Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Partly, his inspiration came from an interest in the deep bottom-end of modern hip-hop and R&B records, whose production he found ‘absolutely mind-bending’. And partly it stemmed from a desire to wrest control of the rhythmic rudder of a song, ensuring that it wasn’t reliant on the input of other musicians – a legacy of the dog-days of his relationship with Bruce Thomas, perhaps.

  The first results of these experimental approaches were startling. ‘When I Was Cruel’ was downright menacing, with airy, discordant guitar shapes ringing above a slow, rhythmic pulse. The other new songs were sparse, disquieting tracks written from a teacher’s and a lawyer’s viewpoint respectively, and had more specific starting points: ‘A Teacher’s Tale (Oh Well)’ and ‘Soul For Hire’ had initially prompted Elvis’s summer writing spree, composed to order for the film called Prison Song.42

  When he and Steve resumed their ‘Lonely World’ tour in the States the fruits of his summer labour were beginning to appear. Less emphasis was placed on the Painted From Memory material, now a year old, and the new songs crept in. He performed ‘45’ on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno before the tour began, and at the opening night at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco on 30 September, there were three new songs in the set. ‘Alibi’ opened – as it would throughout the tour – played without stage lights as Steve and Elvis conjured up a brooding, demi-Attractions sound in the dark with a clattering electro-rhythm, snarling guitar and a full sneer in Elvis’s voice. ‘I Dreamed Of My Old Lover Last Night’ and ‘45’ were also debuted.

  By the end of the US tour on 31 October, Elvis had played ten new songs in total. In addition to the above, ‘Couldn’t You Keep That To Yourself’ was a bluesy lounge song, piano-heavy and lyrically wry, that Elvis had had lying around for a while. He was pushed to finish it when a call came from David Sefton at the South Bank asking if Elvis had any songs for an album Sefton was producing for German cabaret chanteuse Ute Lemper. ‘Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter’ was a stark tale of domestic disharmony co-written with Carole King, while ‘Suspect My Tears’ was a big, poppy piano song that sounded like a Painted From Memory out-take, or at least a nod to Bacharach. ‘It’s good to go on the road when you’ve written a few new songs,’ said Elvis. ‘It’s a great opportunity, if you’ve got the audience’s confidence in you.’19

  Steve and Elvis continued to play a winning combination of old and new songs when the tour reached Britain in November and December. ‘Alibi’ was still the throat-grabbing opener, usually followed by ‘Man Out Of Time’ and ‘Talking In The Dark’. Then the sets skidded all over the vast expanses of Elvis’s career; by the penultimate show of the UK tour in Glasgow on 7 December, he and Steve were playing three-hour concerts which compared favourably with anything Elvis had ever done on a stage. ‘An evening shot through with smiles and spit, cries and whispers and history,’ raved Damien Love in The Scotsman. ‘A reminder that the luckiest archeologists of tomorrow will stare at the stretch of Costello’s output and wonder – a truly, truly great concert. Absolutely staggering.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  2000–01

  WHILE NEARING THE END of the All This Useless Beauty sessions back at the beginning of 1996, Elvis had travelled to Stockholm for two shows on 6 January with Sweden’s Radio Symphony Orchestra and Anne Sofie Von Otter, the classical star. It was another exercise in wish-fulfilment for Elvis, who had been an admirer of the Swedish mezzo-soprano since the late ’80s and had made no secret of both his love of her voice and his desire to collaborate with her. He was by no means alone in his admiration. ‘In the classical world, she is it,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘She’s one of the greatest voices there has ever been.’

  That night, a palpably nervous Elvis sang Bill Frisell’s arrangement of ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’ and Richard’s Harvey’s arrangement of ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ with the Orchestra. Then – apparently unscheduled – he joined Anne Sofie to sing ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ and ‘Without A Song’, with just a piano accompaniment. Later, they sang Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost In The Stars’, and encored with ‘My Ship’ and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.

