Elvis Costello - Page 2

Well, it's also just a case that genres like New Orleans Soul and Bacaharach-style Pop are more designed around a vocalist than most Rock music is, so the challenge/opportunity is there from the get-go.

Yeah, certainly. I guess my point is that his narrators not only aren't him, but are also thoroughly unreliable by design. You're not necessarily supposed to sympathize with all of the ire directed at women in his songs. The (usually male) narrators can be pretty loathsome.

I mean, "I Hope You're Happy Now" is a pretty understandable reaction to getting dumped for someone else, but the guy's an unrelenting dick about it, from ruthlessly critiquing the other guy to (falsely, obviously) claiming he never loved her in the first place. It's easy to see why she might have run off.

EDIT: And cathartic as it might be to write the words, Costello is too smart a writer to just let the venom gush out without thinking of context. It may be a having cake/eating it solution, but even if he's just getting something out of his system, he tends to frame it in such a way that it's not necessarily meant to be sympathetic. Even if the narrator's expressing some petty gripe of Costello's own, he doesn't always want us on his side. I think it becomes clearer and clearer as you get into the 80s and away from the stuff that earned him the "angry young man" label in the 70s.

I just wanted to chime in with a "hell yes". Seeing Costello perform this live remains one of my alltime concert-going highlights.

For whatever reason, rock musicians are usually assumed to be narrating their own life experience any time they sing in the first person, and that is such a weird limitation: I mean, I don't finish The Lovely Bones and wonder just how Alice Sebold's enjoying life in heaven these days.

Sure, rock opened up means of personal expression that were pretty new to popular music (largely by combining the role of singer and songwirter in a way that was rare prior to that), but that doesn't (or, at any rate, shouldn't) translate into a literal reading of every song as personal narrative.

As for his singing, it's true that he's grown immensely: it's a pity that North was such a relatively uninspired collection of tunes, because it's some of the starkest, most heartfelt singing he's done (I think of it as his Ghost of Tom Joad).

And his range really is amazing: with all we've discussed here, I don't think we've even touched on some of his more off-the-wall projects (at least for the Costello of This Years Model) like Il Sogno, For The Stars, or My Flame Burns Blue. None of them are great, IMHO, but there's barely a handful of musicians in the history of popular music that could have even turned out competent work in such diverse genres.

Yeah, I wish I could get into that one. The idea is great, but the songs are so uninteresting. It seems like an experiment in writing straightforward love songs, but they're so straightforward that he stripped the personality right from the lyrics. Anyone could have written those words.

Plus, the guy taught himself how to read sheet music in the early 90s before the Brodsky Quartet collaboration, and he was writing ballets and operas on his own about a decade later. That's some crazy prodigy stuff there.

Listening to Tokyo Storm Warning right now. I dunno Dave, little if any of Costello's work seems autobiographical or confessional, but the misogyny is so rife on the older albums. Even a casual insult like 'She said that she was working for the ABC News/It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use' carries so much spite. It would seem a little disingenuous to write it all off as 'In Character'. Granted his anti-heroes are fools and monsters and the women who got away are better off for it. But I think Costello understands and even empathizes with the narrator in I Want You. Honestly I think most men would actually.

It's very rare for me to feel distance towards a song's narrator (when I like the song, obviously), much more so than with movies or literature or what have you. Most songs only really allow for one POV, and of course music is in itself one of the most emotionally manipulative artforms - if the singer sounds like he means it and there's a good backing, I'm very easily swayed. So I've never looked at those Costello songs in a detached enough manner: I totally think the narrator in "I Want You" is fucked up, and imagine Costello probably thinks so too, but when I'm listening to it, I'm on his side.

There's also something about songs being viewed primairly as outbursts, like it's much easier to view them as the narrator just feeling shitty or emotional at a certain point in their life, as opposed to the more narrative driven artforms, where there's usually some sort of larger worldview being represented.

Well, I think there's misanthropy for sure (like that line from "Brilliant Mistake"), but I don't think Costello has it in for women (or humanity) nearly as much as his narrators seem to. I'm not so sure this is true of the early stuff, but I think as he gained more control as an artist, those great lyrical cheap shots started serving the song in more interesting ways. If his narrator is the one perpetually being wronged on My Aim is True and This Year's Model, it's no longer the case on Imperial Bedroom where relationships just tend to fall apart and the blame's allotted pretty equally.

Lyrics are trickier than traditional narrative art when it comes to character - since most pop songs are in first person with no setup, we tend to take them on their face. It just seems to me that, the male narrators in Costello's most vitriolic songs about men and women* crosses the line from justifiably outraged to ugly, and I don't think this is an accident.

As for "I Want You" - empathy, maybe. Every good writer empathizes with even his most odious creations to a degree. But I tend to think of it as Costello's "Every Breath You Take." The guy's a stalker.

* I don't think this is as true when it comes to his protest songs like "Pills and Soap" or "Tramp the Dirt Down," which are outraged, but there's no one on the other end whom Costello seems to deem worthy of sympathy.

And there are people who think it's a good, kinda sexy love song (to be fair, they said the same about "Every Breath You Take" when I brought that one up as an equally creepy comparison). I had to physically restrain myself from slapping my forehead the first time I heard those words out of someone's mouth.

Geez, at least Sting's vocal delivery lends that song some emotional ambiguity, but how could anyone get anything but the chills from "I Want You"?

Yeah, that's crazy. It's pretty easy to mistake "Every Breath You Take" for a sweet love song if you just listen to the tune and pick up random lines from the song (which is how music is consumed most of the time - you know, casual listening), but "I Want You" is creepy and evil in the most upfront way possible - that twisted one note guitar solo, the unnerving repetition of the song's title (culminating in that howling IIIIII WAAAAANT YOOOOOOU), the sheer acidity in "although my darling/not with that clown", the way the song crawls to an end ina daze of frustration....you sure they weren't thinking of the Bob Dylan song?

There's also a note of self awareness to it, though - dude knows he's fucked up, there's this real despair at the end with that "and when I wake up..." line - contrast that with the confident, soulless stalker in "Every Breath You Take", and you begin to see a certain impotence in Costello's protagonist. I doubt he's singing this to the actual person, more likely he's in his bedroom shouting at a picture of her.

I almost wonder if they're just saying that because they want to embrace something that's obviously fucked up as something emblematic of love.

On second thought, I'd better not give them that much credit.

When I look for lyrics online, I tend to go to songmeanings.com, since I know it's not virus-ridden like a lot of other lyric sites (although with Costello, it's unnecessary, since his own site hosts all of his lyrics, I think).

Anyway, the commentary below that's ostensibly the focus of the site is generally a bunch of inane horseshit, which is exactly why I took a look at what people were saying about "I Want You." Seems Jake's acquaintances are not alone.

Oh my god.

Oh, actually, rereading the lyrics on the site, I'd totally forgotten about the intro:

Oh my baby, baby
I love you more than I can tell
I don't think I can live without you
And I know that I never will

So basically it's a suicide note, right?

i'm lookin' at these replies like

Ha! Never thought of it that way, but it certainly could be. Or it could just show how single-minded he is about getting her back.

That line does signal the big tonal shift in the music, though; I'm surprised that the very deliberate switch (with that gnarly chord) doesn't tip more people off that it's not the sweet little love song you might initially mistake it for.

Me and my friends are drunk and listening to This Year's Model reminiscing about old times. Kinda random but I've won over some of my friends who were always a little ambivalent to Costello.

There are really people who hear I Want you as a sexy love song? That's beyond fucked up.