In short
Elvis Costello discusses Broken Record’s 49th anniversary box set for his debut album My Aim Is True, tracing how the songs were written, recorded, and how his style formed through early influences, band experiments, and audience relationships.
Guest backgrounds
Elvis Costello is the episode’s guest; he’s a British singer-songwriter whose first album My Aim Is True was recorded late 1976/early 1977 and released in 1977. The host is Jacob Goldstein (Business History). No other music guests appear in the conversation.
Key claims
Costello says his “stumbling steps” toward style came from learning via records (no formal music training; can’t sight-read). He describes writing as “trying on hats,” then developing a voice through pub rock, American R&B/americana references, and intimate performance. He credits the box set’s “blueprint” discs with lyrics and demos that were re-matched to new music. He also claims some songs arrived like “visitations” (e.g., “Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes”).
Notable examples
Mystery Dance; Clover and The Attractions; studio work with Nick Lowe and John McPhee; influences from Randy Newman, Dr. John, Van Dyke Parks, Joni Mitchell, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Motown; “Alison” built from borrowed chords and Detroit Spinners’ “Ghetto Child.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODiscussing My Aim is True
0:03 to 0:36
Elvis Costello shares insights about his first album.
“This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History.”
Discussing My Aim is True
2:16 to 4:32
Elvis Costello shares insights about his first album.
“And you are going to talk about your new release of your old release.”
Early Musical Experiences
4:32 to 6:35
Elvis describes his formative experiences in music and songwriting.
“You know, I sort of started writing songs when I was about 14, 15 maybe, played in public around that time for the first time and then, you know, did all the usual things of learning, playing other people's music.”
Developing a Unique Style
6:35 to 8:30
Costello explains his evolution into a unique musical style.
“We didn't really have any other recommendations for being a group than that.”
Recording Journey and Collaborations
8:30 to 14:01
Elvis discusses his studio experiences and collaborations with other artists.
“but they had a lot of American references and a lot of arcane references.”
Finding Your Own Voice in Music
14:01 to 19:25
Explore how personal experiences and relationships with music shape an artist's voice.
“Talking about how you absorb music, how you relearned it, it's reminding me of a story from your book, which I loved.”
Family Influence and Musical Learning
19:25 to 24:28
Learn about the impact of family heritage on musical learning and performance.
“I have no idea why it was that song, because it's a very complicated song for a novice.”
Family Influence and Musical Learning
25:26 to 26:25
Learn about the impact of family heritage on musical learning and performance.
“This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History.”
Family Influence and Musical Learning
26:30 to 27:23
Learn about the impact of family heritage on musical learning and performance.
“My kids' favorite place in the entire world to be is New York City.”
Musical Perspectives and Inspirations
27:24 to 28:00
Delve into the unique songwriting perspectives influenced by various artists.
Show all 23 chapters
The Complexity of Song Narratives
28:00 to 28:36
Explore the unexpected and erotic imagery in song lyrics and their emotional dynamics.
Growing Up With Elvis Presley
28:36 to 30:59
Malcolm Gladwell shares his early experiences with Elvis and how he came to understand his music.
“bellman's even if you chronologically couldn't have known that music firsthand well that's why I didn't know who Elvis Presley was, because my parents never listened to any of his records.”
Influence of Early Rock Icons
30:59 to 33:14
Discussing the impact of Little Richard and Chuck Berry on Elvis Costello's musical journey.
“it was just like, you couldn't be like that or anything, I never ever thought of going to the piano and see if I could play that even, you know.”
Songwriting Process and Inspirations
33:14 to 35:39
Elvis Costello reflects on his songwriting methods and the inspirations behind his lyrics.
“You do some wonderful reproductions of lyric sheets.”
Pulp Fiction and Its Influence
35:39 to 38:08
The discussion reveals how pulp fiction and personal stories have shaped Costello's lyrics.
“On this occasion, I ran to the cab rink and got in a cab and said, take me to my mother's address.”
The Evolution of Lyrics and Music
38:08 to 40:16
Elvis explains how some of his lyrics evolved into different songs and musical settings.
“because he must have known some characters.”
Competitive Spirit in Songwriting
40:16 to 42:00
Costello discusses the competitive nature of songwriting within his musical circle.
“become Watch A Step, Citizen Junction becomes King Horse.”
Competition in Songwriting
42:00 to 44:36
Explore the competitive dynamics between songwriters and performers in the music industry.
