Extra: Elvis Costello Full Interview

A conversation with the iconic singer-songwriter, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “How to Be Creative.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  One of the pleasures of making Freakonomics Radio is that I get to speak with some of the most brilliant researchers and social scientists in the world, along with the occasional physical scientist and perhaps a stray government official. But there are other sorts of people I admire, musicians, for instance, who typically don't fit into our show. That's changed recently as we've launched a few special series, one on CEOs, one on sports, and our latest series called How to Be Creative. This last one has given me the chance to speak with musicians and artists of all kinds, as well as scientists and inventors. Occasionally, one of these conversations is so rich that we can't help but put it out in its entirety, as we're doing with this bonus episode.

• 3:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's an interview with Elvis Costello, the 64-year-old singer and songwriter from England, who now lives in Vancouver with his wife, the jazz singer Diana Krall, and their two kids. Costello has been making excellent records since the mid-1970s, records that range from punkish-pop to super-dense, super-pop, to country and western, from earnest to sardonic. He's particularly adept at bringing a postmodern flair to the elegant foundations of the old-school songbook style. And that's what he's done on his newest record, which is called Look Now. Just how versatile is Elvis Costello? Over the years, his collaborators have included Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet, Anne

• 4:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sophie von Otter, Paul McCartney, the Charles Mingus Orchestra, and Alan Toussaint.

• 4:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you're at all a serious fan of popular music, Elvis Costello has at least been on your periphery for several decades. For a time, he was nearly very, very famous. But to those who love his music, he's way better than famous. He's an original, a musician's musician, a writer's writer. He's also got the rare ability to create music that is both high-minded and open-minded. And, as you'll hear now, he does that in conversation as well. Hope you enjoy. If you would just say your name and what you do, however you'd like to describe that.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Hello, I'm Elvis Costello, and I'm some kind of musician and a writer.

• 4:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's start with your new record, which I love. Congratulations. I think it's remarkable. It's rich and dense, but also gritty and funny, and it's modern and traditional. And it's a record that no one in the world but Elvis Costello could have written.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  That's a pretty, that's a pretty good compliment. But that's kind of what I hope to do, to be, to be really truthful, was I had these songs, some of them I'd written a while ago, some of them were written in collaboration, some of them were written very recently. And I knew that they were songs that would be served by my band, that they would give us an opportunity to show everything that we can do, not just one aspect. You know, a four-piece rock and roll band is often just asked to be a four-piece rock and roll band. And that's great fun. But it's, it's also great to be able to bring to anything that which you've learned, that which you've come to understand, be able to kind of quiet yourself to the mood of a ballad. And in this case, playing collaboration with Burt Bacharach.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  You know, I couldn't have imagined us pulling that off 20 years ago or longer.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  You write in the liner notes, "I wanted to make a record that we couldn't have made back then."

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no point in really, there's never, to me, to me, there's never been any point in making the previous record again. So each one is, to my ear, being quite different. I mean, to people who don't hear those increments change, or don't have the same appreciation, probably all my records are the same, but that's, they're tuned to different things than I am. And the great thing is, we have, we have, we're totally spoilt for choice, you know? We have so much stuff we can listen to, from the past, from the present, stuff that's, you know, secret, stuff that's right in the headlines. You don't have to have one above the other. It's, it isn't necessarily a hierarchy. And one of the only, you know, positive things

• 6:50Speaker 01

  about the changes in, in the way music is heard, is that the hierarchical aspect of it is sort of become less oppressive. There are still people that sell massive amounts of records, and people are obsessed with those achievements, but some of the most interesting things are happening in little corners. And that's not to, that's not to say, "Well, I'm making the best of it because I used to sell records and now there aren't records to sell." It's just that that's the way it is. I find that the records that really interest me by other people, whether they're people of my generation, or whether they're brand-new artists, they tend to be things you stumble upon. And it's, it reminds me

• 7:30Speaker 01

  of how wonderful it was to feel as if you had personal possession of, of a record that nobody else knew about, which was the way it was when I started out.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  So when you were a kid, your dad was a singer for what sounds to be a pretty wonderful, like a dance band, you call them.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were tremendous, you know, they probably, there weren't, nobody would regard them as hip in the slightest thing. But the leader, Joe Loss, he managed to front a band from the late twenties to the, to the eighties, you know. He was a remarkable character in English light entertainment. And he had a very good ear for two things, people, talented singers, I mean, Vera Lynn made her debut with him. My father later was, you know, he had good singers. And the, my dad had two other singing partners and they were on the model of the Glenn Miller Band. They weren't by any means up with the rock and roll vibe or anything like that. But as time went on, because of the curious way radio was set up in England.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  The way we heard a lot of popular songs were as they were interpreted by dance bands and light music, ensembles of all dimensions. What do you mean the way radio was set up in England? Why weren't you hearing? It was, there was only, um, there was an agreement between the BBC and the Musicians' Union. That there were only five hours of recorded music allowed a day. Oh, the Musicians' Union being live music, like, don't put us out of business, BBC. You couldn't play recorded music for more than five hours a day. So bear in mind that there was only the BBC, there was no commercial radio in England. There was one station which we could beam in from Luxembourg, which broadcast in English and played continuous pop music. But it wasn't until the pirate station started up in the, you know, mid sixties.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  That the revolution to the American model of, of twelve to twenty-four hour radio took hold in England. And therefore we heard a lot of things filtered. And that's why you see in archival clips, The Beatles and very big bands like that, appearing on light entertainment shows with comedians and. You know, they would have to get their music out somehow. And the opportunities to play on television were limited to maybe one or two pop shows a week on television. And I'm talking about all the recorded music, so you're dividing up. You know, the classical music, the pop music, jazz. There'd be, so there were a lot of, lot of broadcasts of live music, whether they, you know, they were bands interpreting the hits of the day, or little shows that presented people

• 10:15Speaker 01

  playing music for, for broadcasts, like jazz ensembles or folk singers.

• 10:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  I never knew that. So that's fascinating. I wonder if you, you believe in retrospect that that scarcity retarded a little bit a certain kind of original, or, yeah, original British music making.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  No, it had the opposite effect.

