Elvis Costello Fan Forum

I for one am going to go into the album cold. No promos, no scanning of the lyrics - why, not being one for bootlegs I haven't even heard the live versions of the new songs. I may even extend my pre-release blackout to critical reviews. I really want this one to hit me in the oblivious face, like a ...

I think the cover photo for TRUST is one of his very best. Having said that, I want at LEAST one more Tony Millionaire album cover. Now that he's done a second one, it simply demands a third T-Bone-produced album with Millionaire cover art to complete the trilogy... One thing about this site: it do...

That's a phenomenal album cover. Terrific mix of myth and fable with cynical commentary. One of his best covers ever. Neil, I agree that EC is visually charismatic despite not being conventionally good-looking. What EC always understood brilliantly the wisdom of playing up his eccentricities rather ...

Also, if NR was completed in March, why wait until October to release it? I don't get it.... It was recorded in March - who knows when it was completed? It had to be mixed, the however many recorded songs had to be whittled down to a final track selection, it then had to be mastered, album artwork ...

Remember when EC tried posting entries on a blog on the website, responding to fan questions and comments? That was during the WIWC period. It went on for a while, as I recall, before praising the general thoughtfulness of his correspondents (while also attacking 'whiny babies'), and politely declar...

I too mourn the demise of the man's hat. A lot of that demise has to do with a culture of obsessive youth; once we entered the youth-obsessed 60s it became a faux-pas to present oneself in the dignified fashion of older generations. The idea was to project youthful vigour where before it had been to...

Boy, did I ever enjoy watching the YouTube vid of EC performing his version of one of the very finest songs in the history of popular music. The whimsical tone was spot on; the smile/sneer in reference to the fireman and the Queen was of course vintage Elvis, finding opportunity for vitriol even in ...

Poor Deportee puts it right for me in that the 'edifice' of this song is much too artificial for my ears and eyes; it is feigned and assumed or 'pretentious' as you say. I know what the vocabulary that PD cites means but those words seem inserted into the lyric just to show off. Most off putting fo...

I'd say it is a story told from the perspective of an eye witness--neither Barnum nor Jenny Lind, but perhaps another passenger, a crew member, or even one of the drunken musicians who run amok. He's a raconteur, telling the story after the fact. He says, "Gather round boys for a tale that is ...

I know next to nothing about Jenny Lind, nor what happened on her famous American tour. But I like the sense of darkness and menace that builds through the progress of the lyric. The atmosphere is sordid in the first verse, but some tatters of civility still cling to the proceedings ('reciting scrip...

I'm against self-harmonising, no matter who's doing it. Because it's impossible - someone can't actually sing two vocal lines at the same time. So it pulls me out of the song on a subconscious level. My brain realises it's not possible for it to be happening live and goes 'this is a trick'. Besides...

I agree that Hoover Factory's coda is awesome, but in general I prefer EC harmonizing with others rather than himself. He has a powerful voice that can at times be overbearing; the contrasting tones of a second vocalist work wonders to soften those rough edges IMHO. That's one area where the last fe...

Christopher, you mention The Band as a precursor to Elvis's 'historical' writing. I hadn't thought about the parallels, but you're bang on, obviously, that The Band were a major force in what's now called 'Americana' and a huge influence on EC. Having said that, I'm not so sure that the name of the ...

OK, deep breath! WIWC is absolutely one of EC's worst records in my view. The first four tunes are great fun, but then it sinks like a stone. Not to say it's unlistenable...just that too many of his creative decisions are bad ones (did we need two 'Dusts?' An endlessly and pointlessly extended 'Alib...

...seems to be baroque historical narrative. One thing that strikes me about both TDM and SPSC is that good chunks of them deal in storytelling, much of it apparently set in 19th-century America. (Really, he might have been better-advised to combine the best songs off both and wrap them into a singl...

Do you really think people are going to be angry at the absence of the Sugarcanes? How many of the people in the crowd have even followed anything EC has done lately, outside of Spectacle? I doubt there'll be much moaning.

Thanks for posting that. Someday I shall have to shill out for these fulsome reissues. For now, not being very inclined to download illegally, I live on a spare diet of these e-versions of EC's comments. It seems that in nearly every one of EC's retrospective commentaries there is some sort of portr...

EC's response, while occasionally amusing, amounts to quite a shocking overreaction. I'm not one for speculating about the emotional or mental state of artists whose work I enjoy, but the vitriol Elvis squirts at even his mildest critics really seems to speak to some sort of bizarre and deep-seated ...

Chris, what i think EC could learn from Jesse Winchester is the seemingly ego-less performing style. Elvis is extremely flamboyant on-stage, and it can certainly be exhilarating; but when I saw him perform with Allen Toussant I was really struck by how essential gaudy , showy and attention-hogging, ...

Thanks for that, Christopher Sjoholm. I have a longstanding tendency to discover artists backwards - the first Dylan album I really got into was Oh Mercy, for instance - so I may start with his latest and wander all the way back to the eponymous debut eventually. I've been *aware* of Jesse Wincheste...

The Winchester/Sexsmith/Case/Crow show was great. I just regret that Sheryl Crow got two songs and Neko Case only one. While I have mixed feelings about Case's writings, she is leagues ahead of Crow, who I felt was exposed a bit in that setting: definitely the odd person out in that quartet, in term...

Neil. wrote:I don't know why lots of people think it's going to be a concept album - it'll just be a load of new songs and maybe a couple of covers, with the Sugarcanes on backing - and possibly the Imposters, too. Fab - possibly better than Secret Profane!

Hey, if that's really what it is, then great!

Yes, EC is absolutely entitled to do whatever he wants. And he would be the first to concede, I'm sure, that his listeners are equally entitled to formulate their own views about it . In that spirit, I'll say that SP&S is a pleasant record with wonderful playing, too much rehashed mediocre mater...

Sigh...honestly, what I'd like to hear is another Momofuku. I don't mean this in the sense of being a sonic replica of that record - I have no special insistence that EC record with the Attractions/Imposters over and over, no particular fetish for electric guitar - but in the sense of being a stratg...

A collaborative kid's album could turn out to be a self-indulgent disaster, but it could also be great. I recall a Dan Zanes quotes somewhere, where he remarked that writing kid's music helped him to get his head out of his ass as a musician. There could be something simplifying and purifying in the...