“Because I was still working in an office.”
Competition in Songwriting
44:54 to 45:53
Explore the competitive dynamics between songwriters and performers in the music industry.
“Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line.”
The Influence of Songwriting
46:25 to 51:34
Discussion on the songwriting process and influences behind iconic songs like 'Alison'.
“In the liner notes, there's a lovely quote from Roseanne Cash, who talks about this album coming out.”
Reflections on Influences
51:34 to 56:00
Elvis Costello reflects on his musical influences and the evolution of his songwriting.
“What interests me, particularly when you listen through on the album, is it's much more adventurous harmonically than the songs that precede it.”
Exploring Elvis Costello's Musical Evolution
56:00 to 1:02:38
Discussing the maturity and influences in Elvis Costello's songwriting.
“But when he got to that period, like from things like Peace Like a River and where he's obviously acknowledging all of these things that he, that it's kind of like his gumbo.”
The Impact of Personal Experiences on Music
1:02:38 to 1:08:04
Elvis reflects on how personal struggles and family influence his music.
“Well, the bad news is I'm a journalist with a theory.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the Internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief, analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode.
0:40Available on Plus and Pro plans.
0:43Justin Richmond:If you love music and great artist interviews, check out Before the Moment, hosted by Niall Rogers. This new series follows Niall as he travels across the country, talking with some of today's most fascinating artists about the moments that shaped their lives and careers. From hitmakers like Miguel to rising stars like Alex Warren, Niall explores the stories behind the careers, the songs, and the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the point where everything changed, and this podcast tells the stories that came before it. Listen to Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series, on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:20This is Malcolm Gladwell from Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. This episode is sponsored by Navy Federal Credit Union. They offer great rates and pre-approvals that are good for 90 days. Plus, you could even get$200 when you refinance your auto loans from another lender with Navy Federal Credit Union. Learn more at NavyFederal.org slash auto loans. Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA. Credit and collateral subject to approval. refinance loan must be at least$5 ,000 to be eligible for the$200. Terms and conditions apply. Visit NavyFederal.org slash auto loans for details.
2:09Pushkin.
2:13So Elvis Costello, welcome to Broken Record. Good to be here. And you are going to talk about your new release of your old release. So tell me what it is. It is the 49th anniversary set presenting My Aim is True, my first record, recorded over the back end of 1976 and the first, you know, the first few days of 1977, released in 1977 and other recordings spread over four other discs they are the blueprint which is a collection of acoustic guitar performances songs i wrote in 1975 some half of which i sort of held to myself for fear that they maybe revealed my you know my stumbling steps to get to a style i mean they're to my mind at the time i put them away in a drawer because they sounded too much like the people i i liked when i listen to them now i just hear me and i'm you can have a vague sense of somebody i might have heard and songs i tried to write in a different style entirely than the one that informs my name is true and then of course the demos which you know you can see that coming in coming into focus some recordings i made prior to that which my first attempts to make any recordings with a band, and then the formation of the Attractions, who were put together to, as it were, promote or at least play the music from Miami's True because the band that played on that album were an American group, Clover, who were not available to me after the recording of the record.
3:53They had their own career. Your stumbling attempts to find a style, and I do want to talk about how you developed that style. I remember seeing your album when it was first in the record store. And, you know, there are artists, I think probably Springsteen's an example, where you follow them along as they develop their style. You were one of those artists for me who seemed to emerge fully formed with that first album. You had the attitude, you had the glasses, you had the great lyrics. So to me, going through this record and this package was fascinating because it's so interesting to see how that came about.
4:34You know, I sort of started writing songs when I was about 14, 15 maybe, played in public around that time for the first time and then, you know, did all the usual things of learning, playing other people's music. I joined a band in Liverpool that immediately became a duo because we realized the singer couldn't sing and the bass player went to university, which is a very typical teenage band experience. And we carried on for a year or more. And I realized that I had to return to London where I'd been born. My parents are from Merseyside. And so my first experiences of even running music evenings were going against the grain of the folk music of Liverpool, which was mostly traditional.
