Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach

Foreword

Year 1998: Mercury Records releases “Painted from Memory”, the album written and produced by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello. Why would a forty-something "rock" musician who wrote his most famous hits in the '80s and '90s suddenly team up with a composer in his sixties who, in those very same decades, was considered hopelessly kitsch? (can you picture a Costello and the Attractions fan who, after listening to "Everyday I Write the Book", starts whistling "Raindrops Are Falling on My Head"?).

The story, roughly speaking, goes like this. In 1995, director Allison Anders was working on the film "Grace of My Heart", loosely inspired by the story of Carole King. Together with the soundtrack supervisor, Larry Klein, she came up with an interesting idea: bring together musicians who had actually lived through the Brill Building era (the legendary New York hub of so many record labels in the '50s and '60s, referenced in the film) and contemporary artists influenced by them. Enter the Bacharach-Costello pairing.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Anders said that what she needed, specifically, was a “song like the ones Burt Bacharach used to write for Dusty Springfield, but one that had to express the loss suffered by the film's character, reeling from a disastrous love story...”. Time was tight, with Bacharach in California and Costello in Dublin, but both agreed to the proposal. In fact, the two never actually met; they communicated by phone, fax, courier; in the end the result was “God Give Me Strength” and mutual satisfaction.

From this experience came the idea of making an entire album together, with songs written, produced and performed by the two musicians: Elvis Costello on vocals, Burt Bacharach on piano, orchestral direction and arrangements. And what arrangements... the timbral stylistic signature would be heavily influenced by Bacharach: in the end more than 70 musicians were chosen to play a range of instruments worthy of a symphony orchestra (perhaps only the bass tuba was missing, and little else).

In an interview with “Musician”, Costello comments on his working relationship with Bacharach in writing the songs: “I contributed to the writing of the music too, but when a piece really takes off, especially in the main theme, he shifts into a gear I don't have; the result is that sense of darkness that's in his music and that I recognize in my own sensibility: there's that sense of ‘doubt’ even in his sunniest songs, which is what makes his music timeless”.

Indeed, Bacharach's musical writing can hardly be called simple: his style is famous for several traits: the complexity of the time signatures, very different from the “usual” 4/4 common in pop music (12/8, 6/8 and so on abound), and often varied even within the same song (an extreme case being the 1960s song “Promises Promises”, with time changes almost every two bars, to the delight of singer and performers alike). Not to mention the “strange” chords, diminished chords and the like, and the “lush” arrangements, which nonetheless always retain lightness and elegance.

Costello's signature is certainly very different, but there's no denying his genuine talent for building effective melodies, nor his ability to create subtle, seductive atmospheres in his most famous “ballads” (think of “Alison”, “She” and many others that can be considered almost timeless pieces). Even if Costello himself credits Bacharach with “an extra gear”, the fruit of their joint labours nonetheless owes a great deal to the head, voice and heart of the former. Historically, in fact, Bacharach's preferred interpreter has always been the technically flawless but often somewhat cold singer (to name one example: the great Dionne Warwick — exquisitely elegant phrasing, flawless pitch, excellent vocal range, but perhaps a touch too sparing when it comes to warmth and soul). With Costello everything changes: his voice is sensual, imperfect but alive and warm, capable of hinting at the “blood, sweat and tears” of a real man's feelings. So his style comes across as more impulsive and immediate compared to Bacharach's crystalline melodies, but it's certainly closer to contemporary sensibility.

From the meeting of these two artists came the album's 12 songs, dealing with the usual small-big things of everyday life: love, vulnerability, uncertainty, loneliness... all filtered through a slight detachment, as often happens in real life. Twelve songs of “easy listening” that are hard to pigeonhole by genre, since they're not tied to any particular era or trend. The compositional balance, the colours, the atmosphere lean at times more towards Bacharach's style (one above all: “Toledo”, with its Herb Alpert-style Casino Royale trumpets) and at times more towards Costello's (“My Thief”, “I Still Have That Other Girl”), but they always represent an irresistible blend of the intelligence and soul of two people who met, perhaps recognising in each other a fragment of themselves.

***

Time for confessions. I don't know much about music. Let's face it: someone who until a few years ago thought of Astor Piazzolla as the Argentine Raoul Casadei, of Sinatra as a singer for nostalgic mums, and of Burt Bacharach as somewhere between James Last and Jimmy Fontana, starts from a disadvantage and hardly deserves much credit. Now, about Piazzolla and Sinatra I may write someday; with Bacharach, my atonement began in 1998. “Has anything interesting come out?” I asked my trusted record shop clerk, unaware. “Yes, this” was the answer, and out came “In The Darkest Place”, a gorgeous melodic line, intelligible on first listen yet full of nuance, with an extremely elegant orchestration that was also warm and vibrant, then Costello's voice, full of honey yet gritty and urban. It's rare for me to say this: moving. Next comes “Toledo”, brighter but less melancholic and astonishing, then the miracle of “I Still Have That Other Girl”, a great performance by Costello on a piece that combines an apparently simple melody that nonetheless pierces our emotions with a chill-inducing orchestration and arrangement. By the end of the track I'd already reached for my wallet...

The other nine tracks are all of the highest quality; there's little point going into too much detail — they all boast wonderfully accomplished writing, full of extraordinary melodic ideas and a richness that's frankly unmatched by almost any other songwriter, deepened and dramatised by Costello's performance as co-author of every song, and brought to us mere mortals through extraordinary arrangements, whether venturing into lightly jazz-tinged territory (“Tears At Birthday Party”), or into small psychodramas of quiet lyricism (“My Thief”, “This House Is Empty Now”, “Painted From Memory”, “God Give Me Strength”), or into more sparkling compositions (“The Sweetest Punch”, “Such Unlikely Lovers”).

Don't for a moment think this is merely a record of refined polish: there's the heart and blood of music-making in this record, there's a lofty conception of popular music, an enormous stylistic signature, there's a way of thinking about music in the noblest sense, there's a contact with beauty so simple and fluid that you find yourself immersed in it without even realising. The songs on “Painted From Memory” start from simple elements, but end up becoming little cathedrals — magic previously found only in the songs of Steely Dan.

Bacharach and Costello seem to say that making good music is simple: just sit at the piano and create a beautiful melody. All it takes is talent. Otherwise things get very complicated, and then you have to come up with something else — and the world of music, after all, is full of that something else. A pop record, certainly. But perhaps the greatest pop record of all time, rivalled only by two or three others.

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29/10/2006