How great is Schubert? I mean, come on! Five hundred fucking songs!” It can sometimes seem that musicians live in a parallel universe populated only by other musicians and maybe a few alien non-musician life forms who, by virtue of their musical knowledge and interest, can breathe the air. He’ll say, “And Schubert, I mean, really. Still, it inevitably fixes on his musical influences and alliances, and the circumstances leading up to them, and the opportunities and insights arising out of them-the recollection of each one opening, like a trapdoor, into a vast underground of other projects and encounters and innumerable chambers of musicological erudition. He doesn’t shy away from “My Funny Valentine.” Each episode of “Spectacle,” his talk-and-jam cable-television program, demonstrates his pluck at taking on every section of the songbook, and in explaining why.Ĭonversation with Costello can veer in many directions. Once an avid creator of mix tapes and now a mischievous e-mailer of obscure MP3s, he’s as canny as anyone at choosing songs to cover he has a record geek’s taste for the B side as well as a curator’s love for the big ones. “Not only because they’re total charlatans and thieves, but because it actually embarrasses me.” He is unkind to the eighties. “I am really grossly offended by Led Zeppelin,” he said in 1986. In his younger days, he said nasty things about other acts, and still scoffs at a few that some hold dear. He is too guileless a buff to be a snob, but he is discerning. Costello has worked himself not just into the company of presidents and knights but also into the network of musicians’ musicians and songwriters’ songwriters, the confederation of lesser-known liner-note hot shots who are rarely separated by any more than two or three degrees. A jolly “Penny Lane” for Barack Obama and Paul McCartney at the White House, last June a sly turn, last month, as master of ceremonies, and a warm performance of “Brilliant Mistake,” in a limited-run T Bone Burnett revue featuring, among others, John Mellencamp, Ralph Stanley, Leon Russell, and Elton John perhaps a pensive rearrangement of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” when he performs in December at the Oslo Spektrum, in honor of the Nobel Peace Prize. His enthusiasm for the work of others is now so deep and wide that his calendar strains with far-flung one-offs and barely compensated commitments. He has evolved into one of the most spirited accomplices in tribute gigs, variety evenings, and extracurricular combinations. Yet his peers, if there can be said to be any, may consider him the industry’s highest-ranking music nut he’s as much a fan as he is a participant, and his participation is relentless. “He can toss off an album in an afternoon,” the producer T Bone Burnett, with whom Costello has made a few, says.
Among those who have paid attention the whole way, he may be best and most properly known for his stamina as a performer and his enduring prolificacy as a songwriter. They may think he was authentic once and pretentious later.
Or else they are dimly aware of a restless and protean figure who amid the ripening of a career sampled, and often mastered, other genres and styles-a man of many talents and a few excesses.
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Some people have him frozen in Lucite as the skinny, sneering, knock-kneed rocker with the Buddy Holly glasses and the New Wave suits who, in punk’s wake, in the late seventies, unleashed a series of furious, lyrically tricky but not uncatchy albums and singles that still pop up on classic-rock radio or transgenerational playlists. Athletes chase wins, and bankers thrive on deals Costello hungers after collaborations, which can then be processed into their by-products: recordings, friendships, gate receipts, ideas, and anecdotes. In some respects, Elvis Costello is the sum of his songs-his “oeuvre,” as he once mocked a BBC interviewer for saying-but he is also a compilation of encounters with other musicians. “If I want to wear big glasses and a hat, I will.” Photograph by Jeff Riedel
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