5:21and we were trying to sing our own songs and songs by people we liked who were mostly Californian acoustic musicians and the birds and the band and things like that. I went to London and the beginning of the pub rock scene as it came to be known, although it was never called up by the participants, it was simply bands taking the music directly to the audience rather than going on to the big glamorous stage with dry ice and lame pants they were just walking up in their day clothes and playing music directly to an audience that could buy a ticket at the door and Nick Lowe was in a band, Prinzies Schwartz who I loved and I had met Nick when Prinzies came to the cavern I'd met him in the pub opposite the cavern I got talking with him and then I became the guy that would turn up at their gigs and ask him questions I was trying to find my way I wasn't asking him for favours I was just asking advice about things about songwriting and that I don't remember what our conversations were really about.
6:24It was just I thought it was cool and, you know, we hung out. And I put a band together for a little while, which were really just a collection of people who happened to play the instruments that made up a band. We didn't really have any other recommendations for being a group than that. And we stumbled around playing a few shows and feel-by songs and we took the example of Edwin C. Schwartz in picking particularly obscure songs from American R &B repertoire to put in our set. And the only song that people recognised was Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Thaw, which was then in the charts. Everything else we played was willfully obscure, including my songs, which were the first steps.
7:06Of course, that kind of ran out of steam after we did one recording session, and I went back to that studio with my acoustic guitar a few months later. Dave Robinson was running the studio over a pub which in itself had a basement venue, the Hope and Anchor and he let me just play every song I had while he was twiddling the dials he was really working still on the studio and I think Dire Straits may have done their demos there I believe they did and Graham Parker's first record was recorded there so I just played every song that I had I'd bought Bruce Springsteen's first record when I lived in Liverpool.
7:47I'd listened to that record back to back and I had one song that sort of sounded like it was, to me it sounded like me trying to write like that. Another couple of songs sounded like I'd heard Van Morrison around the time of his Bannon Street Choir. All these ideas in my head was I was trying on those, as I put in the liner notes, it's like a man trying on hats, you know, does this suit me? And I put those songs away and then I proceeded on to a style of writing which was informed by records that I loved, particularly Randy Newman's records, but also including Dr. John's Gumbo and Van Dyke Park's records.
8:26So they would be literally Americana, not the Americana music of today, but they had a lot of American references and a lot of arcane references. And I was really trying to work out how I could sing about the way I felt. 21, married with a son, living in the suburbs, where nothing in the world I was wanting to enter was within my reach. I had no way to make myself into a suitable face for pop music. And even the scene that was beginning to emerge in 75, I'd had a go at being in it. and those same venues were the venues in which punk began and I wasn't in tune with that musically so I proceeded to write these songs that were willfully styled to sound as if they'd been found in a trunk in 1927 and that's the way I wrote Jump Up and Wave a White Flag and a few of the songs that are on this collection.
9:32They were experiments of writing songs that were really from the heart and if you actually read the lyrics of Poison Moon and it really talks about being like an outsider. And I didn't know harmony in any formal sense, so everything was just instinctive. Everything was just... All my musical learning was from records. I never played a scale in my life. I never... I can't read music. You can to this day? I can write it down and I can orchestrate, but I can't sight-read music back because I never trained my eye to my hand, which you have to do, obviously, as a piano player or as another kind of, you know, formal instrumentalist.
10:09so I saw that Nick Lowe had released a single and there was this new label I'd had this demo tape which I'd made in my bedroom sent back to me by five six seven publishers or record companies that didn't see anything in it at all and I left my tape there at this little office never expecting to hear anything about it and I got a call saying we want to talk to you and within a month I was in the studio with Nick producing, playing bass, and I was introduced to John McPhee and Mickey Shine from Clover, whose records I actually owned. They were pretty obscure, they were on fantasy, two albums on fantasy.
10:48They had a new lineup with a different drummer from the original band, with a different keyboard player, or I think a keyboard player at all, Sean Hopper, and of course they had two singers, the original singer Alex Cole and Huey Lewis, who was kind of the rabble-rouser second lead singer. And I was put into the studio initially just with two members, with Nick playing bass. We caught Mystery Dance, which was, you know, a very simple rock and roll song. And I said I didn't want it to sound like a pastiche. I said I want to play it all downstrokes. You know, so that it was kind of, I'd heard the Ramones by then and I'd heard the Modern Lovers.
11:29I thought it needed to be more, actually less swinging in some ways, you know. What's interesting, one thing that re-listening to this album is I realized how much of it really had swing to it, which is not what you did particularly with the attractions. That's very good that you say that because it saves me from saying it to seem like I'm wise after the fact. But one of the reasons I was excited to meet John McPhee was not just that I had these two records which they'd made, it would have been modest, they hadn't made much kind of penetration, they were cult records to say the least. He played on Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey.
