Song Lyric of the Day (Elvis Costello, on ‘Lovers Laughing in Their Amateur Hour’)

“Lovers laughing in their amateur hour
Holding hands in the corridors of power.” —British singer-songwriter and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame member Elvis Costello, “High Fidelity,” performed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions on their Get Happy! LP (1980) 

If recent rumors are true, this is one current example.

Quote of the Day (Elvis Costello, on the Difference Diana Krall Made in His Life)

“My opinion of myself was lower than the ground. What good could come of this new friendship?

“I thought I might be Diana's ‘confidante,’ perhaps write her a song or two. Lately I’d been pulling pianos out from under covers anytime I'd find one parked in the wings of the theater, or I'd go back to my hotel room and work upon a wretched little electric keyboard, my voice hushed against eavesdroppers, saying things that I had lately let others say for me.

“The first song I wrote was called ‘When Did I Stop Dreaming?’”— Rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink (2015)

Twenty years ago today, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall were married on Elton John’s estate outside London, in a mash-up of styles and sensibilities: he, a dark knight of Britain’s New Wave, before moving on to other genres where he continued to vent his wit, rage, and emotional turmoil; she, Canadian, cool, and composed, bringing her blond sultriness and glamour to pop standards seldom seen since the heyday of Peggy Lee.

There was also the couple's contrast in appearance. The year before the wedding, Costello recalled in his memoir, at their joint presentation of Song of the Year at the Grammys, Krall “was so beautiful. I looked like an unmade bed.”

At this point, Costello felt worse than he admitted looking. With a difficult 17-year relationship with Cait O’Riordan ending, he was as mired in the slough of despond as he had been during his great 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted From Memory (which I discussed in this blog post from a few weeks ago).

Meeting Krall lightened Costello’s heart when he was, as the stark title of one of his songs from that period went, “In the Darkest Place.”

As the mutual admiration of Costello and Krall grew into friendship, though, she turned to him for comfort as well, as she experienced within two months the deaths of her mother and one of her mentors, bassist Ray Brown. Costello observed, “The imminent intensity of our friendship was bound up in this powerful sorrow.”

Most people don’t end up marrying the friends who pull them to shore just as they think they’re drowning inside, let alone joining them in family and creative unions. (Costello helped his wife write a haunting lament for her mother, “Departure Bay.”) But in whatever form it takes, the kindness of those who unexpectedly enter our lives can make a real difference, a light in a season of darkness.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Elvis Costello and Diana Krall on the red carpet at the 2009 Juno Awards in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was taken on Mar. 29, 2009, by Shayne Kaye.)

Flashback, September 1998: Costello, Bacharach Release Searing Songs of Heartbreak

Twenty-five years ago this month, two songwriters who few could have predicted, two decades before, would ever collaborate released Painted From Memory, a CD that won a Grammy and recharged their creative energy. 

The album yielded a dozen tightly crafted pop songs and considerable creative satisfaction for Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. If their artistic union went swimmingly, the same could hardly be said of the romantic betrayal, pain, hurt, and regret present on every song in this collection, courtesy of this unlikely duo’s relationships with the six wives they had already had to this point. 

Understandably, Costello has made no bones about these songs being “excessively personal.”

When Costello burst on the music scene in the late 1970s, he quickly gained a reputation for rapid-fire, blistering tunes that matched his reputation at the time as a surly young new wave artist. In the same period, Bacharach found himself experiencing a case of the middle-aged crazies, having split from his second wife, actress Angie Dickinson, and his longtime lyricist, Hal David.

Twenty years later, they were in different places, musically and mentally. Costello had gained a well-deserved reputation for being among the most versatile and musically adventurous musicians of his generation, collaborating with country, jazz, hip-hop, classical music, and R&B artists. Bacharach was seeing something of a career revival, with his songs from three decades before receiving renewed exposure in film hits like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Costello had long been a fan of Bacharach, more than 25 years his senior, and had even played “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” early on in concert. He finally met Bacharach in 1989 when the two recorded at the same studio.

But what brought the pair together to work was the 1996 film Grace of My Heart, set in the Brill Building songwriting factory of the late Fifties and early Sixties—an environment that had bred, among others, Bacharach and David.

Bacharach had already been engaged to write the music for the song intended for the movie’s Carole King-like protagonist when Costello came on board to write the lyrics. They worked long distance, exchanging lyrics and arrangements via fax.