• 10:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Huh.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I would say that the rarity of it sharpened the wits of the people that got through. You know, although there were obviously contradictions in it. I mean, a lot of the rock and roll singers that were, were on the radio when I, because my parents didn't really listen to rock and roll, they were jazz fans. Rock and roll seemed a bit flimsy. I have to be honest, because I never heard any of the really original, exciting stuff, because it didn't get played. We heard this sort of vanilla version of it that was, you know, on, that they were local acts that had been styled and given names to sound like American acts. So it was the Beatles, really, that blew that up. And, you know, the Beatles came and signed to, they were turned down by the first label that they auditioned for.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And then they went to Parlophone, which was an EMI label, but think of the name. What does it mean? It's a, it's a, it was a talking label. It was a comedy label. I don't think they really knew what they had. I think they, nobody's ever said this that much, but I, I think they might have thought they were a novelty act initially. You know, I'm sure the people up, up at the top of the company, George Martin obviously understood what they were, but I think they thought they're probably a one-hit wonder. And people that spoke in northern English accents in those days were mostly comedians. You've got to remember, we're talking about the BBC where they still put on evening dress, you know, dinner jackets to read the news on the radio. I mean, they've always had services that broadcast in different

• 11:59Speaker 01

  languages, but the home broadcasting was very much two things. The sort of, what they call BBC English, which was a sort of kind of formalized English, and nor, mostly northern English comedians or people at a musical, who were genial sort of hosts of things, but... The idea that it would reflect real life was not really-

• 12:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  As a kid in the north, I mean, you were from London originally, then when your parents split, yes, you moved to Liverpool.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we stayed in London. I grew up in the suburbs, in the western suburbs of, you know, you wouldn't call it London because we were out so far. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like a bleak place at all. It was very leafy and, but I spent a lot of school holidays on Merseyside. So my family being, my dad from Birkenhead, my mother from Liverpool, I spent, you know, a lot of holidays staying at my grandmother's house. So I felt as much at home there. I was actually taken north as a baby on Christendale, you know, I mean, I, so I had the sort of feeling of belonging to both places. It's, it's hard to feel you come from London because it's such a mixture of neighborhoods and overlays of culture,

• 13:09Speaker 01

  you know. If you come from one of the old neighborhoods, in particularly in the east or the north of the town, people say, oh, I'm North London, I'm East London. West London gets a little bit more foggy about its identity, you know. We just sort of live out there and you know your friends.

• 13:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pretty support football wise when you're out there.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  I've always supported Liverpool since the early sixties.

• 13:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, well, that was easy, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, no, they were in second division when I started.

• 13:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that right?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 13:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I went to see them the year before they came up.

• 13:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, you're having a very nice season this year and last year was exciting and, yeah. So why so long between records? I'm just curious, you know, Elvis Costello is a musician that those who love him, love him very, very, very much. And yet you've never been the mega sized star that you threatened to become once years ago. And I'd like to talk about that at some point.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Well, I threatened, I was threatened by other people.

• 13:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Threatened upon you perhaps.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I made a, I made a conscious decision about my, the use of my time, uh, uh, two thousand and ten, two thousand and eleven. I, I, I had an enforced little bit of time off. Um, I released a record in two thousand and ten, which I really loved.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  It didn't seem to demand that the music be played live. There was no demand for me to perform those songs. And it coincided also with my father's passing and, and it's maybe that sort of just made me take stock. And I started to think that maybe records were a vanity, that I shouldn't indulge.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  You know, that brought home how limited time was. And with having young children, I decided that if I was going to be away from home, I had better really be bringing home my share of our family income. And so it was a much more certain bet to go out and play concerts. And I also felt that that maybe I had an opportunity. Now I really did have too much material for one evening of songs, that I could create shows that, you know, I ended up creating two or three shows, stage shows I'm talking about. They weren't elaborate productions with huge, you know, expensive values. They were cheap carnival tricks that I used to frame what I had,

• 15:46Speaker 01

  which is my songbook. The first one was called The Spectacular Spinning Songbook. It was a revival of a show I did first as a kind of dare in the mid-eighties. We're gonna read off some of the titles on The Spectacular Spinning Songbook. Tonight, we have: Every Day I Write the Book, Digging Up Through the Mirror, I Want You, Tell Time, Love and Accidents Will Happen, and many, many others that you've never heard of. Where we used a game show wheel to select the next song. And I had, you know, a beautiful assistant like a magician does.

• 16:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it was real, not rigged?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  It was real. It was real.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I mean, sometimes we rigged it towards the end of the show to get a number to get offstage, but, no, we let it go as it was and it was tremendous challenge for the band because they had to know something like a hundred and fifty songs at the drop of a hat and you could get a run of three finale numbers to open the show and then you'd have to find how you could continue the mood, you know. Everything conceivable happened, you'd have people that would come up and, you know, we had very good cast members, you know, we had a dancer who was really, really sympathetic, she was really good, she was doing a parody of like a go-go dancer. People weren't, some people weren't terribly certain that the whole, they didn't realise the whole thing was a satire, they thought we were actually serious and the whole point of it was to bring people on the stage and invite them.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  If you, if you always, you know, you never could guess how many people really want to be a go-go dancer, you know. And there were people on stage who should never dance that did and that's a great moment, you know, because I'm the worst dancer in the world, so, you know, I really have sympathy for people come up, but they threw themselves into it and we had some very, you know, we'd have, you know, mothers and sons come up and do it together and married couples, we had a couple, one guy proposed to his fiancee, I started to claim that I was actually ordained at one point, you know, it really, it was a sort of semi-invented character I was playing, it's partly me and partly this character I was inhabiting. And then I, then I started to, I finished, well, I applied myself to finishing a book

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I'd been working on for twelve years called Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink. And I then, I then worked up another show over a couple of tours where I gradually gathered props, started out with an on-air light like you find in an old radio studio, like the kind I saw when I would go with my dad to the radio broadcast, and then I added a television set which had a screen on to which I could project cues to the songs, sometimes there were old advertisements, sometimes there were family photographs, I could also get inside this TV and appear as it were on television on the stage. It was, again, semi-theatrical, semi-scripted, the anecdotes that I told by way of introduction were sort of frivolous versions of more serious stories that appeared in the book, sometimes

• 19:01Speaker 01

  the, the... The manuscript version was a lot more heartbreaking and I would tell like a lighter hearted version, a lot of the things were about, some of the things about family were quite dark, you know, there were, there were some things about my parents, their relationship, my, my dad's sort of more wayward nature, which I sort of unfortunately inherited for a period of my life. And so, you know, I was, suppose I was working all of that stuff out, but because it was all in the songs already and all I did was sort of like point people to maybe what they had only suspected about the songs.

• 19:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the book we are, I gather, is real to the core. Yes, everything in the book is, is you.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  But let me ask you this.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  I chose to put it out of chronological sequence because I, because I thought, well, Wikipedia does that. I mean, you want the emotional sense of it. And I fictionalized a few episodes where, not because I was being evasive, because I was trying to use fiction to summon up the mood of the, the, rather than identify people, because it wasn't their identity that was the point of the story. It was the, it was the feeling of the room I was in, you know. I only used that twice in the book.

• 20:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Your songs are all, as far as I know, copyrighted Elvis Costello. Your book, however, is copyrighted by your given name, Declan McManus.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Some of my songs are copyrighted. I changed it for a little while. And then I found that when people wanted to write with me or do my songs, of course, nobody had any idea who Declan McManus was, so they wanted an Elvis Costello song, you know what I mean? Again, that's one of those things that I did, kind of as a, just a little marker. It's a gift to music critics to see something like that, because they want a real psychological significance into it. It's, it really isn't that, you know, I, I, I was, I was aware of the fact that the brand of my original appearance on the music scene was quite. Was quite that. It was a brand in some people's view, even though to me it wasn't.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  It was my life. And the name was idiotic and the appearance was idiotic. You know, I played up to it and I lent into the character that was sort of invented around me. But then after a little while, that gets a bit boring and it gets dangerous as well. You know, you start to live it out and make the wrong choices in so many different ways. So you've got to get out of it. So maybe I, part of it was reasserting, you know, there was, there was a person who was like completely on the outside of all of this ridiculous showbiz stuff that made the little tapes that got me my first record, you know, I mean, I, I was making those in my bedroom. I, I still sing some of the other songs that I was writing

• 21:43Speaker 01

  then. It was just the few that caught people's ear were the ones that coincidentally landed me in the studio right when this supposed new thing was happening in rock and roll, you know, I mean, I, I never really identified myself with it. Other people said you're part of this new wave thing. It was, that was just a label somebody made up as a matter of convenience. It's not, it wasn't, it wasn't a game plan, you know?