12:07And I wasn't a psychedelic Van Morrison fan in that it took me a while to get to Astral Weeks. But from Moondance on, particularly Bannon Street Choir and Tupelo Honey, these records just made me crazy and i just wanted to do that and to have john who could play pedal steel as well as guitar but more importantly johnny shamboddy the bass player who was the most swinging bass player i played with other than jerry chef who was in the tcb man later on but john brought this thing and i i had these models for songs some of which i'd been working on for a couple of years and in my head that figure that's sneaky feelings if you play it slower it's like
13:00you think you're so way out and got all the action it's you ain't living till you're loving in my mind that's what we were playing but i couldn't relax enough to be like and i couldn't sing like Marvin Gaye as I just proved I'm not warmed up for singing but I'm just illustrating that in my mind that was the music we were playing we were playing like like Marvin or like the Motown band but of course I never mentioned any of that to the clover players I just let them find it because I had no experience of directing musicians of any caliber and I thought well they know what they're doing these are guys that have already recorded and everything they played sounded great because not only do you hear these songs being interpreted in a number of different ways starting with clover then the attractions taking them over and playing quite faithful to that original model i have to say for the first 20 minutes and then you know six or seven months later just you can't even recognize the songs much less the people playing them it's a completely different type of music and then at the end reunited with clover you know 30 years after we made my own is true and guess what when we went to rehearsals i said to pete thomas who was deputizing as the drummer i said it's a tempo right they said it's the tempo from the record so well we've never played it like that he said i know but trust it and we did and guess what back came that swing and feel so sometimes that first information that you get about music the attempts to copy aren't as important as the leap into the dark often that you make in finding your own voice and and frankly for for me it was literally about being able to be in a room because when i tried to play those intimate songs i was talking about earlier i would write them at home and they would sound attractive to me and then i'd take them to a folk club where i was getting booked in 75 as in 76 i'd play down the bill from people i wouldn't be headlining and when i played those more introspective songs my people just talked over them because i didn't have the relationship with the audience that they trusted me all the people whose music i was listening to at that time whether it be randy newman or joni mitchell or john prine of course it established that relationship that allowed them to sing intimately and didn't need to speak out and shout i just need to speak up for myself and then i did and that's my image true and and to be really honest a handful of those songs are really deeply felt and a couple of them are kind of dashed off kind of as the sort of things that serve me well to kind of be in that moment they don't bear much too much scrutiny they sound good as records but they don't sound you know you would never read the lyrics out and say hey listen to this well we're going to put a lot of scrutiny on them, see how much they can take.
15:58Talking about how you absorb music, how you relearned it, it's reminding me of a story from your book, which I loved. Your father was a musician. He was a big band musician. You share that with Paul McCartney and Paul Simon, whose fathers were all... Very different sort of experiences, of course. My father originally wanted to be a bebop trumpet player he came out of the RAF and he played the trumpet and like most everybody else adored Lois Armstrong and then he heard Dizzy Gillespie and he wanted to play that new music and I've got in a lot of trouble in on Merseyside trying to play that music I don't know how good it if it was there's no recordings but I mean that was his ambition and when my folks went to live in London in about 1950 it was my father's idea to get into the what was then called modern jazz scene and when i was born he took the pragmatic role and took a job as a trumpet vocalist and ended up being one of the featured singers and probably the best known and you know most successful dance band they were a dance band on the glenn miller model so the kind of music which people still really loved from the second world war times because glenn miller was a heroic figure in England.
17:13My father then just had to sing what was put in front of him. He had to sing the hits of the day. And then by the time I became more aware of what it was he did, it would have been around 1963, they had a radio show that was a lunchtime radio show, which was literally called the Joe Lost Pop Show. There's a wonderful scene where you are watching your father and he's got a very early, I'm not sure if it was a tape or it was a single of Please Please Me. It was a 45. They would be sent A-labels which were overprinted with an A so that DJ knew which side to play. Or sometimes even acetates from Dick James from Northern Songs.
17:57So all the records on my record shelf that are A-labels or acetates are songs my father sang on the radio. As strange as it might be that they include my generation and reach out and I'll be there and see Emily play by the Pink Floyd. It's still the only Pink Floyd song I can stand to hear. But that's just me. But that's what it was. It was a very odd introduction into the mechanics of learning songs because I heard my father doing it repeatedly. He wired a deck of decalium, which was one of the first portable record players up, so the arm would just keep coming back onto the record rather than dropping another record in the stack.
