On The Cover # 6: 5 Things I Learned from Elvis Costello’s First Two Albums by Justin Couch

On January 29, 2014, my band, Quantum Creep, will be covering Elvis Costello’s first two albums, My Aim is True and This Year’s Model, at The Hi-Dive as part of the On The Cover series, hosted by Josiah Hesse with Joshua Novak opening the show.

Playing cover songs is nothing new to us. However, in learning the 26 songs on these two albums, I learned a lot more than chords and lyrics. Here are just a few nuggets of wisdom I've gleaned from Costello.

5. When you run out of things to say, either change or stop the song

I tend to write long. I wouldn’t say there's a method I follow every time when writing a song, but generally if the music is coming first, I try to find the most interesting part and play that section way too many times. The best parts of Costello songs only happen once, and then they’re gone.

Listen to the second verse of “(The Angels Want to Wear my) Red Shoes.” There’s a call and response part that totally makes the song. Musically, the chords seem basically the same as the chorus, but they’re not. These two albums are full of those little details that you probably don’t pick up on by casually listening. In “Blame it on Cain,” there’s a chord at the end of the verse that gets longer each time it comes around. In “Pump it Up,” the second verse is one line shorter than all the others. Little changes like that break up the monotony of songs and keep them fresh for repeated listens.

Since learning all of these Costello songs, I’ve done a line-wide edit on all of my songs to pare them down and keep them interesting. “Welcome to the Working Week,” the opening shot of My Aim is True (and one of the best lead-off tracks of all-time) clocks in at under 1:30 – yet still manages to have an intro, two and a half choruses, two verses, and a bridge. Damn. Shorter is often better in pop songs.

4. Punk is about more than playing or dressing a certain way

Was Elvis Costello a punk? He was certainly co-opted by their movement to a certain extent. This Year’s Model shows a definite manic energy shared by his contemporaries in The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and The Jam; however, the songs are more complex and the lyrical content is very different. My Aim is True owes much more to the tradition of Pub Rock and Northern Soul. Aim was also produced by the great Nick Lowe some months before he did The Damned’s fantastic album, Damned Damned Damned, considered by some to be the first proper British punk album.

I’m into trivia, context, and stories about my favorite musicians. I see punk in Costello’s case as being more of a glass slipper a la Cinderella. When he was writing My Aim is True, Costello was working as a computer tech at an Elizabeth Arden make-up factory. He hated his job and played local shows at night; a reality all-too familiar to myself and many of my friends playing up and down Broadway each week. Costello says that he had been playing music for about 7 years before he was discovered. His initial advance matched his salary for the few days that he would be recording his album. It unexpectedly took off and the rest is history.

Was he in the right place at the right time and part of an A&R punk feeding frenzy? Was it that his song-writing brilliance was finally appreciated? I guess it doesn’t really matter. There are certainly punk moments on Aim, but songs like “Mystery Dance” have more in common with a Chuck Berry rave-up than a Ramones girl-group melt down. Elvis Costello is about substance more than style, which may be one reason why he’s still putting out albums while so many of his peers aren’t. He didn’t wear leather or patches and safety pins, he dressed like the computer nerd he was -- which I guess is pretty punk.

3. Pop music is all about finding new ways to say the same thing

There are 26 songs between these two albums, counting the non-album singles that are generally associated with them. As near as I can tell, there are only 4 topics covered: girls, the end of the world, the dangers of fascism, and why the radio sucks. Songs about girls make up the extreme bulk of the albums. That said, the overriding emotion isn’t love or even really desire, but frustration. Frustration about the girl who won’t return your affections, frustration about your ex, frustration that the girl you want is in a relationship already, frustration that you’re in the friend-zone, frustration that you know she’s bad for you but you can’t stop.