  It was a low-key, fun engagement and both singers enjoyed it immensely. ‘There’s something about him when he performs that is terribly moving, really,’ said Von Otter afterwards. ‘I like his voice very much, it has a lot to say, the colour in it. It’s a privilege to have got to know him a little bit.’1 The two became friends. Elvis and Cait went out for dinner with Anne Sofie and her husband and frequently popped backstage after her concerts, and almost a year later, they collided again.

  On 2 December 1997, Elvis watched Anne Sofie perform three pieces he had composed for her and the Brodsky Quartet in Paris’s Cité De La Musique. Entitled Three Distracted Women, the songs – ‘Speak Darkly, My Angel’, ‘Spiteful Dancer’ and ‘April In Orbit’ – had been pieced together over a two-year period. ‘Speak Darkly, My Angel’ had been performed by Elvis as a song fragment at the Beacon Theatre shows in New York the previous August, but each had been specially written to suit Von Otter’s voice and the Quartet’s style.

  The Paris premiere was followed by a brief European tour, including dates in London, Madrid and Bologna. In London, Nicholas Williams of The Independent rated Three Distracted Women as among ‘the evening’s most substantial offerings – part concert aria, part reflection on the seventeenth-century consort song’.

  Ever since, Elvis had been talking to Anne Sofie about the possibility of a recording collaboration. She was keen, and throughout 1999 and into 2000 they discussed suitable ideas and possible songs, exchanging cassettes and letters, finally settling on a non-classical template.

  Unlike the collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach, this time Elvis was bringing much more of his own musical background to the partnership, including some of his own songs, both new and old. Von Otter’s varied personal tastes included folk music, standards and pop, but it was Elvis who was taking her into his own musical heartlands. On 19 February, he travelled to Stockholm for a few days to make some demo recordings with Anne Sofie. Having worked on ten songs and decided that they were compatible, they both consulted their hectic diaries and set aside time in October to start work on an album.

  * * *

  In contrast to the concert fireworks of the previous year, 2000 would prove to be a year of few public appearances but much activity behind the scenes, most of it on the classical side of Elvis’s increasingly schizophrenic career. With so much varied work, and still uncertain about manouevres within the record company, Elvis again shelved his own plans to record a ‘beat’ album that year, putting it on hold indefinitely. Instead, throughout the rest of the spring he concentrated primarily on tackling perhaps the most ambitious project of his life.

  In January, Elvis had flown to Perugia to attend a production of Paradiso by the Aterballetto, a well-established dance company based in Reggio Emilia in north Italy. He had recently been approached by the company to collaborate on their forthcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Elvis felt ballet lay outside even his range of experience and ambition, conceding that he danced only in his mind. However, he was curious enough to attend, and after watching the performance of Paradiso and being ‘overwhelmed’ by it, he agreed to take on the commission of writing a score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Il Sogno Di Una Notte Di Mezza Estate), Il Sogno for short.

  The work would hold Elvis’s attention for the better part of the year. He composed many of the basic themes for Il Sogno based on the motifs of Shakespeare’s original play, with distant but frequent consultation with the Aterballetto’s Mauro Bigonzetti, Nicola Lusuardi and designer Fabrizio Plessi, as well as some help from a bilingual colleague of the company. Elvis speaks passable Italian but it wasn’t up to this kind of dense, fine-toothed discussion.

  With the preliminary work done, Elvis travelled to Reggio in July with his demos and his piano melodies to ponder the finer details of the productio
n face-to-face with members of the company and the creative team. ‘Every aspect from the dramatic outline and choreographic intention to the stage design was examined in relation to the musical content,’ said Elvis. ‘I then returned home to Dublin to write and orchestrate each scene in the production.’2

  After ten weeks of intense work at home throughout the late summer, the score began to take shape. Working originally on piano and then transcribing his work into musical notation, the constraints of time meant that, towards the end, Elvis had to begin orchestrating directly from his head onto manuscript paper for the sixty-piece orchestra. All the work was done manually with a pencil. Still, despite all the preparation, there were elements of the process which relied on a combination of serendipity and a degree of artistic telepathy. ‘I had to go away and compose and then hope that [they] could make use of what I wrote,’3 he admitted. At the end of the ten-week stretch of intense activity, Elvis had a score ready for performance later in the year.

