blog readers! Let us begin by apologizing for the unexpectedly lengthy radio silence (sorry, couldn’t resist). If you’re still with us after this first year (!), you’ve undoubtedly come to terms with the idea of forgiving our occasionally inconsistent posting schedule, but it was never our intention to go this long without generating any new content. However, at the root of…

ECSOTW#28 : Things I Never Said, Some Things You Never Heard

KEVIN DAVIS: I first became an Elvis Costello fan in 2002, and looking back now I can’t help but marvel at the prolificacy into which my fandom was born: When I Was Cruel, Cruel Smile, North, The Delivery Man, Il Sogno, My Flame Burns Blue, and The River in Reverse, all released in the five years spanning 2002 to 2006. Not only that, but Rhino’s famous 2CD reissues were being released…

ECSOTW#27: I’m Driven ‘Til I’m Crying or I’m Dreaming ‘Til I Drown

JORGE FARAH: Last week we wrote about “Lovable”, the second track from King of America; an album that feels like it wants to be a collection of cinematic, narrative-driven, emotionally-charged folk/country/Americana ballads, anchored to rockn’roll by a handful of upbeat palate-cleansers like the aforementioned track. On that post I wrote about how my own tastes and biases have shaped my…

ECSOTW#26: The Toast of the Town and the Talk of the Bedroom

KEVIN DAVIS: Probably because my favorite King of America tracks are all folky, narrative-rich mini-movies (“Our Little Angel,” “American Without Tears,” “Sleep of the Just”), I tend to forget that the record is also home to a few better-than-decent uptempo romps which round out the other end of Elvis’s periodic Americana fascination. While these songs all scan as somewhat slight in comparison to…

ECSOTW#25: Between the Shame and the Sentiment

JORGE FARAH: So hey, before I start talking about this week’s pick, I want to provide you with a little bit of personal context. When I was a little kid, the life I envisioned for myself as a grownup followed my father’s template pretty closely, and really pivoted around two big milestones: get married by 26, have a kid by 27. It just made logical sense; I figured at that age I would have already…

ECSOTW#24: She Thought Too Late and Spoke Too Soon

KEVIN DAVIS: The prevailing reputation (and therefore most common angle of discussion) of Imperial Bedroom in Elvis Costello’s catalog is that of the eclectic, indulgent masterpiece; this was the record that, to paraphrase Costello himself, saw him and the Attractions partaking in the kind of big-budget largesse that defined the Beatles’ middle years, because when the record label’s footing the…

ECSOTW#22: All That Bravado and That Fright

JORGE FARAH: 2004’s The Delivery Man was supposed to be some kind of narrative-driven rock opera revolving around the lives of three women in a small southern town, and their entanglement with a mysterious delivery man who, “in a  certain light, looked like Elvis, and in a certain way, seemed like Jesus”. Then somewhere along its conception Elvis felt the pull away from the narrative—scrapped a…

ECSOTW#22: Any Maybe, Any Might

“’Put Your Big Toe In the Milk of Human Kindness’ is a demo of a song originally written for a Disney movie. Mercifully, the Mouse declined the tune, and I was able to cut it a few years later with Rob Wasserman and Marc Ribot for Rob’s album Trios. It now sounds to me as if I was attempting to write something like the Cahn/Van Heusen song ‘High Hopes.’” –Elvis Costello, from the liner notes to…

ECSOTW#21: Stay the Hands, Arrest the Time

JORGE FARAH: There are some Elvis Costello songs that are so deeply ingrained in my memory that attempting to write about them becomes a process of blindfolding finger-pointing at a diorama of superlatives. There are some songs that I’ve listened to so many times that I can’t adequately verbalize why they work so well except to say “just listen to this.” Now I’m going to try to tell you about a…

ECSOTW#20: The Genuine Voice of His Unlovely State

KEVIN DAVIS: Elvis Costello’s “Gwendolyn Letters” (the name he gave to the collection of songs he penned for former Transvision Vamp singer Wendy James, all of which she subsequently recorded on her 1993 album Now Ain’t the Time For Your Tears) are among the man’s few true remaining rarities, having been omitted from the great Rhino reissue campaign of ’01-’05 and currently available only to…

ECSOTW#19: Signed With Love and Vicious Kisses

JORGE FARAH: Get Happy was the first of several albums in Costello’s oeuvre that felt like very sudden, screeching left turns from what seemed like a natural progression in sound, but that actually make a whole lot of sense when considered within the context of his larger catalogue. My Aim is True into Armed Forces showed a gradual transition from workmanlike pub-rock into the more colorful,…

ECSOTW#18: Who Will I Have Left to Hate?

KEVIN DAVIS: Songs like “It’s Time” are the greatest reward of this type of weekly (so to speak) writing exercise: Here is a song occupying the penultimate slot on the second Elvis Costello record I ever purchased, and it’s not until fourteen years and an impromptu suggestion from my co-author later that I find myself really hearing it. In my mind I’d always sort of relegated this song to the…

ECSOTW#17: Is There Light Beneath Your Door and Laughter From Within

JORGE FARAH: I go through ups-and-downs with Painted From Memory. Sometimes it sounds like a bit of a stretch for Elvis; a knee-deep plunge into a genre that he’s not quite suited for, where he trades in emotional sincerity for self-consciously heightened melodrama and throwback chintzy arrangements, deferring a bit too much to his collaborator. But then, other times, when the mood is right, it…

ECSOTW#16: I Guess I Missed My Calling, I Should’ve Been a Clown

KEVIN DAVIS: Like several of the other rhythm-and-blues covers on Kojak Variety (“Leave My Kitten Alone,” “Running Out of Fools”), Elvis Costello recorded “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man” multiple times between 1986 and its eventual release on 1995’s Kojak Variety. His initial attempt came in the form of an off-the-cuff solo electric demo, cut in 1986 and eventually released on the Blood and…

ECSOTW #15: The Shore is a Parchment, the Sea Has No Tide

JORGE FARAH: National Ransom is the Elvis Costello album that time forgot. Coming off of the unlikely (and caffeine-boosted) commercial success of its bluegrass-tinged predecessor Secret Prophane and Sugarcane, this was to be his victory lap—the album that cemented his comeback as a former elder statesman of rock, now rebranded with muted greens and earthy browns, placed alongside the Randy…

ECSOTW #14: I Hope That She Sleeps Well at Night

KEVIN DAVIS: I was seventeen years old in the fall of 2000, so over the next eight years I grew pretty accustomed to songs by liberal-minded rock musicians devoted to the defamation of George W. Bush’s character (professional musicians are actually contractually obligated to compose songs like this anytime there’s a Republican president in office), but from memory I can’t think of any songs that…