Musically, the songs share some similarities as well. Nearly all the songs on Aim are in the same key. “Sneaky Feelings” and “Pay it Back” are practically the same song. But again, you don’t necessarily notice this listening to it - both are good songs. What I’m getting at is if you were going to break down the typical Elvis Costello song on these two albums to its basic elements, it might look like this “girls cause trouble/bad feelings.” I don’t mean that as a dig at all. Basically all of my songs share the same DNA. What I am saying is how remarkable it is that there are so many deft variations on these themes.

2. Being specific is better than being general

The only song on either album that even approaches a love song is “Alison.” And I’m not even convinced that it is one. The song is a stone cold classic. Everyone loves it. I think the reason for this is because the lyrics are so specific, it paradoxically manages to speak to so many people. Costello is cagey about whether the song is autobiographical or not, but it seems like it would have to be. It seems to play out like a chance run in with an old flame, or more likely an old infatuation.

“Alison” is littered with details: “I heard you let that little friend of mine take off your party dress,” and “Did he leave your pretty fingers lying in the wedding cake?” The totality of all the images evokes a way stronger emotional response than if it had been vague and general. It’s so specific that the meaning of the song can drastically change depending on who is singing it. Take Linda Ronstadt’s (kind of awful) cover. When she sings it, it becomes less of a weird confrontation between two people and something more like sisterly advice. I guess she could have renamed the song, “Al,” or something, but swapping genders like that would cause an even more thorough gutting of the song. I think of other cross-gender reinterpretations of songs like Cyndi Lauper’s cover of Prince’s “When U were Mine,” and even that isn’t as weird as Linda’s cover of “Alison.”

1. Honesty is the key to good lyrics

I am a huge fan of confessional lyrics. It’s something that informs my songwriting. Most male songwriters tend to posture more than simply tell it like it is. Costello strikes the right balance between the bleeding-heart emo-ness of a Conor Oberst and the drunken truth-telling of The Afghan Whigs. The biggest criticism leveled at Costello during this time period is that his songs are very bitter. You feel the grind of the work week and the dissatisfying weekends filled with failed romantics. Some people don’t like or appreciate Costello’s lyrical cleverness either. But it serves to temper the bitterness. Little jokes abound, such as this little gem from “Red Shoes”: “I said, ‘I’m so happy I could die.’ She said, ‘Drop dead,’ and left with another guy.”

Lyrical devices like this have the ability to reveal mixed feelings, from “Pump it Up”: “You want to torture her, you want to talk to her,” or from “The Beat”: “I don’t want to be your lover, I just want to be your victim.” Costello shows us that he can be earnest, caring, and deeply flawed. Even 37 years later, it’s still refreshing and the reason these albums have stood the test of time.

Justin Couch sings and plays guitar in Quantum Creep. They are covering Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True and This Year’s Model album in their entirety at Josiah Hesse's On The Cover series (with opening act Joshua Novak) at The Hi-Dive, Wednesday January 29th. $7.








 

On The Cover: Adam Goldstein covers Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks. Opening: Roger Green

Twist & Shout continues its support of the great monthly series, On the Cover, taking place the last Wednesday of every month at the Hi-Dive. For On the Cover, local musicians tackle classic albums that have been an influence on them, performing them in their entirety live and on stage. Check out this month's series in which Adam Goldstein takes on Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and offers some insight as to why he's chosen to perform this masterpiece.

Bob Dylan always distanced himself from the drama, heartbreak and loss that mark every single song on Blood on the Tracks.

In interviews following the release of the record in 1975, Dylan claimed its ten tracks were based on the short stories of Anton Chekhov. Years later, when a radio interviewer asked him about the fact that the album had become one his most beloved among fans, Dylan demurred, insisting, “It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying that type of pain, you know?” He added that the tunes weren’t pulled from his personal life, saying he didn’t write “confessional” songs.

For anyone who knows and loves this record, those claims are hard to believe.