18:37and he would listen to the record until he'd memorized it. He usually had sheet music as well or a lyric sheet, but a lot of these songs were harmonically quite simple, but they still required him to learn them, to sing them live, and he only had a few days to learn them. He was learning five or six songs a week and also recording them as well. Sometimes he would go and do sessions, which was like a little bit of pen money, as they say. It was like off-the-books money where he would go and record cover versions of the same songs for producers that issued budget records of this so there was this whole industry of songwriting publisher covers radio performance that that's what i grew up with that insight into it strangely enough i never picked up an instrument i never was moved to learn i didn't take piano lessons i i think i took violin lessons for a week until they tell me stop doing that and the usual horrifying things with the recorder that they make children go through but i had a guitar from the time i was about nine i think that was bought as a souvenir from a trip to spain but i never learned to play it until i was 14 or something when did the songwriting start almost right away i didn't learn three chord tricks i learned the song Man of the World by Fleetwood Mac, which I think is 1968.
20:02So I would have been 14. I have no idea why it was that song, because it's a very complicated song for a novice. And I patiently, a lad who I didn't really know, played the guitar, he was a couple of years older than us, and heard that I liked that song, and he gave me a piece of paper with the words on it, with the chord symbols over it. I wish I had it, you know, the actual chord diagrams, not just the names of the chords. And so I painstakingly learned how to play this song. It took me ages, it took me months. And the unlocking of that harmonic labyrinth, frankly, compared with most three chord songs, made other songs seem really easy to learn.
20:45And I quickly learned a lot of other songs. I heard all these other things I couldn't play. but these few songs I could play, and I immediately started writing, and there was an opportunity to play in public at a local church basement that had a weekly folk club, and I went down there a few weeks and saw a few artists and saw that people put their name down to be what they call floor singers, like open mic, and they put my name down and went up there and sang my one song in E minor and made a terrible job of it. I was really mortified, didn't do that for a while. And then I suppose the next year I went to live in Liverpool and there was more of a music club scene there, which took a little penetration because they didn't really want to hear original songs.
21:34Me and my partner, Alan Mays, we used to end up having to negotiate with club owners to open up a music night on a Tuesday night when they might not have even bothered to turn the lights on at all. Did you, this is going to sound like an odd question, but did you like being on stage? No, never. No, Alan was the much more confident. He was better looking than me and he was a better guitar player. And the only thing that he would say is that we tried to write songs together and I said it was impossible because I would finish them before I had the idea. That was the only thing in which I was, you know, more evidently, I'd say it's gifted, but I had capability.
22:17and they were really halting sort of compositions but I wrote faster than him if I was able to complete the thought. And we used to sing mostly other people's material but again, nothing from the charts. We were singing mostly Californian music, sung by the band, sung by the birds, you know. Your love of Joni Mitchell is well known but it surprised me that you liked so many of those California bands. it seems so different to me from your own work. With Joni, it's an exceptional thing as I came to understand it more and actually followed her development as a musician album by album. A friend of mine and I went to Manchester because a lot of tourists didn't come to Liverpool in those days.
23:01Liverpool was quite, you know, wasn't the richest town. And we'd go to Manchester to see people play. And we went to see Joni, I think the Free Trader Hall maybe. and she played the songs from Blue and that was a couple of months before the record came out which was something that used to happen then because people couldn't so easily they couldn't capture it on their phone and put it online so artists would debut songs in concert first but Joanie you can imagine her singing River and Case of You and then you've got to sort of memorise them on one hearing and have the feeling of them and the playing and then you went and sat We went and bought the record the day it came out and sat at Tony's house and listened to it for a whole day, like a whole day and night.
23:47We just listened to it. So it went in deep. But when you get to the next few records, the harmony gets even more intricate and she's starting to introduce other musicians. I know enough about it now that some of those musicians thought they knew better than her what the chords were. They didn't actually. Her chords were more interesting because they were more unusual. Sometimes the jazz musicians would adjust it to what they thought she was playing. But what she was actually playing was much more original. That's how you get to Caught and Spark and particularly Hissing on Summer Ones. And that music is just, there's still nothing like it.
24:28The only thing that's like it a little bit is Prince. And that's why, you know, I think he admired her and she admired him. is the only thing that sort of has that kind of imagination.
