Elvis Costello

Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

Elvis Costello joins Broken Record to discuss the 49th anniversary box set of his debut album, My Aim Is True, tracing the years of musical absorption and experimentation that preceded its release. He details how influences

Key takeaways

• Costello recorded My Aim Is True in late 1976/early 1977 with American session group Clover, not his touring band The Attractions, after they had their own career commitments.
• His early songwriting was heavily shaped by Joni Mitchell's intricate harmonies, Chuck Berry's lyrical compression, and the Detroit Spinners' rhythmic phrasing in Ghetto Child.

Main topics

• Musical influences and early development
• Songwriting craft versus confessional authenticity

Notable quotes

"I wasn't sitting around analyzing stuff. I was just doing it too fast."

Conclusion

Costello's reflections offer a masterclass in how deliberate craftsmansh

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (0:04) Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the U.S. has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold. Speaker 4 (0:46) Pushkin. Speaker 4 (0:51) So Elvis Costello, welcome to Broken Record. Good to be here. And you are going to talk about your new release of your old release. So tell me what it is. Speaker 2 (1:01) It is the 49th anniversary set presenting My Aim Is True, my first record. recorded over the back end of 1976 and the first few days of 1977, released in 1977. Speaker 2 (1:21) Other recordings spread over four other discs. They are The Blueprint, which is a collection of acoustic guitar performances, songs I wrote in 1975, half of which I sort of held to myself for fear that they maybe revealed my, you know, my stumbling steps to get to a style. I mean, to my mind at the time... I put them away in a drawer because they sounded too much like the people I liked. When I listen to them now, I just hear me, and you can have a vague sense of somebody I might have heard. Songs I tried to write in a different style entirely than the one that informs Mime is True. And then, of course, the demos, which you can see that coming into focus. Some recordings I made prior to that, which were my first attempts to make any recordings with a band. And then the formation of the attractions. who were put together to, as it were, promote or at least play the music from Miami's True, because the band that played on that album were an American group, Clover, who were not available to me after the recording of the record. They had their own career. You're Speaker 4 (2:32) stumbling attempts to find a style. And I do want to talk about how you developed that style. I remember seeing your album when it was first in the record store. You know, there are artists, I think probably Springsteen's an example, where you follow them along as they develop their style. You are one of those artists for me who seemed to emerge fully formed with that first album. You had the attitude, you had the glasses, you had the great lyrics. So to me, going through this record and this package was fascinating because it's so interesting to see how that came about. Speaker 2 (3:11) You know, I sort of... I started writing songs when I was about 14, 15 maybe, played in public around that time for the first time and then, you know, did all the usual things of learning, playing other people's music. I joined a band in Liverpool that immediately became a duo because we realised the singer couldn't sing at the bass player, went to university, which is a very typical teenage band experience. And we carried on for a year or more. And I realized that I had to return to London where I had been born. My parents are from Merseyside. So my first experiences of even running music evenings were going against the grain of the folk music of Liverpool, which was mostly traditional. And we were trying to sing our own songs and songs by people we liked who were mostly Californian acoustic musicians and the birds and the band and things like that. I went to London and the beginning of the pub rock scene as it came to be known, although it was never called that by the participants, it was simply bands taking the music directly to the audience rather than going on to the big glamorous stage with dry ice and lame pants. They were just walking up in their day clothes and playing music directly to an audience that could buy a ticket at the door. Speaker 2 (4:36) Nick Lowe was in a band, Prince's Schwartz, who I loved. And I had met Nick when Prince's came to the Cavern. I'd met him in the pub opposite the Cavern. I got talking with him and then I turned, then I became the guy that would turn up at their gigs and ask him questions. You know, I was trying to find my way. I wasn't asking for favors. I was just asking advice about things, about songwriting and that. I don't remember what our conversations were really about. It was just, I thought he was cool and, you know, we hung out. And, uh... I put a band together for a little while, which were really just a collection of people who happened to play the instruments that made up a band. We didn't really have any other recommendations for being a group than that. And we stumbled around playing a few shows and field by songs, and we took the example of Ebenezer Schwartz in picking particularly obscure songs from American R &B