The result, “God Give Me Strength” (featuring the voice of Kristen Vigard but lip-synched by Illeana Douglas), was a distinct high point in the movie. Thankfully, it didn’t stop there.

As Costello noted in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, “To have written a song like ‘God Give Me Strength’ and simply stopped would have been ridiculous, so about a year later we began a series of writing sessions, the first at Burt’s work studio near Santa Monica and later in a hotel suite on Park Avenue… One of us would lead the way with an opening statement, perhaps a verse or even all the way through a refrain, and the other would naturally follow with an ever more elaborate bridge of resolution, but as the exchange of ideas got faster and faster, we found ourselves completing each other’s musical sentences at the piano.”

If two words could summarize the creative fusion between the two, it would be “painstaking” and “accommodation.”

The two song craftsmen were used to creating the most intricate examples of their specialties: Costello, twisty lyrics spitting out satire, sarcasm, and wordplay; Bacharach, irresistible hooks that masked complicated arrangements filled with changing time signatures and irregular phrasing, all somehow refined from his classical music training and love of bebop.

In Bacharach, Costello found a master of the studio whose compositions were so complex that they required musicians who could meet his exacting standards. On the other hand, he had to find a way to place his own words naturally into this sumptuous sound.

As he told Chris Willman in a March interview for Variety Magazine, his first thought was: “‘How am I ever gonna make sense with something so, so, so spaced out?’… So this was more of a challenge for me, to make those words really land on the (minimal beats), and have it still make sense and have it still sound like me. It took a bit of puzzling.”

At the same time, the relationship agonies expressed in the songs required Costello to convey a naked, soul-baring emotion he had rarely had to summon to date. Each song, after all, was a character study in which a complex character ranged across betrayal, being cuckolded, feeble self-justification, self-recrimination, hatred and heartbreak.

And here’s the thing: beneath its shimmering orchestral pop surface, replete with tinkling piano, French horn, and muted strings, the lyrics did not deviate in the slightest from the CD’s first note to last. The first song is not titled “In the Darkest Place” for nothing—not with Costello singing, “I'm lost, I have abandoned every hope.”

Costello and Bacharach chose the song that brought them together, “God Give Me Strength,” to close out their CD. But if the protagonist has chosen to reach out past himself, it’s because he has to: he is in such despair that God is his only hope.

Few moments in pop music describe the searing loss of a lover with the outburst that Costello lets loose at the song’s climax:

I might as well wipe her from my memory
Fracture the spell, as she becomes my enemy
Maybe I was washed out like a lip-print on my shirt
See, I'm only human, I want her to hurt.

Marinated in melancholy, Painted From Memory masterfully expressed what Wall Street Journal critic Marc Myers called this past March “the anguish of failed relationships—creating a new breed of saloon song minus the saloon.”

"I Still Have That Other Girl" brought Costello and Bacharach a 1999 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. But it turned out to be the last studio album they put out during Bacharach’s lifetime.

Bacharach died in February, only a few weeks before the release of a 4-CD box set, The Songs of Bacharach and Costello. The set includes a remastered version of Painted From Memory; Taken from Life, a song cycle reflecting the development of Painted from Memory into an abortive Broadway musical that would have been co-produced by Big Bang Theory showrunner Chuck Lorre; a collection of concert performances, mostly piano-and-vocal from Costello and another Bacharach collaborator, Steve Nieve; and other live Costello performances of scattered Bacharach and David songs over the years.

Recently I blogged about another artist—director Martin Scorsese—moving in a direction not expected by longtime fans with his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. In a similar radical overturning of expectations, Costello, with Bacharach’s plush orchestration in Painted From Memory, could not have more astounded listeners who wanted no part of collaboration with one of the prime purveyors of Sixties MOR music.

Yet Costello, like Scorsese, created what many now regard as a distinct highlight in a career full of them. And Painted From Memory, like The Age of Innocence, continually rewards those who return to it to find new subtleties each time.