Blood on the Tracks stands apart in Dylan’s oeuvre for its immediacy, for its rare glimpse into the heart of an artist who made enigma, distance and mystery such a big part of his creative persona. Beneath the convoluted lyrical twists on “Idiot Wind,” beyond the third-person narrative approach of “Tangled Up and Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate,” under the fatalistic bravado on “Bucket of Rain,” this album offers a portrait of Dylan coming to grips with a gaping emotional wound. And that makes sense, considering that this album came out shortly after his divorce from his wife and the mother of his children, Sara Dylan.

That pain makes for a compelling work of art, one that offers lessons to anyone who’s ever known heartache. Since I started listening to Blood on the Tracks in earnest at the tender age of 14, it’s offered comfort for every failed crush, every derailed relationship and every brutal rejection.

That’s not to say this album is about self-pity. Lyrically and musically, Dylan avoids self-indulgence here in a way he fails to do on any other album. He tracks every stage of a doomed relationship across the record, from the first glimmer of obsession to the final acceptance of letting go. But he does it with lyricism, integrity and insight.

It’s quite a feat, considering the material here came from a messy creative process. Indeed, on hearing the bare-bones songs for the first time, Stephen Stills was not impressed. “He's a good songwriter ... but he's no musician,” Stills observed to Graham Nash.

That’s hardly apparent from this brilliant record.

On the album’s opener, “Tangled Up in Blue,” the tale of a drifter looking to reconnect with an old flame becomes an allegory for much larger truths. Singing over bright major chords and tasteful folk-rock rhythm accompaniment, Dylan ends up purposeful: “Now I’m going back again, I got to get to her somehow,” he promises, before adding, “We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view.”

Those nuggets of wisdom only get more profound. “People tell me it’s a sin to know and feel too much within/I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring/She was born in spring, but I was born too late,” he bemoans on “Simple Twist of Fate.” On “You’re a Big Girl Now,” he cries, “I’m going out of my mind with a pain that stops and starts / Like a corkscrew to my heart.”

The accusations fly on “Idiot Wind,” before Dylan turns tender on “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” one of the poet’s most haunting and aching romantic tributes. Even the standard blues number “Meet Me in the Morning” includes nuggets of profound wisdom, as does the epic, 15-verse “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.”

The end of the record stands as a career high point for Dylan. The imagery in “Shelter from the Storm” stands among Dylan’s most profound; lines like, “Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine” resonate for those who’ve been caught up in the bleak hopelessness of a rejection. “Buckets of Rain” turns philosophical, with lines like “Life is sad, life is a bust, all you can do is do what you must. You do what you must do and you do it well / I do it for you, honey baby can’t you tell.”

Dylan’s songwriting matches his insights. The song structures are subtle and moving. The guitar work, mostly performed in open E, is crisp; his harmonica playing never veers into overindulgence. Haunting organ lines on “Idiot Wind,” high-register bass on “Shelter from the Storm” and a funky blues band on “Meet Me in the Morning” round out the artist’s voice, strings and harp.

But perhaps more than any other album, Blood on the Tracks is all about Dylan. In peeling back layers and exposing what he usually keeps hidden behind brilliant verse and folk tradition, Dylan offered listeners a peek into the universal.

That’s the reason this record still feels poignant after every spin. That’s the reason why, nearly 20 years after I first played it through, I find new insights and deeper pathos in the tunes. That’s the reason why, after I can play this entire record through, I’m ready to listen to it again.

On The Cover: Neil Young's After The Gold Rush By Nathan Barsness of Fingers Of The Sun

Twist and Shout presents On The Cover, a new monthly live series at Hi-dive featuring local bands covering influential and classic albums, from start to finish.

 We offered Nathan Barsness of Fingers Of The Sun a chance to tell us why he loved Neil Young's After the Gold Rush album and why he chose to cover it with his band, so read on, and be sure to catch the first ever On The Cover live series on July 31st!