• 22:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  You did seem to recognize even then that, I remember one, once you, I guess this was in your book, maybe you wrote the squarer I look, which I gather is English for angrier, yes? The, the angrier I look, the more the camera likes it. How much of early on was you kind of putting on a, a creative persona?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I think it was a sort of, I, I saw an interview with Wayne Shorter in a documentary about Lee Morgan, where he talked about drinking brandy when he was younger and he said it just created a little kind of, a little kind of place around himself in which he did his work. It wasn't like he was really getting lit. It just had a, it just took him out of the immediate environment. I, I understood exactly what that was, even though I, I'm a very different type of musician. Obviously, I'm not on that same level, but I'm not an improviser in that way. But I, I know that I did the same thing with the

• 23:13Speaker 01

  With aspects of the persona, the fact that I didn't speak on record at times, it all just created a bit of room around me, get on with the job without being interrupted.

• 23:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, is that what it was?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  It was just that.

• 23:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  It wasn't that you needed...

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And also, I was probably just, I was probably just anxious and nervous as well, because I actually, by nature, quite shy. And then you have to learn bravado. And of course bravado easily, you know, then you get challenged, particularly by boring, self-satisfied people, whether it be like a radio DJ or a journalist that thought they'd worked you out. Of course, you go push it to a greater extreme just to confound them, just to horrify them more, you know. And hence you have those big standoffs, you know, with the Sex Pistols and somebody on TV. Well, it never got to that stage, really. Mostly, I could handle the situation. And then also, some people who were very kind.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  There were some older journalists. There was a woman journalist from Wales who interviewed me very early on. And I hadn't got any guard up for her. I found her charming. And she seemed to kind of see that I was serious about what I did in that way that sometimes younger people are almost a little earnest. And I see that, when I see the footage of it, it breaks my heart because I think it was like a real, you know, there wasn't any sort of generational animosity or any of that nonsense. You know, it was like, it was, it was just genuine curiosity, somebody trying to do their job than me trying to do mine.

• 24:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'd like to ask you about, well, your writing. And I could ask you all day about your writing. I don't get to, but I think you're a great writer.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 24:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think you're a great songwriter, but also I think lyrically alone, you're a great writer, but a puzzling one sometimes, or a challenging one sometimes in that, on a couple of dimensions. I'll start with the one.

• 25:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Your lyrics are full of extraordinarily clever and memorable and cutting phrases and imagery that's evocative and it's specific. And yet, often... The actual theme or the plot of a story is a little bit removed and enigmatic.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Opaque.

• 25:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I want to know, is that a choice, is that you were...

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Tis in some cases, I think there's a really obvious shift in the writing on the album Imperial Bedroom in 81. I knew I was doing it then. That's the first record I ever published the lyrics. Up until then, I didn't think that they should be written down. I felt they needed to be heard at the same time as, you know, as the music. They didn't, they weren't little poems. I could have written poetry if I wanted to. I used to write poetry as a kid and I don't know whether it was any good, but I mean, I, you know, I knew how to write poetry. And I think poetry is sort of, is the sort of use of words where music is heard but not is playing, isn't it?

• 26:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've never heard that, but it makes sense.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I don't know who said that, maybe I did. You know, you sort of hear music that's by the rhythm and the cadence of the words without there actually being a musical accompaniment. I mean, that's, that's one possible definition of poetry, you know. And I never really put myself on that level. It's a very high art form.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  So I just wrote these things to be sung. And then I started to think, well, I liked certain kinds of painting where there are more than one angle within the frame. Why can't a song replicate that? And cinematic cutting is like that. It fractures time, it goes backwards and just the act of editing to, you know, you see it from one point of view and then you're through a door and then you see the person standing there, all those things. I'd kind of referred to them in songs from as early as what, from The Detectives.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I'd use the stage or the film directions in the lyric. I'd done that a few times. But those, I just sort of push it further.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And then other songs came up that were just fairly, that were very straightforward and I just wasn't very comfortable with the idea that I had to write. If I wrote about events that we all shared, rather than say about matters of the heart, then I was less comfortable with making the easy slogan about it. It just wa, I didn't feel it was my job to do that or to tell people what to think, but to maybe try and find that little story that underlined something that I had seen that maybe somebody else hadn't.

• 28:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  How often would you write a lyric that you would need to get rid of because it was too obvious, too on the surface?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I just didn't write it. I mean, I just, I don't think I ever did get rid of it because I thought it was too obvious. I just didn't write that. I mean, I'm sure I threw away, you know, I wrote very fast, so I mean, I'd realise right away if I was down a track that wasn't gonna work. I never wrote any songs about rock and roll that I can think of. You know what I mean? There's a lot of songs with the word rock and roll in the title. You know that kind of song that was sort of celebrating the life?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  I wrote some songs that were kind of about the indulgences, but they were more like from the outside. I never felt that comfortable, even though I indulged just as much as anybody in those things, I always stood off myself kind of.

• 29:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Indulge, you mean the lifestyle?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  There were some moments of hedonism, I suppose would be the word, but I always sort of stood outside myself a little bit going, this is not really what you should be doing. Maybe that's just a way of making excuse to yourself, you know, like a drunk who said, well, I could give up, but maybe I'll just have to this drink, you know, that kind of thing.

• 30:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you were drinking, by the way, which sounds horrible to me, Coke and Pernod?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Oh, that was just one afternoon.

• 30:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was just one time, you're saying?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You don't do that twice.

• 30:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So along those lines, along the lines of becoming the writer that you became, you wrote, I guess in your book, that you knew you hadn't been born with the good looks and confidence necessary for popular success. I'm curious.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Thanks for the radio.

