Elvis Costello on His 97-Song Collection, Past Love, and Why He Didn’t Sue Olivia Rodrigo for That “Brutal” Riff

Elvis Costello slipped into the tiny restaurant without me noticing. Maybe because he looked more like a Brooklyn dad than a rockstar, in a sweater, navy blue with white stripes, and a trucker hat emblazoned with the word Flirt beside a cockatoo. Eventually I found Costello sitting quietly at a corner table, happily at work on his laptop.

Then he started to talk, and there was no mistaking who he was. Not just because of the voice, instantly familiar to fans of Costello’s 39 albums. But because his distinctive and discursive answers to my questions were a thrill ride, much like the songs Costello has been recording ever since his first album, the landmark 1977 My Aim Is True.

The occasion for our nearly four-hour conversation was the imminent release of a six-CD box set called King of America & Other Realms. It is centered on Costello’s gorgeous and emotionally intricate 1986 album, a record he says contains “some of the most plain-spoken verses I have ever put into song.” Several of those King of America songs are masterpieces, including “Brilliant Mistake” and “Indoor Fireworks.”

Costello, 70, uses the old album, which was made in Los Angeles at a pivotal, tumultuous moment in his life and career, as a jumping-off point for an exploration of his relationship with American music, especially country and New Orleans music. Those are the Other Realms. The 97-song set includes tracks made with Emmylou Harris, the Fairfield Four, Kris Kristofferson, and Allen Toussaint, previously unreleased acoustic King of America demos, a live 1987 concert at the Royal Albert Hall, plus 57 pages of evocative, sometimes elliptical liner notes written by Costello. There are songs by the Coward Brothers, Costello’s project with T Bone Burnett, and the pair will release a full album next month. Yet even all that material doesn’t suggest the carnival of ideas banging around in Costello’s head and heart when he thinks about King of America tributaries.

Vanity Fair: Your introduction to so much quintessentially American music came through translations, so to speak—British cover versions, or the versions your father, Ross MacManus, sung with Joe Loss & His Orchestra. Did that make you think anyone could sing anything?

Elvis Costello: No. You’d think it would be that, but it’s not. My first sensory experiences of music beyond real infancy and my mother playing Sinatra over and over again is my father learning songs in the front room, and the one that registered happened to be “Please Please Me.” There was a shock to your own father singing along at performance level with the record. Over and over again. And the glass door to the front room vibrating from the resonance of his voice. I was only nine years old so I had no way of knowing what those songs were really about, particularly the later ones, when I was sort of 12, not 13, and Rubber Soul came out and those much more adult scenarios in the songs, things like “Norwegian Wood” and “Girl,” particularly “Girl.” It’s almost like getting the idea that older kids in school are up to something you don’t quite understand. It’s a little bit that slightly illicit feeling. Quite sexy, actually.

The Beatles were the main thread. The second most important person in my listening, in the records I spent my own money on, were Georgie [Fame]’s records. And through that, I got this education and quite a lot of things that are represented in this set, they stuck with me. Mose Allison! And I guess Willie [Nelson].

I didn’t realize how early and how much you were reading about Hank Williams and you were listening to George Jones.

That sort of evangelist thing, the sort of John the Baptist person, is obviously Gram Parsons, because it’s the International Submarine Band, which I came to after the Burritos. The Flying Burrito Brothers were particularly an eye opener because they covered songs by Merle Haggard, and Gram had done so in the brief time he was in the Byrds… One of the first albums I had was Aretha Franklin’s first record on Atlantic, which I love, and it’s predominantly in six and three. It’s not in four. And among the songs on that is “Do Right Woman.” And then a Burritos record that’s got the same song on it! Wow! What? It’s these guys in Nudie suits on the cover and they’re doing “Do Right Woman” and “Dark End of the Street.” And I found out that “Dark End of the Street” was by this guy James Carr. You couldn’t get his records. And that just led me down that road. And I realized that road went to a point where all this music kind of met, and that was Hank Williams.

Whether it’s Haggard or Gram or Hank, what were you responding to in that music?

Hank, I just like that there was nowhere else to go but in that song. If you check the studio record, which I did because they did an exhibition called “The Williams Tradition,” and they had all of the session logs from the end of Hank’s career, I think you’ll find that he cut like four of the most harrowing songs all in the last couple of sessions he did. I think he cut “You Win Again.” He cut them all in a really short space of time. There is no other place to go but in those songs. And try writing those songs. Very, very difficult. The same changes as millions of other songs. But what makes them stand out? I can’t even—it’s somewhere between where he phrases, where he feels the story comes in [sings melody], and it also swings as well, in a weird kind of lopey way.

