Some exciting news about DVD / live CD releases in this.
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http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/m ... 56,00.html
Costello rides song cycle on new side trip
By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
September 24, 2003
With piano, bass and some string orchestrations, Elvis
Costello knows exactly what some fans are going to
think of his new album, North.
"People will say 'Oh, it's informed by jazz,' but it's
just as much informed by songs written in the 19th
century," Costello said in a recent phone interview.
"They don't have to be the same shape, but what they
do have to be is true to the way you feel. And these
are very true to my feelings at the moment."
North, which just arrived in stores, is almost a song
cycle. The album takes the listener from the end of
one relationship to the beginning of a new one - a
scenario almost certain to have fans thinking it's a
chronicle of his marital breakup and engagement to
singer Diana Krall.
"Certainly the record . . . isn't set out to tell a
story, but it does progress. I always try to not
prejudice people's ears by giving too much away,"
Costello said.
After the return to rock of last year's When I Was
Cruel, the new CD is another side trip. North is a set
exclusively made up of ballads he wrote on piano.
"I can't really ask people to do more than listen. I
will say that it obviously isn't a record that in any
way is a continuation of the sound of When I Was
Cruel, but then again, When I Was Cruel didn't have
anything to do with Painted From Memory, and next to
nothing to do with All This Useless Beauty."
"It's very intimate in that I don't sing out a lot. I
sing in a low register, close to the listener. It's a
very emotional record," Costello said.
The songs came to him in a torrent, sometimes two or
three in an evening. His prolific writing pace - one
of the things that estranged him from his original
label, Columbia, in the '80s makes fans believe the
songs always come this way.
"Some of the best work I've done has come that way,
but some other really good songs have been worked on
over a much longer period," Costello said. "Some of
the songs I wrote with Paul McCartney (are like that)
- not necessarily the ones most successful in chart
success (Veronica, My Brave Face), but the ones that
perhaps have a little bit more grit. The song So Like
Candy, this has been around awhile, and suddenly it
has a permanence to it. You can go back and find a new
angle in the drama of it."
If North has a shortcoming, it's in the sameness of
the songs. While Costello is going through a variety
of emotions (anger, betrayal, hope, joy) he varies his
delivery little. Ultimately, the album may be for
Costello fanatics.
Costello fans have other reasons to rejoice - the
latest three titles in his reissue series are out.
Trust, Punch the Clock and Get Happy are all jammed
with bonus cuts.
"Get Happy was an exceptional record when it came out
because it had 20 tracks. The version coming out . . .
now has 50 tracks," Costello notes.
Almost as enjoyable as the music is Costello's own
liner notes, where he's brutally honest about his
music and himself.
"You're trying to tell a story of how the record came
to exist. That's what the reissues are," Costello
says. "The Get Happy notes . . . tell not just about
the making of the record, but the dramatic period of
time we moved through: The end of our initial pop
success. It was not glorious; quite the opposite, it
was quite horrifying at times."
He's able to issue these discs exactly as he wants
because, unlike most artists, Costello retained the
rights to his publishing and his master tapes.
"It's rare for anybody to own his back catalog. Most
people sell bits and pieces of themselves because
they're forced into it. I managed to be in a position
to reclaim all of it."
That freedom has encouraged him to look further for
more archive releases.
"We're one of the few performers in the world who
doesn't have a DVD of some kind," said Costello, who
is scouring for footage from throughout the years to
make a live retrospective, hoping for release in 2004.
He's located good early performance footage, as well
as the MTV videos of his songs.
"People still get a kick out of them because of the
funny fashions and odd staging. We're talking about
putting out something next year that probably compiles
all the video clips but also extends it into some live
material."
He also has ideas about putting out complete shows
from various eras on CD.
"The problem is I put out too many new records. It's
difficult to actually stop long enough to create a
gap. If you were really going to do it justice, you'd
want to do some snapshot live albums from different
periods of time rather than do the compilation live
album."
Live At El Mocombo, issued as part of a Rykodisc box
set several years ago, "is a reasonably good snapshot
of the band in a club, but we certainly played better
than that in our time, just not with tape rolling. We
had very bad luck early on. Whenever we put a mobile
recorder outside we tended not to play well or
something went wrong."
These days, with all the archive releases, "there's a
tolerance for a slightly less-pristine audio quality.
Now you can release something that is literally like a
Polaroid, an audio Polaroid, rather than people
expecting it to be completely perfect, you know?"
North
Deutsche Grammophon,
Grade: B-
Mark Brown is the popular music critic.
Brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2674