24:40Justin Richmond:If you're a music fan, I've got a new podcast you have to check out. It's called Before the Moment, a new series hosted by the legendary Niall Rogers. You know him as the producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of Chic. But in this series, he's hitting the road to sit down with some of today's most fascinating artists. From hitmakers like Miguel to rising stars like Alex Warren, Niall explores the stories behind the careers, the songs and the moments that changed everything. Because every artist can point to that turning point. That moment before the breakthrough, before the success, before everything changed.
25:12Justin Richmond:Through candid conversations and personal stories, you'll hear what happened before the moment that made them who they are today. Listen to Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now, imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps.
25:49You give it the goal, along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT.
26:20Justin Richmond:You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode. available on Plus and Pro plans. My kids' favorite place in the entire world to be is New York City. They want to go any chance they get, even if it means just accompanying me on a two-night business trip. And this time they want to go to Central Park because we missed it last time. And they can't wait to have the bagels. They're like real New Yorkers. They love the bagels. They love the pizza. It's crazy. Now, if you're planning any upcoming trips, do you ever think about how your home will just be sitting empty while you're gone?
26:55Justin Richmond:Why not consider listing your space on Airbnb? You could be giving travelers like me a place to land while they visit somewhere new and earn some extra cash at the same time. And with your co-host network, you don't even need to stress the little details while you're enjoying your own trip. You can hire a local co-host to handle everything like creating your listing, managing reservations, guest communication, onsite support, and even styling your space. So while you're making your own memories, your home can be helping another family make theirs. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. there's a wonderful clip on youtube from a party at gordon lightfoot's house during the roll of thunder tour where she plays coyote she plays coyote and mcguinn and dylan are just looking at her and they know they can't follow her because she's playing on open tuning that's exactly it they're they're like they play along and then they look at each other and think everything about the performance and the same is true the performance in the last waltz everything is so perfectly weighted her phrasing is perfectly weighted uh you know it's a very difficult long narrative song and there's no common idioms in it at all hardly there are lots of very unexpected kind of things are happening within the narrative of the song and complicated ideas you know like what is the line about the scent on my scent on his fingers while he's watching the waitress's legs it's like what the hell kind of yeah it's a very erotic kind of image but also kind of cold as well like like the whole dynamic of that song it's the unique perspective it's not anything i'd ever like try to write like but it was the fact that you could write like that so many people say my elder brother played me this record by dion and the bellman's even if you chronologically couldn't have known that music firsthand well that's why I didn't know who Elvis Presley was, because my parents never listened to any of his records.
28:50And I knew he existed, and I knew it was a name that people really liked. But I'd never heard any of his records except by chance, except a neighbor played me, you know, It's Now or Never. And she was a Cliff Richard fan, and she said, do you think this guy's as good as Cliff? And it was Elvis. And I'd never heard an Elvis Presley record played on a record before. And to an eight-year-old, I've got to be honest, it sounded like opera or what i thought opera sounded like i had never heard any opera but you know if you think about it you can imagine it was like i don't understand what this it's not like it's bad it's well sung but it's not what am i supposed to do with this you know and your your responses at that age are very uncomplicated that like you either like it or you don't like it you can't really analyze it later on i then john lennon next thing you know a couple of years later John Allen saying how important Elvis was, I still wasn't really curious.
29:46And I had no access. And all I saw were, like, trailers for his movies. And they just really looked a bit square. And then, like, the Motown review came in 65. And, like, you could have Stevie Wonder or you could have this music, you know. It wasn't until, like, Suspicious Minds that I thought, oh, now I get it. Now I get why he's great. and so when I made My Minds True I'd never heard the Sun Sessions you know you might say Mystery Dance is a little bit like a 50s sounding song but I learned that through the Beatles, Carl Perkins I knew who Carl Perkins was and I knew Chuck Berry I knew Chuck Berry well and Little Richard, who was far and away my favorite rock and roll singer him and Jerry Lee When did you first hear Little Richard?
30:38when he was on TV when I was a kid, and he'd just come out of being a gospel singer, and he came on Granada Television, and was backed by the Sands Incorporated, and he was doing his Lucille and things like that, and he put out a new single, I think 64, Bama Lama Bama Lou, that was the first Little Richard record I owned, and I was far and away at Little Richard, it was just like, you couldn't be like that or anything, I never ever thought of going to the piano and see if I could play that even, you know. But just in terms of the thrill of his voice, and the same with Chuck Berry, the first record I heard of Chuck Berry that I owned was not one of the ones from the 50s.