  As soon as he was finished with the compositional side of Il Sogno, recording could finally begin with Anne Sofie Von Otter. Elvis travelled to Stockholm towards the end of September to familiarise himself with the musicians and his surroundings. They were recording at Atlantis Studios, where Abba had cut ‘Dancing Queen’; the famous grand piano which had inspired Steve Nieve to add his distinctive part to ‘Oliver’s Army’ many years earlier was still in the room. Now, the pianist finally got the chance to play it.

  Steve, ex-Rockpile member Billy Bremner and Michael Blair added subtle touches to the final record, but the core studio ensemble were respected local Swedish players familiar to Anne Sofie, as were the Swedish string quartet Fleshquartet, who also played on a handful of tracks. ‘In the end, rather than it being something that I presented her with completely formed, it was a proper collaboration,’ Elvis explained. ‘Not in writing this time, but in choices: choices of instrumentation, choices of venue, choices of musical background.’4

  Elvis’s role was essentially that of producer and mentor, although he sang briefly on six of the eighteen songs and added a little guitar. He also brought two new bespoke tracks, called ‘No Wonder’ and ‘For The Stars’, to the sessions, and with typical collaborative zeal wrote three more while in Sweden. Two of them, ‘Rope’ and ‘Just A Curio’, were co-written with Fleshquartet, Elvis adding words to their music. The third was ‘Green Song’, Elvis adding lyrics to the ensemble leader Svante Henryson’s solo cello piece.

  The final track selection included the five newly composed songs and four old Costello numbers – ‘Shamed Into Love’, ‘This House Is Empty Now’, ‘Baby Plays Around’ and ‘I Want To Vanish’, ensuring that Elvis’s fingerprints were all over the record. In the end, they decided not to record the Three Distracted Women songs that Anne Sofie had sung with the Brodsky Quartet in 1997, believing they were more suited to the stage than the album.

  The nine remaining songs were covers of original material by Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Tom Waits, Abba, Jesse Mae Robinson, Ron Sexsmith and Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The sound was a loose amalgamation of folk music and laid-back jazz with classical inflections, with some pop touches thrown in. The mood – once again – was autumnal, a restrained, melancholic hue, etched with cello lines, soft piano, double bass and the occasional saxophone or pedal steel.

  Overall, recording was a happy process, but there were tensions in the studio, brought about by the intrinsic cultural collisions of the project rather than any personality clashes. Elvis was determined to coax Anne Sofie Von Otter out of her classical stylings: he demanded live vocals rather than compound takes, while experimenting with microphone techniques and shifting song keys to force her into singing quietly, more naturalistically.

  But some of the material caused problems: the two Tom Waits covers – ‘Broken Bicycles’ and ‘Take It With Me’ – were especially troublesome, primarily because the singer had trouble locating the song’s melodies beneath the gruff, eccentric timbre of Waits’s voice. ‘Any song that Tom Waits sings is difficult for me to imagine that I could ever sing,’5 she admitted, with some justification. ‘Baby Plays Around’, meanwhile, was the one Costello song that Elvis had brought to the session at his own instigation rather than Anne Sofie’s, and the contours of the melody line gave her some difficulty. With the recording process so much more time-consuming than it is in the classical field, she also found her attention span and patience started to wane after more than a handful of takes on each song.

  There were other glitches that only came to light in the studio. Elvis had envisaged singing duets and harmony on many of the songs, but soon found that the blend of voices didn’t work on tape. ‘With all respect to Elvis,’ admitted Anne Sofie bluntly, ‘I must say [our voices] don’t go together too well.’6 Instead, they mostly sang in sequence, Elvis coming in to fill the parts where Anne Sofie had left spaces in the songs. ‘We developed this idea, I think quite wisely, that the way for me to make an appearance was by taking up the story at a certain point in the song,’ said Elvis. ‘So there are only a few bars where we actually sing together.’7 Some may have asked why there was any need for the producer to sing at all. On the final record, even Elvis’s brief interruptions – added at Windmill Lane in Dublin and Westside in London in mid-November, away from Anne Sofie’s raised eyebrows – sounded utterly inappropriate.

