Off-the-cuff remarks, with heart on sleeve

I'm not sure what to expect from Elvis Costello's new full-length orchestral score for ballet, Il Sogno. Reading these two wildly divergent perspectives on last month's performance of Il Sogno at Lincoln Center, I feel like the blind man that grabs the elephant's fleshy ear in one hand and wispy tail in the other and tries in vain to synthesize the information into some unified theory of the beast. Right after reading about the concert, my curiosity whipped me into a blessedly brief frenzy of bidding on eBay for one of the promotional sampler CD's that had been handed out to the concertgoers. I finally talked myself down from the ledge as the bids started going way up. (I told myself: for that price, you could get half-a-dozen used CD's on your wish list...or three or four gallon-pot-size designer perennials...or a nice lunch with your husband at a restaurant with white tablecloths and no kiddie menu. Did I say "as the bids started going way up?" Try one dollar short of the ridiculously high winning bid. And all this when the CD of the full score, conducted by MTT, goes on sale in a month anyway.)

So I don't know what to expect from Elvis Costello music with no Elvis Costello words and no Elvis Costello voice. But then again, I remember the first Elvis Costello song I ever heard: "Accidents Will Happen". When I heard it on the radio for the first time, I stopped everything and turned the music way up. I'm queen of the mondegreen, so I hardly ever get lyrics on a first listen, and it was the music that grabbed me right away anyway. (I still think it's a song that would be well worth hearing on the harpsichord.) I couldn't believe it when the dj announced the record was from "Elvis" "Costello", the fellow that I'd read about but had already dismissed out of hand based solely on the utter ridiculousness of his nom de plume. And so it wasn't long before I was wearing the grooves down on Armed Forces (yes, folks, it was the days of vinyl), and all the albums that came before it, and, later, all the albums that came after it (well, maybe not so much Almost Blue. Or Blood and Chocolate).

So what is it about Elvis? Once I read someone, somewhere, describing his singing as "histrionic", but that's not quite right. I find his singing and his songs to be intensely and authentically emotional, but without the emotional showboating you get with other singers whose singing "their hearts out" is just a means to an end, a vehicle for satisfying the extrovert's need for attention from the audience:

Other boys use the splendour of their trembling lip
They're so teddy bear tender and tragically hip

I'm never going to cry again
I'm going to be as strong as them
They say they'd die for love
And then they live it out
They'll give you something to cry about

(from "Town Cryer," on Imperial Bedroom).

The emotions in Elvis Costello's strongest songs are driven by alienation, expressed sometimes through themes of futuristic dystopian modernist anxiety, and sometimes through eschatological images (less theological than an adolescent sensibility in which everything feels like the end of the world). They're also fueled by his travels up and down the continuum of awe-desire-fear-rage before the power of the feminine (which is as much about lipstick and powder and the Cuban heel as it is about Wicca-good-and-love-the-earth, no?). While I can identify with some of these emotional drivers quite a lot and some (guess which) not at all, I find the songs cathartic in the classic sense almost regardless of the origin of the emotion. I'm also drawn to the introversion in Elvis Costello's songs, which is sometimes akin to a primal cry in a padded cell, and sometimes an interior monologue which observes and criticizes an external disconnected world, and sometimes an imagined dialogue with someone (often a would-be-loved one, like "Alison" or the "Party Girl") who, let's face it, isn't in the room as he's "talking" to her. And since the emotions in these songs are too intense to mainline, unalloyed, I find that his songs are more effective, paradoxically, with indirection: the complex orchestral arrangements in Imperial Bedroom with overdubbed vocals that sound disembodied; the devastating description of the knock-down-drag-out emotional life of an unhappy couple in Imperial Bedroom's "Tears Before Bedtime":

Tears before bedtime
There'll be trouble tonight
I don't want to talk about it anymore
I don't want to have another fight
I don't want to talk I don't want to fight
How wrong can I be before I am right

juxtaposed with a playground rhyme's sing-song melody and backup vocals by Elvis channeling both Eddie Kendricks and Melvin Franklin; and the constant, almost logorrheic wordplay of his lyrics—id with a thesaurus:

You're sending me tulips mistaken for lilies
You give me your lip after punching me silly
You turned my head till it rolled down the brain drain
If I had any sense now I wouldn't want it back again

New Amsterdam it's become much too much
Till I have the possession of everything she touches
Till I step on the brakes to get out of her clutches
Till I speak double dutch to a real double duchess

Down on the mainspring, listen to the tick tock
Clock all the faces that move in on your block
Twice shy and dog tired because you've been bitten
Everything you say now sounds like it was ghost-written

(from "New Amsterdam", on Get Happy).

Although Elvis has become much more nuanced in his singing over the years (the turning point being The Juliet Letters, to my mind), I think his most affecting singing comes in love songs with ambivalence and irony, like "Human Hands", and the Randy Newman song Elvis sings on Kojak Variety, "I've Been Wrong Before":

You held me tight
And everything seemed just right
I couldn't ask for more
But baby, I've been wrong before

She used to smile at me
And hold my hand like you do
Then she left me
And broke my heart in two

See her face
And feel your warm embrace
You're all that I adore
But baby, I've been wrong before.

I'm not all skeptical about Elvis Costello's ability to compose musical ideas with interest and complexity; his popular songs have owed as much to classical antecedents as to Motown. I'll choose to be optimistic, and hope that being able to create without the burden of having to filter what he wants to express through a hall of funhouse mirrors will open the door to even more and better Elvis Costello.

And now, from the "Regrets, I've had a few" files: I was crushed (crushed!) to learn, belatedly, about this past spring's Oxford Conference for the Book in Mississippi, which was dedicated to Walker Percy, and whose attendees were treated to a surprise performance by Elvis Costello, who was in town recording The Delivery Man. After I'm through gnashing and grinding my teeth (To. The. Roots.) that this all happened without me, I'll fantasize, first, that I got to be there, and second, that Elvis sang "The Invisible Man".

Happy fiftieth birthday, today, to Declan Aloysius Patrick MacManus.