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History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues
I'm just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
—Elvis Costello, "Beyond Belief"
Love begins with a question. In our first substantial conversation, the young woman who became my wife wanted to know if I had any thoughts concerning the meaning of Elvis Costello's last radio hit, "Veronica," a Paul McCartney-collaboration from his 1989 album, Spike. Little did she know that contemplating Elvis Costello lyrics was (and is) one of my favorite pastimes. And oh the joys of being asked to indulge an explication (by a female, no less)! I happily explained that the song is an ode to his grandmother, whose knowing glances and romantic memories survive a quietly ordered existence surrounded by nursing home personnel ("They call her a name that they never get right / And if they don't, then nobody else will"). In between her vacant stares, Costello notes the occasional smile and the penetrating look of recognition and derives an abiding encouragement from both. My wife-to-be was satisfied by my answer, and I was, to say the least, deeply gratified by her satisfaction. It was her favorite Costello song, as it turns out, and I couldn't have asked for a more fertile bit of common ground.
The affectionate interrogation that drives a song like "Veronica" ("Is it all in that pretty little head of yours?") is a defining trait of Costello's entire catalogue. The hasty listener will protest that this aging punk rocker is primarily possessed by the cleverly worded rant, the posture of a spurned lover, and a mostly unmatched cynicism. But this is only the work of pr machinery (admittedly encouraged by the man himself) that screeched to a halt 20 years ago. A close listen to "Alison" ("I know this world is killing you") or the twangy, countrified demos of his early work will reveal a more subtle context and an underlying tenderness that was there all along.
Take 1979's Armed Forces, for instance. Largely inspired by his first trip to Northern Ireland, it isn't in the name of a hopeless nihilism that he takes British imperialism to task. Ever wary of the backhanded compliment that comes with careless categorizing, Costello makes a habit of placing what might be described as protest songs right alongside the ballads and torch-song confessions. The same man who penned a lamentation concerning the weapons industry ("Shipbuilding") also recorded an album with Burt Bacharach. He eschews the easy dismissal of topical descriptions: "I don't see a subject called politics, it's just right and wrong and what happens in life." And he's happy enough with "folk music" as a category for his own work just so long as it's no more highfalutin a description than, say, "music for folks," a broad description indeed for a fellow who's recorded albums with the Brodsky Quartet, the opera star Anne Sofie von Otter, and a legend in country music production like Billy Sherrill (with 1981's Almost Blue, Costello was alt-country when country wasn't cool).
Whatever the genre that best serves to pigeonhole his latest musical preoccupation, the defining trait of his songwriting is a determination to look hard at human beings, most notably himself. "I'm an idiot," he's quick to point out. "We all are, we're all beautiful and we're all ugly." His willingness to examine the seamier side of modern man (perhaps most effectively in his chronicles of man's inhumanity to woman) can leave the fastidious listener a little cold. But this is the peculiar authenticity that marks the best of what we perhaps do well to call "folk music." It reflects confusion as well as harmony, the beautiful and the ugly. As Bob Dylan remarked in a 1965 interview, "It's weird, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts … chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything." As a lyricist, Costello stands in this tradition with people like Dylan and Tom Waits. Neither sap nor sentimentality will have the last word. His subject is all things ineffably human.
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