• 30:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, yeah, thanks for the radio. But was that really true? Did you really believe that? I mean, because in my reckoning of how you became who you are as an artist, you're growing up with this father who's, you know, in showbiz and you have access to showbiz. And British music at the time was very exciting and there was a lot of, there were rock stars being made all the time. And you were, to my mind at least, I hope you agree, phenomenally good and talented and hardworking, et cetera, et cetera. And did you really kind of draw the boundary for yourself that I'm never going to be in the inner circle of stardom? Is that really the case?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think that a couple of things color it. One is that I was, you know, exposed, I suppose, to some elements of show business early on, just like anybody of my, you know, you have a sort of admiration for your parents' ability to do whatever it is they do, cook the dinner, you know, and go to work. And I'd go see my dad sometimes in the dance hall on a Saturday afternoon. That was just, you know, that was one perspective of performance. And he brought music into the house that he was learning for the weekly broadcasts. Later on, after my parents separated, you know, his life transformed. He then sort

• 32:14Speaker 01

  of took on an appearance closer to, I said, I've said in my show, you know, closer to sort of. Uh Peter Sellers in What's New Pussy Cat, he grew his hair long and he started to wear fashionable clothes and listen to contemporary music. And started to incorporate their songs into what was otherwise a fairly unpromising. Environment of working men's clubs and social clubs because he left the safety of the nightly gig with the dance band. And decided he wanted to do his own thing. So that striking out and being independent thing was sort of like from his example. But all the way along, no matter what the music was or the style, and bear in mind my tastes in music changed us like any teenager from.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Every, it was all about one thing. The next day it was all about another. Um. It was always about the song. I'd I'd seen the sheet music transformed into a radio performance. My father used to go and make a little bit of cash money. Doing cover records where they did note for note covers of things. So. The stardom of the individual people, with the exception of a band like The Beatles, who obviously everybody was, you know, fascinated and focused on. All the way through those years and their various transformations. I I didn't really see that as something I could do. And by the time I I'd spent the last two years of schooling in Liverpool, which at that time was. Musically very quiet in the early seventies.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  And tried to make my own way, playing my own songs. I had a partner, we sang in bars and. Any evening where they would let us on the stage, really, we're making tiny little bits of money, just about covered our expenses. And I learned a little bit how to do it. But I never really thought that I was, you know, I looked at the the television every Thursday to see Top of the Pops and saw. The distance between the way I looked and felt and sounded. And what was a pop singer right then, which was a lot of people in baker foil with eye makeup on. That was. That was the the music of that moment, the glitter moment, you know, glam moment. That seemed very distant from a seventeen year old, you know.

• 34:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you kind of wish you could do that?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  No, I never wanted to do that. I might be the only person in English pop music. That, you know, that made a record that never wanted to be David Bowie while still loving everything he did. You know, I, I never wanted to sort of look like him, or I just loved his records. I, it was enough for me that he made those records. I didn't want to make them. I knew I couldn't, you know?

• 34:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's also, so your music, again, I don't mean to summarize your music to you, but this is one, one person's perception and your music is extraordinarily diverse and interesting on a lot of levels over the years. But a lot of your writing shows a sort of, I don't know if cynicism is fair, distrust and frustration and often the belief that too many people and especially institutions are cruel and corrupt, maybe not of their own design, but they are hypocritical. And I'm curious if you accept my summary of that part attitude in part in your writing. It's not always that. If you accept that to some degree, whether you thought that maybe pop music, the kind of super popular pop music, couldn't contain that sort of commentary?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I felt the opposite thing. I felt the opposite thing. I mean, I think like any teenager, I was a little bit self-righteous when I went, you know, when I was 17 about, and I thought I'd discovered the secret because I was putting, I remember telling a teacher, you know, a careers master, I was gonna, I wasn't gonna be in pop music, I was gonna like take words and I was gonna set them to music and like I'd discovered a magic formula. And he just, oh, you want to be a pop singer then? And they were sneering and just sort of how ridiculous could that be? And it wasn't like they were thwarting my ambition. I didn't have any ambition. I was a purist, you know, I was a puritan.

• 36:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you mean by that? A puritan in what direction?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I wasn't interested in those traffic. And before one thing, I didn't think I was a performer. I almost certain that I was a songwriter.

• 36:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. For other people.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Well, I, I sort of had a, by then I'd got possessed of the idea that, you know, that was, I'd watched too many Hollywood movies where somebody'd burst into a room and go, I've got a song for you and make them listen to it. And I did do that for a few years. When I returned to London in 1973, I was playing my songs still around wherever they'd let me play, which were the remnants of the English folk club scene where, you know, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon had made their first steps in the early 60s. It was only 10 years, 12 years later, you know, but it was quite changed the scene. We'd had all of the late 60s psychedelia. There was, you know, the music that was in the pop charts were mainly.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Sort of like, like wasn't really yet quite disco, but it was like dance music and and and glitter and and the acoustic music, which I really loved, was mostly played by Californians or people that came out of California, you know, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, although she was Canadian, was was seen as Californian, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and that kind of music, it seemed quite remote, somehow glamorous, you know, they were, it was all operating on, and we never thought you would ever see those people. And there there were lots of really good musicians playing around, you could see, and I I'd run across them, but we didn't hold them in the same regard as the American musicians, and that's always been the way the English thing that,

• 37:38Speaker 01

  whether it be jazz or rock and roll or even acoustic music. So I would go to publishing houses and try and get them to listen to my songs, and I think of them now, they were not at all suited to other people. You'd go with tapes or you'd go with a guitar and sing? Both, I would go with a reel to reel tape and made in the bedroom and and and my guitar, and I'd make them listen to the songs, which, you know, they would take calls in the middle of the songs and, you know, it was pretty, you know, not good for the confidence, or maybe very good for the confidence, because you got, I got a little tougher. And I got, I got, I started to get, I got a few paying gigs, playing my own songs, I abbreviated my name to my initials, my dad always called me DP.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  So I adopted that, then I then I adopted my great grandmother's name, Costello, as we correctly say it in Ireland, but everybody said it Costello, like an Italian name. So I let them think that was Italian, not that anybody really cared, but it was, it looked better on a bill, you know, and I and then I became the resident singer in a club where quite good people came and played. And when did the Elvis come in? Not until, not until I sent, I took a tape to my first record company, Stiff, which was a, you know, it was a little company that started with like a thousand bucks, not even, maybe not even that, that borrowed money and started putting out singles in nineteen seventy six.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Producer and who was one of my favorite singers, Nick Lowe, was their first artist. And I was the first person to knock on the door with a demo tape. And at first, they had me record a couple of songs, but very much with the view of somebody else singing them. They were still seen as demos. They weren't seen as releases.

• 39:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Even for Stiff?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first recordings, they weren't sure that I wasn't a writer for somebody else. That was really the objective. My managers were managing Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds Band Rockpile. And Dave didn't write, so they tried to sell Dave on a couple of my songs and they tried to give them to other people.

• 39:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank goodness they didn't take them.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  And people found them sort of too quirky, so that in the end, they suggested first putting half a record out with another songwriter. Because it's like Chuck meets Bo, you know? There's a jazz record with one side of Chuck Berry, one side of Bo Diddley. Thankfully, I just ended up writing so many songs, there were 12, and they put that out. I was still working in an office till the week before my record came out.

• 39:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was for Elizabeth Arden is where you were?

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just working in a, I was a computer operator. I'd sit in a little air-conditioned cubicle and, you know, pretend I knew what was happening with the computer and write my songs in a book, you know? And sometimes I ever had to work an evening shift. It was just one operator. It was only an IBM 360. It wasn't a complex computer. It was probably not as powerful as your phone, you know? And I just wrote my songs in the evenings. And I was still working there. I had singles out and I was still working there.

• 40:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you, I guess, an existentially depressing question, which is for every one of you, Elvis Costello or Declan McManus, working that job and writing songs, for every 100,000 of you, there's one who actually gets to do what you did. And there are questions of talent versus hard work and opportunity and luck and so on. What do you say to all those people out there who have some kind of dream of being a creative? And, you know, many people are realistic. They don't expect to reach huge success or even do it, you know, as their livelihood even partially. But...