Fast forward to 1984 and 1985, when you’re creating King of America. You write in the liner notes that you were trying to reclaim your identity, to shed the “Elvis Costello” character, and so you changed your legal name back to Declan MacManus. Going to Los Angeles and making a country-influenced record doesn’t seem like an obvious choice when returning to your roots.

I just didn’t want to do the bug-eyed monster from the planet Revenge and Guilt anymore. I just had had enough of that. I was never that. That was just one part of what I did…It was just a good job. I mean, it was like being Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse the early, angry years. Which if you watch the films, he was!

You had made Almost Blue in Nashville four years earlier. But that was an album of country covers. King of America, an album of originals backed by a country-ish sound, seems more intentional. It feels like you knew who you were and where you needed to go. Or maybe you didn’t?

I was just trying to get through my life, which was a bit complicated. The songs were where certain things were sort of examined and then turned into songs that anybody could understand.

You’re referring to the recent end of your first marriage, the beginning of your relationship with Cait O’Riordan, and the hostilities with your longtime band, the Attractions?

Yeah. What was interesting to discover in the demos, after 40 years, was how very raw in expression some of the first drafts were. “Brilliant Mistake” is a perfect example. It is like a completely different song from halfway through. If you read it just as a document, it is like the pages of a diary. And so I’m glad that in the long run I took the time to make it more satiric than confessional, because otherwise I would have been just indulging myself.

That first version hits pretty hard.

Yeah, but now it can be that, because it’s all a long time ago and I’m either reconciled emotionally with people or I’m not speaking to them at all.

The process of disentangling is also not easily described in song, because it’s a series of compromises with your own sense of self…If you have a group of songs and they’re identified as running parallel to such a period of transition, you assume you can find all of the clues to what happened in these songs. And of course that’s assuming I’m a more stupid songwriter than I am.

I’ve always felt you should do those things with a degree of craftsmanship. Because to do otherwise is really just reading your diary. There’s no way you’re sharing it with people–you’re imposing it on them when you do that. Which is why even the records that appear to be very confessional, that are the benchmark for all the things to do in that area, be it [Bob Dylan’s] Blood on the Tracks or [Joni Mitchell’s] Blue or Taylor Swift–the reason that she communicates to somebody is there’s a craft beyond what melody or what changes are used.

There are four versions of “Brilliant Mistake” in the box set. Which one is truest to your emotional intent?

As I wrote it, the one that opens “King of America, because it has the promise of America in it, the brightness of it, you know, the brightness and the kind of found melody that’s in Aaron Copland. It’s also in the Turtles. So that’s good. That’s good lineage. It’s a theme, it’s a traditional song, so you can find it in Copland. You can find it in [sings] “We are too young to have tied ourselves to/Each others’ arms”—same melody. Do you know that song? It’s the B-side of “Happy Together.”

The last one, the one we did in Cape Fear [in 2021] that’s the way I feel about it now. It makes visible the allusion to [Hal Kemp and His Orchestra’s] “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” because heaven knows that’s where we’re at. For people in actual circumstances of there being no home, or people who have lost faith, lost faith in who to believe in and which God to believe in, which statesmen to regard, which person is really your friend, which person is only pretending to be your friend, which person is trying to sell you something.

What’s the line from “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?”

Yeah—”Who are the trusted?”…I love the way Nick [Lowe] sings it, like a lament. It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Another of the “complications” in your mid-’80s life was that the fallout from your ugly comments about Ray Charles during a drunken bar fight in Columbus, Ohio was still fairly fresh. Did that experience inform your work or understanding of America at that time?

You could write about that, but I have tried my best to explain the inexplicable. It wasn’t anything to do with the calculations about the music. Is it in my mind all the time, even to this day? Yes. But does it affect the choices I make in music? No. There was nothing being transmitted or suggested by, say for example, the choice to do [Ray Charles’s] “What Would I Do Without You” in the Albert Hall show. That wasn’t signifying. I was singing a song I loved and it was really great. The idiotic, arrogant youthful—no, youth has nothing to do with it—the bravado of youth in that argument and the way things were said in—I’m going to say the opposite of what I actually believe—they just got furious with me and should have been. It was an idiotic way to try and one-up people. Which of course should have gone no further than those walls. But it did. And then it follows you around as part of your reputation…Check out the things that you’ve become involved in and then ask me my opinion about all of these things, whether there is anything inherently evil within me. I don’t believe so. I believe I’ve done what I feel I should do when occasions come up. And that doesn’t absolve me of any sins, any of them, and we’ve all got them. A little bit less self-righteousness would do us all good.