repertoire to put in our set. And the only song that... people recognized was Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door, which was then in the charts. Everything else we played was like willfully obscure, including my songs, which were, you know, they were the first steps. Of course, that kind of ran out of steam after we did one recording session. And I went back to that studio with my acoustic guitar a few months later. Dave Robinson was running the studio over a pub, which in itself had a basement venue, the Hope and Anchor. And he let me... just play every song I had while he was twiddling the dials. He was really working still on the studio. And I think Dire Straits may have done their demos there. I believe they did. And Graham Parker's first record was recorded there. So I just played every song that I had. I'd bought Bruce Springsteen's first record while I lived in Liverpool. I'd listened to that record back to back. And I had one song that sort of sounded like it was, to me it sounded like me trying to write like that. Another couple of songs sounded like I'd heard Van Morrison around the time of his Bannon Street Choir. All these ideas in my head was I was trying on those, as I put in the liner notes, it's like a man trying on hats, you know, does this suit me? And I put those songs away and then I proceeded on to a style of writing which was informed by... Records that I loved, particularly Randy Newman's records, but also including Dr. John's Gumbo and Van Dyke Park's records. So they would be literally Americana, not the Americana music of today, but they had a lot of American references and a lot of arcane references. And I was really trying to work out how I could sing about the way I felt, 21. married with a son, living in the suburbs, where nothing in the world I was wanting to enter was within my reach. I had no way to make myself into a suitable face for pop music. And even the scene that was beginning to emerge in 75, I'd had a go at being in it. And those same venues were the venues in which punk began. And I wasn't in tune with that musically. So I proceeded to write these songs that were willfully styled to sound as if they'd been found in a trunk in 1927. And that's the way I wrote Jump Up and Wave a White Flag and a few of the songs that are on this collection. They were experiments of writing songs that were really from the heart. And if you actually read the lyrics of Poison Moon, it really talks about being like an outsider. And I didn't know harmony in any formal sense. So everything was just instinctive. Everything was just, all my musical learning was from records. I never played a scale in my life. I never, I can't read music. You can to this day? I can write it down and I can orchestrate, but I can't sight read music back because I never trained my eye to my hand. which you have to do, obviously, as a piano player or as another kind of, you know, formal instrumentalist. So I saw that Nick Lowe had released a single and there was this new label. I'd had this demo tape, which I'd made in my bedroom, sent back to me by five, six, seven publishers or record companies that didn't see anything in it at all. And I left my tape there at this little office, never expecting to hear anything about it, and I got a call saying... We want to talk to you. And within a month, I was in the studio with Nick producing, playing bass. And I was introduced to John McPhee and Mickey Shine from Clover, whose records I actually owned. They were pretty obscure. They were on Fantasy, two albums on Fantasy. They had a new lineup with a different drummer from the original band with a different keyboard player, or I think a keyboard player at all, Sean Hopper. Of course, they had two singers, the original singer, Alex Cole, and Huey Lewis, who was kind of the rabble rouser second lead singer. And I was put into the studio initially just with two members, with Nick playing bass. We caught Mystery Dance, which was, you know, a very simple rock and roll song. And I said I didn't want it to sound like a pastiche. I said I want to play it all downstrokes, you know, so that it was kind of, I'd heard the Ramones by then, and I'd heard the Modern Lovers. I thought it needed to be more, actually less swinging in some ways, you know. Speaker 4 (10:11) What's interesting, one thing that, re-listening to this album, is I realized how much of it really had swing to it, which is not what you did particularly with the attractions. Speaker 2 (10:22) That was, that's very good that you say that because it saves me from saying it seemed like I'm wise after the fact. But one of the reasons I was excited to meet John McPhee. was not just that I had these two records which they'd made, it would have been modest, they hadn't made much kind of penetration, they were cult records to say the least. He played on Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey and I wasn't a psychedelic Van Morrison fan in that it took me a while to get to Astral Weeks, but from Moondance on, particularly Bannon Street Choir and Tupelo Honey, these records just made me crazy and I just wanted to do that. and to have John, who could play pedal steel as well as guitar, but more importantly, Johnny Shambodi, the bass player, who was the most swinging bass player I played with other than Jerry Sheff, who was in the TCB band, later on. But John brought