11.01.2020
ELVIS COSTELLO ON HIS ‘CLOCKFACE’ ALBUM, ‘ARMED FORCES’ SET AND COMING BROADWAY MUSICAL: ‘I’VE SPENT MY WHOLE CAREER LEANING BACKWARDS TO LAUNCH FORWARD’
Variety: Chris Willman: October 30th 2020. Photo By Diana Krall
Elvis Costello knows that, this deep into a four-decade-plus career, he will always be asked the inevitable then-and-now questions about how his attitude has changed, beckoning the 66-year-old to pit the late-1970s version of himself against the gentler and more accomplished Costello that constitutes this century’s model. That doesn’t mean he has to like it; asking him to do a self-compare-and-contrast is one of the few things you could bring up that risks evincing the vintage 1978 glare.
“You know, that’s an analyst’s question, that question they always ask,” he says — referring to journalists’ eagerness to put him on the couch to measure his levels of amusement and disgust, then versus now — “and I try not to be impatient with it. But if for some reason you had to have your legs sawn off, you would not ask the surgeon poised with the hacksaw, ‘How did you feel about your vocation in medicine when you were a student?,’ would you?” He continues: “You surely feel something valuable has happened in the time, even if you’ve made mistakes. And, you know, mistakes, I’ve made a few. But then again, too few to mention.”
As it turns out, Costello is perfectly happy to talk about his youthful days, as long as he doesn’t feel like he’s being subjected to Freud’s talking cure. And it’s a good thing he has that comfort level, because he is being asked to chat up two projects that, apparently by coincidence, are coming out nearly simultaneously: his strikingly good 31st studio album, “Hey Clockface,” which dropped Oct. 30, and a deluxe vinyl boxed set commemorating his third album, the 1979 masterpiece “Armed Forces,” which arrives just a week later, on Nov. 6. There is a lot of clock-punching, or smashing, to go around in this sudden flurry of releases.
He quotes a couplet from “Newspaper Pane,” one of the tunes from the brand new album: “’I don’t spend my time perfecting the past / I live for the future because I know it won’t last.’ That’s spoken by a character in the song, but there are days when I really feel that. The effort to critique the past is one thing. To live to solely devote yourself to correcting it is surely energy that should be spent on making a better future. Now, maybe you can’t do one without the other,” he acknowledges. “Lots of people would argue that. And I have spent my whole creative career leaning backwards to launch forward.” In context, he’s talking partly about how he’s always acknowledged borrowing from his musical forebears, but it could just as easily describe how, as the juxtaposition of new and catalog releases suggests, he’s standing on the shoulders not just of the giants who preceded him, but his own, too.