http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/ ... ansom.html
Elvis Costello Says National Ransom Is His Best Record in Years
by Marc Spitz, Vanity Fair
October 25, 2010
Talk show hosting has been good for Elvis Costello. Conversing deeply with heroes, peers, and upstarts under hot lights for Spectacle, Elvis Costello With… has him looking invigorated and trim at 56. National Ransom, his second album in two years to have been recorded in Nashville with longtime cohort T-Bone Burnett, is a novelistic sprawl of jazz, both cocktail (“You Hung The Moon”) and gypsy (“Jimmie Standing In the Rain”); classic country-pop (“I Lost You”); and shadowy folk rock (“Dr. Watson I Presume”). Guests such as Marc Ribot, Dennis Crouch, Jim Lauderdale, Vince Gill, Leon Russell, and longtime Costello collaborators Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas have helped create what might be the first masterpiece of Costello’s golden age. “Woe betide all this hocus pocus,” he sneers on the headline-ripped title track, “They’re running us ragged at their first attempt/Around the time the killing stopped on Wall Street/You couldn’t hold me baby with anything but contempt.” Meet this year’s high performance model.
You returned to Nashville to record National Ransom. Is there that inspirational sense that no matter what time of day it is in that city, someone is always making an album?
I think that’s the romantic view. Just as many people are making records in their bedroom with their computers. It is one of the few addresses left in America where there are very fine recording studios and there’s also a high concentration of great musicians. I have been working with the Nashville-based musicians featured on this record for a couple of years and we’ve developed a feeling of being a unit. We’ve toured together—and as we did that we opened up to many more possibilities than on the first record, Secret, Profane and Sugarcane. I don’t think this record is colored much more by the culture of Nashville—there are jazz records made in Nashville, R&B records made in Nashville. Blonde on Blonde was made in Nashville. There’s a lot of music that’s been made down there. It’s a great address to go to.
This is certainly an eclectic record.
It’s a group of songs that tell different stories using different methods to do that, that’s true. I didn’t set out to make an eclectic record. It’s diverse. Eclecticism is usually used pejoratively, sadly enough. People are keen to hang a very clean line on one story. That’s not really what I wanted to do here. It’s a double LP.
You’re an artist who still creates full albums. Does it bother you that something conceived as a double LP will inevitably be broken down into pieces and heard out of sequence or on a computer?
When somebody does a reproduction of a painting, you don’t know how big the original painting is. You don’t know if it’s the whole wall or the size of a matchbook—and for me, this collection of songs belongs best on a double LP. It’s also going to be available digitally and on CD. Those mediums are more commonly used, and I don’t necessarily think they’re superior, but they are terribly convenient. I think it’s a shame when people just take something when it becomes available digitally, only because they’re cheating themselves. They have no idea of the providence of the download. This record really sounds good. I make no apology for saying that—whether or not you like my singing or the songs, it’s a really good-sounding record and you should hear it the best you can. I think it’s more the question of a group of songs in an album framework—it’s laid out and tells a story—and if somebody wants to just take a bit out of that, that is their right.
It doesn’t frustrate you after taking so much care putting it together a certain way?
You have to accept that there’s a great impatience about it—some people want to know all about something instantaneously and be able to have an opinion before they invest in it. The other people are the people I’m making the record for.
At this stage in your career, with so many songs, do you ever view your new material in context and reference it? “O.K., this is a bit like a T-Bone Burnett track from King of America. This could be off Blood and Chocolate?”
Other people are quick to make those connections, whether they mean it as a compliment or a slight. Willie Dixon was one of the great American songwriters. He wrote down the coded versions of songs—many of which had existed for decades in the blues—and made great pop records out of them. They were blues pop records but they were great pop records, too. You can take the simplest of shapes and rework them and bend them to your needs. Or you can take something from a relatively distant time in popular song form and tell a new story about it. A (new) song like “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” borrows some music from the time it was set in but the song is actually happening now —I wrote it now—it’s not nostalgic.
Have you read Bob Dylan in America?
No, I haven’t.