That’s an understatement.

Can you get a filter on X and take out the self-righteousness?

I don’t think Elon is interested in that.

He isn’t, of course.

In the run-up to making King of America you met T Bone Burnett, who became the album’s producer and recruited an incredible cast to play on the record, including members of Elvis Presley’s band. You and T Bone quickly became close friends.

We discovered we were brothers, despite all the obvious evidence of your eyes.

An album of Coward Brothers originals is coming soon and Audible is releasing a new audible original play you’ve written, with you as Howard Coward and T Bone as Henry Coward. The episodes are directed by Christopher Guest.

After a couple months on tour together [in 1984] we came up with this Coward Brothers riff as a pretext for singing everything from “Baby’s in Black” to “Tennessee Blues” by Bobby Charles or “If You Come to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”…It wasn’t really a worked-out thing. It’s actually very liberating for T Bone and I to be Henry and Howard Coward. And then T Bone came back with this melody, this beautiful melody, which was the first song we just put out, “Always.” He called me a couple of months later and said, “I just kept writing.” Same thread of melody, simple, very accessible. And the words are very direct. By then I knew the King of America set was coming out and I thought, well, these things sort of talk to one another if you bother to look.

The box set has collaborations with many great American non-fictional characters, including Allen Toussaint, Rosanne Cash, Dave Bartholomew, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Emmylou Harris. I particularly love Lucinda Williams. You clearly love Lucinda Williams.

She’s the second-best Williams in music. I think even she would tell you that.

When you’re in the studio with her, you can’t tell whether she’s going to get there because her process is different from mine. We did “Jailhouse Tears.” I thought, I don’t think we’re going to get this today. It doesn’t seem like she really wants to do it. She was fussing with the headphones. And then suddenly she came on beam. And it was like, oh my God, now I better pay attention.

There’s an enormous amount of music and variety in this set. Is there a theme?

The best way I can describe it is the first encounter with some of the music. So it requires me to explain [in the liner notes] the mechanism through which I received messages from overseas as my father, grandfather, my mother had all done, and worked out a different agenda from them.

How do you find new music today? Do you just let Spotify feed you stuff?

I don’t. I have an account, but I only ever go there if somebody sends me something.

Who’s the best young rock band working now? Is it Paramore? The 1975? Maneskin?

Maneskin I’ve seen a few times. I like them. I’ve not listened to rock music. My son likes Foster the People. But his favorite band is Justice. They’re French. I would say it’s a kind of techno prog band. We went to see them in Brooklyn. Twenty-four hours after I played Wolf Trap, I was in a warehouse in Brooklyn watching Justice. And it was fucking great. One of the great shows I’ve ever been to. It was thrilling.

When this ends for you—and I hope it’s not for another 100 years—your first two albums will inevitably dominate your public legacy, even with all the other terrific music you’ve made since. Does that matter to you?

At different times I’ve wrestled with that a little bit…When my father died, he was the voice of a very famous lemonade commercial. The headlines actually said, “Secret lemonade drinker dies.” As if he’d never done anything else in a 50-year career. I don’t doubt a similar indignity will accompany my demise. But the truth of it is, if you wrote a song 50 years ago, which it almost is since I wrote the first drafts of “Alison,” and that’s still being played by anybody—well, think about what year it was when I started writing the songs which I’m known for. Some of them come from 1975. Trace back 50 years from that and tell me what songs were still being played [in the mid-seventies]. If they’re enduring, they’re regarded as standards. So whether anybody else likes it or not, there are a few that I guess have joined that company. I don’t, self-consciously, regard them that way, but it is a historical fact. The odd thing to say is, very few of my songs are performed by other people. By far the most successful and ubiquitous music to other performers that I’ve been involved in writing is The Juliet Letters…Not so many people are playing—other than maybe “Pump It Up.” And then mostly not playing it but alluding to it in their own arrangements. Like Olivia Rodrigo’s producer obviously did. Now, I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that, because I think it would be ludicrous. It’s a shared language of music. Other people clearly felt differently about other songs on that record. But if there were no quotations, there’d be no Bach. There’d be no Mozart. There’d be no Sonny Rollins. So we can’t start worrying about that.

That’s the way it works. One thing leads to another. That’s all I’ve ever been saying. What I’m still saying.

Below, a playlist created by Elvis Costello for Vanity Fair in the spirit of King of America’s music and musicians.

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