• 41:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you discourage those people from hanging on to that?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Are you talking about right now or back then?

• 41:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh, I'd say right now, yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Right now would seem to be tougher to start because, you know, the way in which it's been.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I'm beginning to think there was a narrow window of opportunity, which I caught the last few years of, where it was possible to make a reasonable amount of money from making records and having a musical career, other than to just fund the next go-round on the machine. Um, obviously before that, people bought the rights to songs. They sometimes put the names of the publisher or the singer onto the song. That's how you come to see songs that are credited to Al Jolson or Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra, who to my knowledge never wrote anything, you know? Um, and of course latterly, uh, and when I say latterly, it was sort of like almost 25 years now.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  There's been a shift to the ownership of all of the medium through which music and most other entertainments appear, and it's transformed the, the, the sense of ownership. On the one hand, uh, the delivery of those things has become a commodity owned usually by super corporations who are not in the same business as I'm in. In other words, say, Universal Records, who hold the, the, the rights for the time being to my catalog are owned in turn by a French utilities company. You know, they run trains, sewage works. They're not really in the music business, are they? They're not in the art business for sure.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Um, so they are the people to whom the bosses, who are above the people who hire me to work, make records, that, that's who they are. Now, independent companies like the one I'm recording for now still have relationships with, you know, because there's, you have to get the physical records out somewhere and those people control the distribution networks. But of course, as it's become a matter of instantaneous access, we're moving to a, we're moving to a model now where. The, nobody really has any physical records anymore, at least as generations of people that have no knowledge of that. They have no expectation of owning a physical copy of a record, unless it's a fetish object like a vinyl record that they bought in a hipster store.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  They, they, they, they can access something much more readily on the internet, whether through YouTube or Spotify or such a system. So why would they want to clutter up their, the house with a bunch of records? Now, there are people that will contradict that, but that is a big model now for it. So why can't you have all of those systems? Rather than sort of sitting around whining about it, why not just say, well, that's happened? You can sort of say there are some, you know, there are some things that are unfair or possibly even dishonest about it, but so it's always been the way, you know, that people would say, yeah, you make that record for me, I'll give you a Cadillac. And then they would go make millions off that title and the guy would just be driving

• 44:26Speaker 01

  around till the wheels fell off the Cadillac, you know? The artists have always had a difficult, hard time getting what they, you know, and their more egotistical moments, and some of the megalomaniac moments, you know, they, they probably believe that they're, they've been cheated in some way over fate, but maybe they just didn't work hard enough, or they weren't, or they were too, you know, they, you know, one thing that really affects some people is they're too hip to work. There's a lot, I know a lot of people that, you know, that think of themselves as very groovy, that disdain major popular music. Do you know who I like? I like Bing Crosby. He was a huge selling artist. I don't, I don't dislike pop music. I actually, you know what kind of music I don't care for?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  It's boring rock music that's sort of so pompous. I like rock and roll a lot, but I don't hear the thrill in this square music and you, and each type of music gets infected by that kind of squareness or self-satisfaction or self-fulfilling prophecy that happens in every form of music. And somebody else will tell you, that happened to me, because they, they judge you that way, you know?

• 45:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where did, um? Your tremolo come from, is that what it's called? Tremolo, vibrato in your voice when you sing?

• 45:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you always do that? Was it a conscious thing? Did you do it as a kid?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  It's about three different factors. One is that I was aware of that way of singing.

• 45:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  From your dad's music?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  He definitely listened to Billy Eckstein. When I said goodbye, I'm sorry. My dad on some records that he made, he doesn't have a lot of records under his own name, but the few where he sings in his true voice, oddly enough, you can hear elements of Eckstein in his vocal delivery. And he's one of my mother's favorite singers along with Tony Bennett. And, you know, ballad singers tended to use vibrato. The vibrato that might have been inherent in my voice, I think, wasn't so obvious because there were so many words in my songs. There were not many long-held notes in the early songs. They were mostly very quick-fire.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And when I slowed the pace down to sing ballads, then it became more apparent. And also simultaneously to that, I have to credit Chrissie Hyne with reintroducing the warm vibrato idea into popular music of the then-time.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  I'm talking about 80 to 83, that period there, after, you know, she made her prints about 79, 80.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  It reminded me of like the sounds that I loved about Dusty Springfield, who was probably my favorite singer at that time.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  I think beyond that, there's a certain amount of vibrato is a product of maybe a physiological,

• 47:54Speaker 01

  um, I, I, there are some.

• 47:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Many can't do it, right? Many singers can't do it.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, but I think also, I think that part of it is, uh, physiological, uh,

• 48:06Speaker 01

  I guess it's a flaw.

• 48:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  In my, in my, in my breathing.

• 48:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  No.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Like in my, maybe my, my, the whole engine works like that and it's, uh, like, uh, if you, if you live with a, uh, something like a heart murmur, you're, you're, you're, uh, you know, it can be like that.

• 48:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're saying your vibrato is a handicap of some kind?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  It's not a handicap. It's a, it's a physiological fact. It's a.

• 48:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really? So you don't try?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  You don't try to put it on? Your voice does that?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I think the breathing, the breathing does that because I think it's, uh, and it's like, it's a, it's like, uh, it's like a limp. It's like a limp. You could make it, you could, you, there are people who have great gates, you know, that you remember, like Robert Mitchum had a particular gate. Think of it like that. It's my John Wayne kind of gate that we've brought up. Just think of it like John Wayne and you've got it.

• 49:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  The story you were telling me about Chrissie Hynde was that.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I, I, I didn't suppress it then. I, I, I loved Chrissie singing so much that I thought, well, okay, you can have that in modern pop music. Like you could have it in the sixties, like, like, you know, um.

• 49:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cause it was corny. I mean, if you'd heard it in the sixties, it would have been.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I, I don't think there's a single corny note that Dusty ever sang. She always just sounded like she was.

• 49:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I say, I guess I mean, uh, certain pop.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's certain, you know, if you hear some things from the fifties, they sound, they sound very over emotive. They sound kind of, uh, trumped up, but, but, you know, they're just, and also, you know, some people can't hear opera. You know, they they think that's ridiculous and other people hear beauty in that way of singing.

• 49:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  How about you?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  I hear it, I hear really beauty in in a lot of the opera singers. I mean, there's there's times when you go and it isn't good and the people, but I but I know the physical dedication that that goes into that. And if you listen to Shalapin.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Or Hans Hutter.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Or Fisher Descal or any of the great recorded singers. And then there's the people I've seen, my friend Ansa Fivenotto. I mean, I I was a fan of hers from the from just going to the concert hall to always hear her sing. And then we became friends and we made a record together.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  She wanted to make a record where she let go of some of the training of her voice. But, you know, she's incapable of singing an ugly note, you know, and and of course, some of the things that are proposed in the singing of a popular song are sounds that are an anathema to to a trained singer. So it's quite difficult for them to unlearn some of their training and to to be unbuttoned enough to do it.

• 51:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you still uh, do you still have the scream? Do you still scream ever?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Do I what?

• 51:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  The scream you used to do.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  I can, yeah. I mean, I I don't want to do it in here because it's loud, but.