The author [Sean Wilentz] talks about that with regard to Dylan’s later work. How it’s derived almost entirely from old forms but it’s not really old.
Of course it’s not old. It’s happening right now, and it obviously contains ideas about satisfaction and the way people eke out their existence and find solace even in the most discouraging times. Things that happened in the historical past are happening right now.
The title track certainly calls to mind current hard times. I probably shouldn’t say that it also sounds like a great old Attractions rocker.
That’s very nice of you to say. I couldn’t play guitar like Marc Ribot on that, but we have Steve Nieve with the Vox Continental and it is a rock ’n’ roll beat. And it’s true that it makes reference to the chaos that reigns at the moment, but the ransom is one to which we’re holding ourselves.
How so?
We’ve handed over the power to these other things: “Those geniuses over there/ They’re the economic scientists.” Just as there once used to be those great documentary shorts about the future. There’ll be walkways where we wouldn’t need legs. And jetpacks. When did that stuff turn up? They use them in airports. That’s the only place they have any use. We don’t’ have them on the sidewalk—don’t you remember those future-world projections?
Sure, like The Jetsons.
Some of them were good ideas, some just fanciful. We’ve allowed ourselves to believe because of our own weakness and greed that we want to be able to afford everything and we don’t want to think about the consequence of every transaction we make. I include myself in this. “Where did that apple come from? Did it come from down the road? How’d it get here? What kind of fuel was in the truck that brought it here?” You can go crazy considering all those interlocking transactions—but that’s the kind of ransom we’re holding ourselves to.
I’ve always wondered, do you type your lyrics or write them longhand?
I write them on whatever comes to hand.
Are you always writing?
I go long periods where I don’t write anything. But I’m a working person—I’ve worked at what I do since I left school. I haven’t really taken a lot of time off.
If you’re doing something else and you get an idea will you stop everything and write it down?
Usually. I’m not ambidextrous. I have to use my left hand. If you do what I do, you become adept at capturing the thought. You mumble into a taping device and, of course, now they’re attached to phones. It’s easier to capture fleeting thoughts. Some of which are useful. Some of which you turn into songs.
Your albums from the 70s and early 80s have been reissued. Are there young fans who come to the shows expecting a certain level of anger that may not be there?
That’s a huge simplification of 30 years of work. That there’s just anger. There’s a lot of tenderness on the first record. I’d certainly lead the way to that thought—that it was maybe defined by an ill-advised youthful bravado in some of my remarks at the time. I’m not denying it, but I think the people who have been coming and listening to what I do for 30 years have either gone away disconcerted when it departed from the thing they liked first, or have followed the development.
But I’m curious about the reaction of, say, a teenager who is in love with and, in a way, needs the energy of This Year’s Model. When he or she comes to the show, what kind of reaction do they have to the other songs?
You sometimes find that young people will have discovered you because, like it or not, you’re in the big book of facts about rock ’n’ roll—and there’s nothing you can do to manipulate that section. When I was young, I listened to a lot of music other than the music of my immediate generation. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume there’s anything different with the youngest people in my audience now. They might come through the door because they read that somebody they like liked This Year’s Model, but then they’re going to hear what we’re doing. They’ll either walk away or be engaged.
For all the shifts in style and form, the one thing that’s constant is your voice. It’s instantly recognizable and sounds remarkably the same as it did on your earlier records. And you can really hear it showcased on National Ransom. Is it hard to preserve?
There are times when it gets stretched. In this case, we had a very clear sound and felt able to use the voice for each character of each song. I used the voice that pushed out over the instruments. In the space to tell a story I used a warmer tone.
You look great. I love the way you’re dressing lately, and this new album is wonderful. Do you think you’re entering a golden age?
(Laughs.) Who can say? I feel as if everything and nothing is possible.
I’m very proud of this record. I think it may be the best record I’ve made in terms of the latter part of my career. Where it goes and what it means to who I am? I will carry on for as long as I feel I want to do this. But it has to be really worthwhile, because I want to be with my wife and my family—all the members of my family—the most I can. I can’t put up with bad gigs or wasted opportunities. It has to count, because there’s somewhere I’d rather actually be.