The New York Times Magazine: Elvis Costello Looks Back

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In the back of Elvis Costello’s favorite Vancouver espresso bar, there are a few bins of carefully selected new and vintage vinyl LPs. On a recent afternoon, the stack Costello chose to take home included an album by the Texas Hill Country troubadour Townes van Zandt and one by Eric Dolphy, the avant-garde jazz saxophonist, flutist and bass-clarinet player. Eclecticism is a staple of 21st-century taste. It’s not unusual to meet a modern music lover with an iPod full of opera, country-and-western ballads, show tunes, punk-rock classics, hip-hop remixes, celebrity duets and sensitive singer-songwriter self-explorations.
A music lover, though, could achieve the same effect with an iPod stocked entirely with Elvis Costello albums. For some of us on the nearer and further edges of 50, he has been both idol and pedagogue. We first knew him as an awkward, angry, skinny guy with glasses and a Fender Jazzmaster guitar whose songs were articulate, aggressive, sarcastic and sometimes disarmingly beautiful.
Those songs also carried traces of musical history. We might have spent a lot of time trying to absorb the cryptic wisdom of the lyrics, but the melodies and harmonies issued their own occult signals. As Costello has advanced through pop hits and complex orchestral arrangements, covers and collaborations and a series of impeccable bands, he has drawn his fans simultaneously forward and backward. Erstwhile New Wave kids found themselves raiding their parents’ LP collections in search of George Jones and Burt Bacharach.
A sense of musical history, not nostalgia or irony or pastiche, was always at the core of Costello’s art. He came by it honestly: Music was his father’s trade and his grandfather’s before that. The family business included bebop in the ’40s and ’50s and the whole gamut of Anglo-American pop in the decades that followed. That was all before Costello, née Declan Patrick MacManus, chose a moniker that paid tribute to his great-grandmother and took the King’s name in vain, and released his first album, ‘‘My Aim Is True,’’ in 1977.
When I met Costello last month in Vancouver, where he lives with his wife, the jazz artist Diana Krall, and their twin sons, Dexter and Frank, he was in a retrospective mood. He was about to publish a memoir with Blue Rider Press called ‘‘Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink.’’ The book is partly a compendium of family reminiscences and true tales of the road and the studio, and partly an encyclopedia of musical influences and associations. There’s no index, but if there were, it would include the names of just about everyone in Britain and the United States who cut a side or played a concert between the invention of recorded sound and the day before yesterday.
Costello, who is 61, is a prodigious talker, possessed of astonishing recall and a mind that moves like nimble fingers riffling through a box of old albums. He does not always wait for the question or directly answer the one that is asked. Nor does he supply footnotes. You have to keep up, fill in the blanks and get your education on the fly. If you’ve been listening for a while — a few decades, give or take — it all starts to make sense.
--Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/elvis-costello-looks-back.html?_r=1
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