• 51:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't I don't mind, but I.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  No, I'm not going to try it now, but I mean, yeah, it doesn't always, it's not something I was conscious of doing. I can. I mean, it's not really thinking, I better put a scream in there. It's just something you do. I it's sort of a harmonic. I'm thinking in particularly in terms of the beginning of Man Out of Time. It sort of sounds like a, it sort of sounds like a alto saxophone playing harmonics. It's not, it's actually more than one note, you know.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  And I liked that when it came out, it all went squarely and it just like the, I love those things. I mean, there's different singers whose techniques are fascinated by, you know, I used to love Bobby Blueblatt, cause he always used to say,

• 52:46Speaker 01

  he used to sound like he was clearing his throat.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  It sounded like, you know, and Al Green has a, and these are singers that have so much voice compared with me, there's, I like singers who are kind of triers, like Rikkenko, he sounded like a,

• 53:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, Rikkenko.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  There was kind of a, kind of nervous thing to the way he sang that, that I really loved and it felt very human and there's something very beautiful about that and that's probably why we're able to respond to music in other languages without understanding what's being sung. We're maybe fascinated by where the emphasis lies in a kind of music that uses either a different rhythm or a different scale, so it's always surprising us. And the timbre of the voice is, you can tell there's a yearning in it or a, a sense of joy or a sense of lament. I can listen to religious music in the same way without necessarily believing the same thing that the singer is. I can listen to gospel music or

• 53:46Speaker 01

  cantors or, you know, whatever recordings that, that it's just, it's what the peo- the singer believes in.

• 53:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Um, Joe Loss was Jewish, I assume. There was a line in your book about how he,

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  He wanted your dad to have been Jewish, yes?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  He was absolutely convinced that my dad was.

• 54:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And are, are we convinced your dad wasn't Jewish? I was kind of hoping your dad was Jewish.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  I, I actually don't know, um, because I, I think it a bit unlikely, but of course, you know, because of the background of the family, who knows? I mean, we can't get back very far with records with, with Irish people that were, you know, there's, my great grandfather was what would be called now an economic migrant. You know, he left in the generation after the famine and unlike a lot of people, he didn't go to America, he just went to Merseyside.

• 54:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  You know, and so I've no idea if he hadn't died in a relatively avoidable industrial accident, I might not even be sitting here talking to you because maybe I'd be digging a ditch or loading coal onto a ship because that's what he did.

• 54:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  You know, and the only reason that the occupation of musician appears in my family is because my grandfather was placed in an orphanage and from there became, joined the British Army when he was 12 as a boy soldier, as a, as a bandsman. And, you know, that chance event seems to have derailed our family into a line of work in music. I've no way of knowing whether it would have been any different.

• 55:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Had you not become a musician, presumably you wouldn't have stayed at Elizabeth Arden forever. What do you think you would have done though, had it not worked out?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  I, I've, I just never had any doubt that I would do something eventually. I don't, it never occurred to me.

• 55:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you say you didn't have doubt, meaning you had confidence that it would work or you just didn't have an alternate idea?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  I never, I never have, never had any, oddly enough, it sounds really strange, but I didn't have any other ambition than just to do this, including like I didn't imagine any of the things that happened to me because they were all from the making of the first record to right now, just the thing that happened next.

• 55:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So do you feel fortunate in that regard or do you feel like this is just?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Enormously, even though in many ways, you know, I could have had a much more conventional form of success, but I've watched friends of mine who are much better known become confined by their success, you know, and to the expectations of an audience and, and not being able to outdistance their own shadow and things like that. So it seems like a life you'd want, but the grass is always greener, you know, the rewards that I have managed to kind of stay ahead of the wolf, you know, by basically working most of the days since I was 17. And most people would regard me as very, very fortunate, but I'm sure a lot of people

• 56:33Speaker 01

  that imagine I'm, you know, wealthy beyond all dreams and I, I'm really not. I'm, I, I work to maintain, to look after the people that I want to look, look, look out for, for as long as I can do that. And. To do the next thing. Quite often, the money that comes in to make a record funds that project, like being an independent filmmaker. It's not about it's not about sort of like hitting some imaginary number or moving yourself to some other echelon. I've never ever thought of that. I mean, I think five minutes in the late seventies, we had dreams of breaking America, cracking America. That was the thing. But but when you get there, you sense the vastness of it very quickly.

• 57:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you, I think everyone who knows your music, including me, would think of you, would consider you a an extraordinarily creative person. You're the kind of person that people use the phrase creative genius on.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  That's really crazy.

• 57:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I know, it is crazy. But but here's my question for you, really. We'll put aside the genius thing because that is just a silly question, silly argument. The creative part, I want to know. Do you feel your life is an exercise in that your work is an exercise in creativity and you carve out time and place and mood in which to be creative? Or is it work for you?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It's I think of myself, if I think of, I don't really think in terms of definition like a like a name tag. But if you actually ask me the difference, I say I I was a worker of a kind. I work at what I do. And then there might be moments of inspiration that visit you unexpectedly.

• 58:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you give, can you give an example?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Well, any song arriving is a mysterious sort of thing. I mean, it can be, it can range from carrying around a phrase in a notebook for four years before it joins up with some other thoughts or, or, you know, a line of melody that seems to bring it to life and allows you to kind of, you know, to represent something that you want to share with people. Or a song can just appear, the whole thing, the words and music, it can time stops and

• 58:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really? That's happened?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it happens.

• 58:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anything on the new record that happened?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Not so much in these because more of them were collaborations.

• 58:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  So then you are obviously, you're making a statement and waiting for somebody else's reply. So it's like, you know, it's like writing away for something.

• 59:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which of these songs, though, would you say came to you most fully?

• 59:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when I say fully, I mean, maybe it's even just the idea or the instrumentation and not...

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Oh, well, the instrumentation, that's a different thing. That was, the instrumentation and the orchestration of these songs was very, was sort of more like a, they were very complete to me when, when the songs were finished.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  The minute I decided that we were gonna do them as a, as a band, then I also started to think of like...

• 59:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're hearing the horns even in the strings, though?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  I was hearing everything and the vocal, and the background voices, you know, the vocal arrangements, the string arrangements.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  The horn arrangements, they were all, to my mind, almost extensions of the composition. So as we arranged the, our parts, I, I wanted the, I wanted, you know, the whole point of the exercise was to sort of trust in my cohorts. We had gone out last year and, and looked at the, the songs from the album Imperial Bedroom, which the original band who played at the Attractions, two of whom play in The Impostors, we truthfully never had the patience to play many of those songs well. The ones that survived into our live repertoire were songs that were easily adapted to the way we more commonly played, which was more frenetic. And the other songs, which were quite detailed in the studio, we didn't have the patience for the little details and nuances, nor did we have the voices. Nobody could sing

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  in that band, except me. So we never had any vocal harmony on stage for the last, you know, 15 years or whatever it is. Davy Fager has been in the band as a bass playing singer or singing bass player. So we've had two part harmony, but we've also started to, you know, incorporate two other singers into the live. Yeah, so Kit and Carroy and Brianna Lee in this case, and on some songs Davy's elder brother Tommy. So we could have, so between between us, we could, Davy being a very good vocal arranger in his own right. Although I sort of sketched out all the parts in my demos, we would, Davy and I would then discuss

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  what combination of voices is best used, just the same way as I didn't arrange every song for the same configuration of instruments. There's a bassoon on one song. There's a woodwind quintet where you might have expected to hear a string quartet.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Though you could imagine them playing the same parts on stripping paper, but I wanted the the sense of like something breathing, which the wind instruments brought. And so that was all.