Something that’s always struck me about Neil Young’s music is its intuitiveness. The emotional content of the lyrics are clear and the music drives the point home with a sort of unschooled, but supremely confident, simplicity. It has inspired my approach to songwriting over the years, reminding me to trust my instincts, not over-think my choices, and keep the feel of the song itself at the center of all of my creative decisions—even if it requires sacrificing technique.

When Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone reviewed After the Gold Rush in 1970, he described the album as “half-baked” and went onto say that it sounded as if the songs were recorded before they were properly rehearsed. Though that may be true from a purely technical standpoint, Winner missed the point. With After the Gold Rush Neil Young captured a specific time and place in his life as a person and an artist. What we are left with as listeners is a snapshot of the emotions and energy of that time and place. That’s part of why the album stands up after all of these years: it is genuine.

Thanks to my dad’s almost fanatical love of Young, I have been steeped in his meandering, folk-rock sound since my ears formed in the womb. But it wasn't until my late teens when I first picked up a guitar and formed a band that I began to realize what an innovator Neil Young was. What interested me at the time was the way he could pack so much emotion into such simple music. Songs like “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” were basically raw jams where Crazy Horse would repeat a basic, two-chord progression, while Young soloed over the top. It was inspiring to realize that with only basic musical knowledge (E minor 7, A major, REPEAT—as heard in “Down by the River”) you could not only make a complete song, but a potentially epic song. A perfect recipe for a 16 year old with a guitar and almost no training.

After the Gold Rush doesn’t have those extended two-chord jams, but it remains a great example of simple, non-technical music, that still communicates an almost unbelievable amount of feeling. It’s the kind of album that continues to inspire me, a constant reminder that the exploration of what a song can do is never finished. When Langdon Winner criticized what he perceived as the technical shortcomings of the album, what he missed was that those technical shortcomings were exactly what gave that album its abundance of emotion, its vibe, the intangible thing about it that keeps people coming back 40+ years later.

A perfect example of Winner missing the point is his criticism of the album’s title track. “Apparently no one bothered to tell Neil Young that he was singing a half octave above his highest acceptable range,” he wrote of “After the Gold Rush,” with its plaintive vocal and minimalist arrangement. At his best, Neil Young has a way of writing songs that sound as if they came into the world in their complete and final form. Listening to it now as a songwriter I get the feeling that Neil sat at a piano, put his hands on the keyboard, and wrote it in ten minutes of pure, unfiltered inspiration. Maybe the key that required him to sing “a half octave above his highest acceptable range” was the result of where his hands first landed when he sat down to write the song. And the fact that Young would trust his muse and take a chance on sounding slightly off on his vocals is one of the main reasons he remains an inspiration.

Similarly, Winner criticizes “Southern Man” for sounding “sloppy and disconnected,” where to me it sounds like it was recorded by a band that learned the song the very day it was recorded and nailed it. Young's guitar solo on the track has all the bite, grit, and energy of a first take. The difference between my view and Winner’s is only that, for me, that first take’s energy and uncertainty is what makes the track. It’s sloppy, but true.

Funny enough, earlier in 1970 Neil Young explained his process to another Rolling Stone writer, Elliot Blinder. He said that, for him, playing live in the studio captures the excitement of the moment and allows the musicians to react to each other in real time. In interviews he consistently talks about the “mood” or “spirit” of the recordings he’s been a part of and how the recording process (whether live or overdubbed) affects the final recordings. As an example he said that the differences between the Beatles and the Stones can be explained in part by the fact that the Beatles overdubbed (that is, recorded in pieces, often one instrument at a time) constantly, while the Stones preferred to play live in the studio.

I think that’s a good point and would go even farther in explaining my view of After the Gold Rush: It’s more like a field recording of some forgotten tribe’s traditional songs than a meticulously crafted, Sgt. Pepper-style concept album. It wasn’t meant to be built up, edited, and perfected, it was meant to share with us a particular time and place, while eliminating any distraction from the process of communicating the real, basic, human feelings at the heart of each song.