this thing, and I had these models for songs, some of which I'd been working on for a couple of years, and in my head, that figure that's Sneaky Feelings, If you play it slower, it's like... Speaker 1 (11:34) You Speaker 3 (11:37) think you're so way out and got all the action. Speaker 2 (11:42) You ain't living till you're loving. In my mind, that's what we were playing, but I couldn't relax enough to be like, and I couldn't sing like Marvin Gaye as I just proved. I'm not warmed up for singing, but I'm just illustrating that in my mind, that was the music we were playing. We were playing like Marvin. Or like the Motown band. But of course, I never mentioned any of that to the Clover players. I just let them find it. Because I had no experience of directing musicians of any caliber. And I thought, well, they know what they're doing. These are guys that have already recorded. And everything they played sounded great. Because not only do you hear these songs being interpreted in a number of different ways, starting with... then the attractions taking them over and playing quite faithful to that original model, I have to say, for the first 20 minutes. And then, you know, six or seven months later, just you can't even recognize the songs, much less the people playing them. It's a completely different type of music. And then at the end, reunited with Clover, you know, 30 years after we made Miami's True. And guess what? When we went to rehearsals, I said to Pete Thomas, who was... deputizing as the drummer. I said, it's the tempo, right? He said, it's the tempo from the record. I said, well, we've never played it like that. He said, I know, but trust it. And we did. And guess what? Back came that swing and feel. So sometimes that first information that you get about music, the attempts to copy aren't as important as the leap into the dark often that you make in finding your own voice. And frankly, for me, it was... literally about being able to be in a room. Because when I tried to play those intimate songs I was talking about earlier, I would write them at home and they would sound attractive to me. And then I'd take them to a folk club where I was getting booked in 75 or 76. I'd play down the bill from people I wouldn't be headlining. And when I played those more introspective songs, my people just talked over them because I didn't have the relationship with the audience that they trusted me. all the people whose music I was listening to at that time, whether it be Randy Newman or Joni Mitchell or John Prine, of course, it established that relationship that allowed them to sing intimately and didn't need to speak out and shout. I just need to speak up for myself. And then I did, and that's My Amidst True. And to be really honest, a handful of those songs are really deeply felt, and a couple of them are kind of dashed off, kind of as the sort of things that serve me well to kind of... be in that moment, they don't bear too much scrutiny. They sound good as records, but they don't sound, you know, you would never read the lyrics out and say, hey, listen to this. Speaker 4 (14:30) Well, we're going to put a lot of scrutiny on them, see how much they can take. Talking about how you absorb music, how you relearned it, it's reminding me of a story from your book, which I loved. Your father was a musician. He was a big band musician. You share that with... Paul McCartney and Paul Simon, whose fathers were all... Speaker 2 (14:52) Very different sort of experiences, of course. My father originally wanted to be a bebop trumpet player. He came out of the RAF and he played the trumpet, and like most everybody else, adored Louis Armstrong. And then he heard Dizzy Gillespie, and he wanted to play that new music, and got in a lot of trouble on Merseyside trying to play that music. I don't know how good it was, because there's no recordings. But, I mean, that was his ambition. And when my folks went to live in London in about 1950, it was my father's idea to get into what was then called modern jazz scene. And when I was born, he took the pragmatic role and took a job as a trumpet vocalist and ended up being one of the featured singers and probably the best known and, you know, most successful dance band. They were a dance band on the Glenn Miller model. the kind of music which people still really loved from the Second World War times, because Glenn Miller was a heroic figure in England. My father then just had to sing what was put in front of him. He had to sing the hits of the day. And then by the time I became more aware of what it was he did, it would have been around 1963, they had a radio show that was a lunchtime radio show, which was literally called the Joe Lost Pop Show. Speaker 4 (16:10) There's a wonderful scene where you are watching your father and he's got a very early, I'm not sure if it was a tape or it was a single of Please Please Me. Speaker 2 (16:20) Oh, it was a 45. They would be sent A labels, you know, which were overprinted with an A so that DJ knew which side to play. Or sometimes even acetates from Dick James from Northern Songs. Speaker 2 (16:34) So all the records on my record shelf that are A-labels or acetates are songs my father sang on the radio. As strange as it might be that they include my generation and reach out and I'll be there and see Emily play by the Pink Floyds. It's still the only Pink Floyd song