  Perhaps the highpoint of the recording – indeed, probably the album itself – was the collaboration with Abba’s Benny Andersson on ‘Like An Angel Passing Through My Room’. Anne Sofie knew Andersson from old and invited him to the sessions, and he ended up playing piano and synclavier on the new version of his own composition. ‘It was amusing; these two high dignitaries of pop smelling each other out,’8 she said.

  The work was swift. They recorded twenty-seven songs in just two weeks, concluding on 21 October. Eighteen would be used for the final record, and Elvis would return to Stockholm in mid-January to mix the record.

  Meanwhile, there were more pressing concerns. From Stockholm, Elvis travelled to Italy in the last week of October to put the finishing touches to Il Sogno, attending the final rehearsals and the press conference, before the Aterballetto premiered the ballet at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna on 31 October. Steve Nieve was in attendance at the premier, popping along for moral support; it was all a long way away from ‘Pump It Up’.

  Elvis was terribly excited by the end product. As an artist who was primarily recognised for his ability with words, Il Sogno marked the fulfilment of a deeply held desire to write a major work of instrumental music, and he found the final synthesis of music and movement profoundly rewarding. ‘I couldn’t believe I’d imagined all this music,’ he admitted. ‘I put things in the music which I hoped were going to be useful in the choreography, and then you see them and think, “Wow, how did he know I meant that?” Every time it is what I hoped, but much, much more.’9

  The review in Italy’s La Stampa was generally positive: ‘Elvis Costello was able to show that he knows cultured music and knows also how to write it, from Debussy, Stravinsky, Mozart, jazz, big bands of the last fifty years, music from cinema and other areas.’

  Aterballetto’s Il Sogno tour then continued through northern Italy over November and December, reaching France and Germany in 2001, where it was again warmly received. Elvis expressed his desire to capture the score on record some time soon.

  * * *

  He was back in Stockholm for a few days on 15 January to mix the new album, now called Anne Sofie Von Otter Meets Elvis Costello: For The Stars. The next few weeks were taken up with promoting the record, which was being released on Universal’s classical label, Deutsche Grammophon. The launch for both the classical and popular music media took place in Vienna on 25 February, where Elvis and Anne Sofie played a live set featuring most of the album with the studio musicians. A little later, ITV screened a South Bank Show documentary on the making of the record, and there were numerous joint interviews. However, no amount of hype could m
ake the record work. Released on 19 March 2001, For The Stars was far from successful. Despite the best efforts of all involved, the basic premise failed: to coax a naturalistic, unstudied vocal performance from a classical singing star. Anne Sofie Von Otter had trouble negotiating many of the songs, often sounding stiff, mannered and uncomfortable, while the subdued tone of the record was almost unwavering throughout, washed-out and depressed rather than melancholic.

  Elvis’s new original songs – with the exception of ‘Green Song’ and the closing title track, which at least showed a little life – were little better than mediocre, and some of the cover versions wildly ill-judged. Von Otter simply didn’t have the kind of grain in her voice necessary to make sense of the sultry, weary sadness of ‘The Other Woman’, not to mention ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’, ‘Take It With Me’ and ‘For No One’. The occasional interjections from Elvis at the top of the mix only proved conclusively that their voices should never have appeared within a mile of each other.

  Only on Abba’s glacial ‘Like An Angel Passing Through My Room’, and Elvis’s ‘Shamed Into Love’ and ‘For The Stars’ did the record really show glimpses of what might have been. In retrospect, it would have been considerably more rewarding and exciting to have persevered with Anne Sofie Von Otter’s intial desire to create an all-out pop album. On the up-beat title song, the results were actually quite exhilarating.

  Even some of Elvis’s closest collaborators and admirers conceded that they found little to love in the record. ‘I don’t get much relief from it,’ admits the Brodsky Quartet’s Paul Cassidy. ‘It feels like it’s in a certain place and it’s determined to stay there, and I don’t really know why that is. I would have thought that with his imagination and his incredible encyclopedic knowledge of song and music in general that he would have presented her with many more options.’