• 1:01:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you're hearing, but you're hearing all that.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  I was hearing that in my, all of that in my head. And then it's just something that I've learned over the years, which is whereas I used to have to kind of, whenever I had something outside of the regular instruments of the band, I had to trust somebody to write it down. Sometimes it would get a little changed. Something would get lost in the translation and in the early nineties, I learned how to write music down. I was, you know, it was.

• 1:02:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  You didn't learn until then. I mean, you grew up knowing what music, what, reading it.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I never had any need to write it down because the sort of songs I started out with, they they would be, in some ways, they would have been attenuated by writing them down. You had to feel them. But these songs, it was all a process of powering down the arrangements to the essentials in the rhythm section. And Steve Naive, who's been my cohort for nearly forty years. I mean, he's a remarkable musician. I mean, he was an, he was a nineteen year old Royal College of Music student. So his education was obviously not complete there, but what he brought to the band and then what he's developed in all of the music, not just playing with me, but his own compositions. I mean, he wrote an opera, you know, I mean, he's, he's explored things and piano records where he's followed his own instincts about music.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Is the kind of person who can give you lots of invention to any theme you give him. But also you have to have some discretion about which part of what he's playing is really magical and which complements the song and which.

• 1:03:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you good, is he good at accepting that from you?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I think we worked, I, I think that, I think there are some times when I've just been inclined, just let Steve go. And when I think about it later, maybe I could have been more, more discerning. But it was so thrilling to hear him play, I didn't do that. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna retrospectively re-edit the records.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Nearly all of the credit for the production should go to Sebastian Kreis. He recorded it. He was the one that made sure the order was kept to things. He got the beauty of the sound. He mixed it. My contribution to the production was really in the editorial of the music. In that I had to be there, the discerning voice of anything there. I'd say to Pete, play a simpler fill or give me something different there if you can. Steve, leave this hole because there's gonna be strings there and then you'll play together and the next time, well, he couldn't know that because I hadn't told him.

• 1:04:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you don't let him play through then edit out? You decide?

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Uh, well, in some cases we, we would get in and he'd start to play and I'd say, we maybe need to leave more of a hole there or don't do that variation because it's not agreeing with what else is coming. Because we did do everything separately. Most records I've done in the past, ninety percent of them have been arranged from the voice outwards. So I would sing on the live take and often that would be the take. So that, that would, was a lot of pressure for the band in that if I got something I liked, they would have to live sometimes with a flawed performance if you couldn't fix it in some way. In this case, I didn't want to do that. I wanted everything to be. That we would agree what we were gonna play and we would draw on everybody's strengths independently.

• 1:04:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was that experience like for you then as a singer?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Well, that's really like getting to my dream to be like Dusty. You know, of going in and like if you see those old pictures of like where they they had the band in the studio and the vocalist in the booth. That's what it felt like because usually when you're singing in the studio, you're imagining I'm gonna add some stuff to this and sometimes when you re-sing a song, it's because the weight of the original performance wasn't quite right. There's nothing the matter with the singing, but maybe it was it was too aggressive or not aggressive enough and so or not forceful enough. And then when you add those other instruments, the vocal sounds muted. In this case, I had everything to support me. It was like being on stage with an orchestra or an ensemble.

• 1:05:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was gonna say, I mean, I don't mean to be a shrink here, but to to some degree, was it your father died a while back?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  No, the people.

• 1:05:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  No fulfillment?

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  People said that when I worked with Bert Bakrak because I wore a tuxedo, you know, but they'd never seen my dad in a caftan, you know what I mean? It was never psychological.

• 1:05:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  I'm not given to that kind of thing. I mean, it's it I just enjoyed doing it this way, but equally when I invited Bert Bakrak to play with the band, you know, we had written about twenty five songs over the last twelve years for two musical projects, one of which was based on our original album Painted From Memory. It's quite difficult to thread a story through a group of existing songs unless it's a biographical show about the songwriter or the artist. And therefore, we ended up with another ten or so songs written for Painted From Memory, but they were also very slow and melancholic like the original collection,

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  which I guess scared the producers that we were engaged with and the show seemed to stall. And after a couple of years of no further movement, I asked Bert two years ago if he would consent to let me bring them out into the light or the ones that I felt I could sing. Because I just thought they were too good. I mean, I thought they were, you know, they were they were absolutely crazy for good songs. In the case of the two that he leads, they're all his music and I'm only the lyricist. One of the most amazing things to me and wonderful things is that Bert entered into a different kind of collaboration twenty five years ago than he'd ever had, and he continued to return to that style of collaboration with me.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Actually, I think uniquely, I don't think he's co-written music with anybody else but maybe Neil Diamond. So that's pretty good company to be in, you know, Neil, who has written tremendous songs as well. But Burt was open to a different form of collaboration, a dialogue in music, which, why, why would he need to do that? He's Burt Bacharach, you know. But that just shows the curiosity.

• 1:07:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, come on, you're Elvis Costello.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  No, but it's not like that. It's like, you know, it has always been the beauty of this collaboration, that, that on the one hand, you had somebody who was open to something different, despite all the experience, despite all of his achievements. And the second thing is, you can't get anything past him. Because he, you know, he hears everything.

• 1:07:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was the song you said you sent to him and he said, nope, it's done?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Uh, Stripping Paper.

• 1:07:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Because that was also written with view to being in this musical production.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  You know, I'm pretty shrewd about these things, because I've read all my musical, you know, Broadway biographies, and I know how many great songs have been in and out of shows, they've been cut at the last minute.

• 1:08:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  There was the Gershwin song you wrote, that was in three shows.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  The Man I Love.

• 1:08:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Unbelievably, in three shows. And I think, uh, I think, uh, lots of Rogers and the Heart songs went the same way. So, much better songs than I'll ever write have been in, uh, cut out of shows. So I'm, I, I have no, I have no, um, uh, make no apology for being, like, tricky enough to, to make sure that the song stands up on its own. Because I don't really care for songs even in opera, where they go, I'm walking up the stairs, I'm walking down the stairs, it's a lovely day today. You know, I don't care about that stuff. I want to hear about the feelings, or something to do with the story that's unique. And, and obviously, these songs, that we ended up with, a few, few of them,

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  quite a few of them are about how we decode the way people look at each other.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Don't Look Now, the second song on the record, is a woman looking at a man saying, I see you looking at me.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  And trying to imagine what is contained within the gaze. She's trying to see what's contained within that man's gaze. Is it admiration? Is it appreciation? Is it lust? Is it ill-intent?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Another song that wrote the music for Photographs and Liars, the story of her daughter realising, upon discovering her father's infidelity, he falls from a pedestal on which she's placed him.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  That seemed to be the way these particular songs worked out. They weren't the last 12 things that happened to me. Maybe that's something to do with, well, obviously it's something to do with the fact originally they had a theatrical origin, but even contained within the two or three, four minutes of the song, I didn't, I just didn't have the feeling of wanting to be selfish in them being...

