Photo: Christopher Anderson for New York Magazine I know where the bodies are buried and the choices that I can’t or won’t take,” Elvis Costello tells me with utter conviction and without going into the specifics. He’s sitting under a photograph of a young Aretha Franklin in mid-song and cradling what appears to be a Fender bass guitar, which he seems to be on the verge of playing but never does.
Desperation. Nervousness. Young Declan took it all in. You could take your vulnerabilities as far as rock and roll could allow, even beyond rock and roll when you wanted to. His adenoidal singing voice is not perfect, but it delivers catharsis. And in this pandemic — which cut short his tour in mid-March; he flew back from London to Canada while he still could — who couldn’t use some?
A girlfriend once told me that Costello sounded to her like the angry guy masturbating on the other side of the door. Which is a creepy image and not something anybody wants to think about. Male sexual frustration has gone from being an acceptably ubiquitous font of artistic inspiration to something that sounds like incel, and whether or not that is entirely fair, the culture has more important injustices on its mind, and that is okay.
He is on record trashing the royal family and writing a song, “Tramp the Dirt Down,” about dancing on Margaret Thatcher’s grave, yet he is now an OBE — on receiving the honor, he mentioned that his mum thought Prime Minister Theresa May was “rubbish.” When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored him years ago, he thanked Franz Schubert.
These are not hard lyrics to decode. It’s like an open wound. But Costello doesn’t want to talk about its emotional content. He wants to talk about songwriting almost in a technical sense. He mentions that two of his favorite artists — Dylan and Lennon — had songs called “I Want You” first. He listened very closely. “You have to distinguish between what is communicating an emotional truth and what is just a tantrum,” he says.