07.20.2020
EVERY SONG THAT INFLUENCED ELVIS COSTELLO, ACCORDING TO HIS NEW MEMOIR
Vulture: Stephen Deusner: October 14th 2015
… Even when a song may not say exactly what he needs it to, music is still his preferred means of communication; which is to say, Costello’s knowledge is nerdishly prodigious. He stumps George Jones with one of the Possum’s own deep cuts, and he tries to do the same with Bob Dylan — but nobody out-alludes that guy. With the obsession of a dilettante or possibly a savant, Costello jumps around from country and old-time folk to punk and reggae, from New Orleans jazz to Brill Building pop, from the classical compositions of the Brodsky Quartet to the erudite melodies of Burt Bacharach.
Costello quoted liberally from the pop canon, but every song, even the ones sung from other perspectives, was stolen from his life, such that you can get as nuanced a portrait of the man from Unfaithful Music’s two-part “soundtrack” (i.e., a Costello greatest hits) as you do from the book itself. Perhaps his wisest decision as a memoirist was to write Unfaithful Music with no regard for chronology, so that you glimpse the struggling young artist and the settled old legend side by side, although whether you glimpse them in horror or relief will depend on whether you prefer 1977’s My Aim Is True or 2006’s Allen Toussaint collaboration, The River in Reverse….