Song Lyric of the Day (Elvis Costello, on Friends’ Attitudes)

“Some of my friends sit around every evening
And they worry about the times ahead

But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
And the promise of an early bed.” —"Radio, Radio,” written by rock-and-roller Elvis Costello, performed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions on the LP This Year's Model (1978)

Quote of the Day (Elvis Costello, on How He Wrote ‘Pump It Up’)

“All it took was some gin, some tonic, some blue pills, and a red pen to write ‘Pump It Up’ during my first exposure to idiotic rock and roll decadence.” —Rock ‘n’ roller Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink (2015)

Song Lyric of the Day (Elvis Costello, Describing My Current Mood)

“Oh, I used to be disgusted

Now I try to be amused.”— Elvis Costello, “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” from his My Aim Is True LP (1977)

This Day in Jazz History (Fallen Star Chet Baker Plunges to His Death)

May 13, 1988—Chet Baker, who became as famous for his simple, understated vocals as his piercing trumpet solos, ended his up-and-down career at age 58 when he was found fallen to his death from the second story of an Amsterdam hotel. Countless colleagues and fans were saddened—but few were surprised—when an autopsy found cocaine and heroin in his body.

In 1952, Baker joined the piano-less quartet formed by Gerry Mulligan. The band’s version of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” featuring Baker’s piercing trumpet solo, became so iconic that it was listed in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry for its  "cultural, artistic and/or historical significance to American society and the nation’s audio legacy."

By the next year, Baker had formed his own band, achieving enormous listener popularity, topping polls as both a top trumpeter and male vocalist on hit songs such as “Let’s Get Lost.” The impression made by his good looks did not go unnoticed, as described in jazz critic and historian Gary Giddins’ Visions of Jazz: The First Century:

“Baker, with his neatly boxed pompadour and baby-face handsomeness, was short, introverted, and intense; he was a natural, creative in any key, exceptional ears, liked to play with the mike against the bell of his trumpet, which he occasionally put aside to croon a song in a girlishly attenuated voice.”

Such early success, particularly at a point when African-Americans such as Miles Davis were not receiving comparable attention, annoyed the likes of Stanley Crouch, who noted that Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis “both did in Chet Baker when the dark blond supposed-wonder from the West Coast was brought to New York”:

“Baker got top billing at Birdland over Gillespie one week and over Davis the next. Musically speaking, the two put the white hope's head in a bag and turned the bag flat, red, and sticky. Davis was especially angry because he saw Baker, whom he had so heavily influenced, as no more than another example of how some white guy could bite a chunk out of the neck of a Negro's style and set up residence in the bank, the blood from the chunk of meat in his mouth dripping a puddle that turned to gold at his feet.”

It was harder to begrudge all the acclaim, though, once the steep price was paid. From the mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties, Baker developed an intense addiction to drugs that resulted not only in several drug arrests and stints behind bars, but also deportation by Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. 

He reached the nadir of his career in 1966, when drug dealers knocked out his teeth, rendering him unable to play the trumpet for years. It took him a long time just to work again, and the large fees he could command often quickly disappeared because of his continuing craving for drugs.

Although he was been compared to James Dean, another young star who came to prominence in the early-to-mid-Fifties, Baker might be better likened to Montgomery Clift, who also survived a hideous incident brought on by his substance abuse in his late 30s, only to hang on grimly for a while with his once-golden looks gone. 

In his memoir Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Acts, Elvis Costello writes with honesty, humor, admiration and regret about his encounters with Baker, centered around the singer-songwriter’s attempt to get him to play on the song "Shipbuilding" in his 1983 CD Punch the Clock. 

As befitting a musician, most of the impressions in the account come through sounds—lines of dialogue tossed off by Baker as casually as his talent (on the prospect of playing Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” for a video: “I hate that f-----g song”), along with the tender notes he could still somehow summon from his trumpet (for Costello’s “Almost Blue,” according to the composer: “fragile, but also like glass”).

But the sole visual detail is telling and memorable: the trumpeter turned “the ruin of his once beautiful face to me, the very portrait of the song ‘Everything Happens to Me,’” writes Costello.

Early in his career, Baker had become a figure of celluloid, either appearing on the big screen himself (in the 1955 war movie Hell’s Horizon) or under thinly fictionalized guise (Robert Wagner’s character in All the Fine Young Cannibals). Then, in the late Eighties, Baker earned new attention, even after years of decline, with a documentary by Bruce Weber, Let’s Get Lost. Unfortunately, the film's release came after the musician's tragic death.

Despite the official verdict that Baker's fatal injury resulted from an accident, some questions lingered over the exact circumstances. After all, his skull was crushed, leading some to wonder whether an irate dealer, handling him with the same kind of violence that had gravely damaged him 20 years before, had now taken matters a step too far.

Quote of the Day (Elvis Costello, on What Songs Can Be)

“Songs can be many things: an education, a seduction, some solace in heartache, a valve for anger, a passport, your undoing, or even a lottery ticket.” —Rock ‘n’ roller Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink (2015)