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  My direct experience rather than things that I knew to be true and things that observed the kind of reactions people had to a discovery. The song Stripping Paper that I mentioned a moment ago is uh, the, the words of a, a woman who's discovered her husband's infidelity and absentmindedly almost pulls a layer of wallpaper from the wall. And it, that's just peeling off and she peels it back and behind it is a simpler pattern that sort of is a symbol of when they had less money and beneath that another even simpler one that may have been on the wall when they first got that apartment. And where they had drawn a pencil mark for their daughters to measure their daughter's height.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Well, when you describe it, it sounds a little sentimental. But when you sing it, it doesn't, it doesn't read as sentimental because the idea of somebody having almost like this book of their life. And you, you know, including like joyful erotic memories that are, that she's wrestling with. I don't think that, that's not something that, that anybody is gonna have any problem understanding. It's not, it's not opaque and, and the lyrics are pretty to the point on this record. With the possible exception of the first song on the record, which is in itself a sequel. Underline? Yeah. I took the character. Jimmy, yeah. Jimmy from my song Jimmy Standing in the Rain, which I wrote.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Well, it was released on a record in two thousand and ten. And Jimmy was a portrait of a vaudeville singer, musical singer in the north of England. Who was traping around doing this kind of trying to sell cowboy songs to, you know, it would be the worst time in life to try and do that. And, you know, I, I pictured him kind of like beaten down, alcoholic. Probably could have TB, you know, he's like got the full challenge.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  He finds some sort of comfort in the arms of a woman who, in the throes of passion, calls out the name of another man. I mean, nothing about his life is encouraging. And he feels himself abandoned. And then I, I just left him there at the end of the song, and I don't know, I started thinking about what if he, what if he were discovered and kind of disinterred and brought into the realm of, of light entertainment in England in the, in the 50s. It's only 20 years later. We think of these eras as totally independent, but of course they're not, you know. And now he's on one of those shows where they used to blindfold people and make them guess people's occupation or identity. And he's put in the charge of a young woman who is the production assistant of the show, and

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  they tell her, don't, don't tell him your name, you know, don't, don't, don't, don't let him, whatever you think, don't let him drink, because he's disreputable. And he might potentially be, you know, gonna hit on her when they get alone. And when they do get alone, he sort of is charming, and he starts to ask her all about herself, and about her boyfriend, and about her family.

• 1:15:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whole family tree.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then you see how he's maybe making a trap, and she almost leans into it. And she finds him like, he conceives a ruin, but like, people are fascinated by ruins sometimes, even when they know they shouldn't be.

• 1:15:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then there's the line, "I can't believe this is happening to me."

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Happening to me.

• 1:15:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  We were to read that in one of two ways, I assume?

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Maybe that she's flattered momentarily by his attention, and in that, and in that little indecision, you know, is the risk. But I tried to make it so that I wasn't judging her or judging him even. He's obviously not right, you know. In the last verse, he, it says he shuttered, shuttered his eyes. That he made a very conscious effort not to look at her. And he's thinking about, he thought of a drummer and he considered a snare. Because he's laid this trap before and he may have even taken advantage of that situation before. He's had the, had the.

• 1:16:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And he's trying to talk himself.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  He's always trying to talk himself, well, I'll leave it to the listener to decide whether it says, you know. He says, you don't get a record if you never get poor.

• 1:16:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  You know, and it, it's.

• 1:16:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a long way down from that.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  It's a scene that we're, that, that isn't exactly, it's not a new one, you know. It's not made up last week.

• 1:16:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Quite plainly.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  No, it isn't. And it's been there all of, you know, it's been, it's been a scene I've seen, I've, I've witnessed. You know, so it's, um, I just thought that was the way I would leave him. I don't know whether Jimmy will ever make another appearance now. Maybe, maybe in a stripy suit, I don't know, you know. I mean, that's the terrible thing about it, you know.

• 1:16:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just quickly, what do you do for fun? I'm curious what you.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  It's a family show. Um, uh, yeah.

• 1:17:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean plainly you read and listen to a lot of music and you have a family and so on. I'm just curious, are you?

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's really enough. I mean, I, I like to see my friends, I, I keep in touch with people. I mean, life is full and, you know, between your, the, the people that you care for. And as people get older and more vulnerable in your family, you, you have to spend time with them. Because that time becomes more and more precious. I, I don't feel that I'm, I'm oppressed by, by anything really. I'm curious about things, so, and I mean, I, I'm not, I'm never really thought of myself as being cynical. I don't like the, when I see the word cynical attached to my name. I think I'm very skeptical. I think you're right to be skeptical about, um.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Institutions and the things you mentioned and I know the systems of of control, but whether they're the small ones between two people or the larger ones that are governments or corporations. But I don't, I get, I just laugh at the idea that people tell you, people in my line of work shouldn't, shouldn't make a comment, particularly when the comments are not unsubtle slogans. I mean, I try even say a song like Under Lime, it's, it's got three or four points of view within the song. It's written, so the music is, opens with a, with a strong rhythm.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  And then becomes, as it becomes, there's more doubt in the motivation of what's being said, the music changes.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  And then it explodes into a more celebratory type of music.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Which I suppose has a, has a meaning in that it, you know, the show does go on despite all of this. And often the scene in the backstage is something we draw a veil over sometimes, or we used to draw a veil over. That's the same with everything. I mean, problems that that I thought would have gone away a long time ago are still there. You know, everybody sang that song and it didn't change. So you've got to keep trying. For some people, it's, you know, some people are in a lifelong service to a better way to live. And, and some people are just trying to, are just jesters. And I guess I'm one of them.

• 1:19:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I gather that doing this, sitting down and talking about yourself is not what you do for fun, but I very much appreciate your making this up.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Your questions have been very, you know, they're not, they're not any, any pain to me to answer. I hope there's been something of worth.

• 1:20:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Absolutely. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:20:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks to Elvis Costello for taking the time to speak with us. Thanks also to Mark Satloff for making it happen. If you haven't already done so, check out our How to Be Creative series, episodes 354 and 355 so far. It features other creative types like Ai Weiwei, Jennifer Egan, Wynton Marsalis, James Dyson, Rosanne Cash, and Myra Kalman. In the coming weeks, we'll be putting out more of these full interviews on Stitcher Premium. We've already published many extras from our sports series there as well. On Stitcher Premium, you can use the promo code Freakonomics for one month free, and our entire catalog is available there without ads. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was

• 1:21:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  produced by Matt Fraschica, with help from Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, and Rebecca Lee Douglas. Our staff also includes Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zach Lipinski. You can subscribe to the Freakonomics Radio podcast on any podcast app. Feel free to leave us a nice rating or review. We can also be heard on NPR stations across the country, and

• 1:21:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  we can be reached at [email protected]. Thanks for listening. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the

• 1:22:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:22:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:23:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company: building the future of energy.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

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