31:19The first Chuck Berry record I heard was No Particular Place to Go, which again was after he came out from when he was incarcerated. You can just read the words down. It's incredible. Like all of those songs, they're just incredible. You could say they're poetry. They're so well-constructed. Did that influence your lyric writing? I wasn't conscious, but I mean, I think the compression of syllables per line, it never frightened me. Like a lot of words, it's a common observation that I use too many words, but they're not. I'm just using as many as I need, you know, and that's true. And sometimes I'm aware that I'm overpowering the ability to gather them.
32:02and I think if you gather the sense of what I'm saying, then later on you'll hear the, if you've had the emotion or the intensity of it, you'll gather the rest of it because I think you'd be hard pushed to gather too much monkey business or Maybelline at one. That was the whole thing. It's like a movie with a great ending. You go, that was a thrill. I have to go back to the top of the ride to get to that thrill. That's how Chuck Berry songs work. It's like he's throwing so many ideas at you. You're talking about it reminds me of, of course, the first song on My Aim is True, which has a lot of words, Welcome to My Working Week.
Read the full transcript
32:38Yeah. And it has this sort of cadence I hear in a lot of your songs, which is the syllables come a little slower in the beginning, but then it really accelerates towards the end. I don't know where it comes from. It's not a conscious imitation of anybody. I think there are some songs within the blueprint where I'm experimenting with the kind of, you know, lyrical voice that I heard in other people and I'm trying to get close to that way of using words or the kind of images that are incorporated to explain things. But I wasn't sitting around analyzing stuff. I was just doing it too fast. You do some wonderful reproductions of lyric sheets.
33:18You said you always kept notebooks. I did meticulously early on. and I still like to write with a pen. I probably will commit too many things directly to a screen but I'm trying all the time to get back to writing because I think the rhythm and the editorial which some of these notebooks reveal is a different use of the mind than reading lines on a screen where they're all the same. They all appear to be the same length because there's no rhythm to the physical handwriting. The problem is you get excitable your own handwriting can be illegible so I might write a brilliant lesson not be able to read it back I trained myself to be able to write in the dark oh yeah it's not that much of a trick and it was a familiar thing for me to wake up and with something would be on my mind and I'd try and write it down or enough of it it wouldn't be a whole line it would be just a couple of words I knew that if I turned the light on that that line would disappear and we've all had that experience of surely of like apparently being in a story or hearing music in a dream, and then you wake up and you think you've got it in your head, but if you're a musician and you go to the instrument almost instantly, you can't gather it.
34:31I've had that happen lots of times. And you've lost it? Yeah, just a melody would come to me in a dream, and I'd go, oh, that's a great tune, and I'd wake up and I'd go to a piano or go to a guitar. By the time you got the guitar out of the case, you've forgotten it, you know? And I guess if you can't gather it, then maybe it only had its reality in a dream, like a lot of things in a dream are illogical. But that's how Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes came. That's kind of like a visitation. That's a thing that's happened a number of times, and I don't want to make anything that mystical about it, but it came to me on the back end of a train journey from London to Liverpool.
35:07And I remember the image coming into my head as we pulled out of Ron Corn Station and went over the bridge across the Mersey and into the city. And by the time I got to Lime Street, I had the whole song in some sort of embryonic form and then had, of course, no tape recorder, no voice memo device in those days, just a notebook. I'd scribbled a few lines down in and a tune going around in my head and I usually got the bus to my mother's. I didn't have a lot of money. On this occasion, I ran to the cab rink and got in a cab and said, take me to my mother's address. And I tried to sing the song in my head all the time.
35:49so that I wouldn't lose it. And then got to the house and barely said hello to her and ran upstairs. You know, my old guitar was still sitting on top of the wardrobe and I played it and played it. She must have wondered where I'd gone because I must have been gone an hour playing it until it was imprinted on my memory. So I play it and I probably changed it a little bit, you know. And even within this box set, there's the structure of the song. The rhythm wasn't set originally. The lyric and most of the narrative was there. But before we were putting this box together, a friend of mine wrote to me after a long time of not being in touch and said, I found a tape that you recorded at my house in 1976.
36:27And I must have just been playing through my new songs. And there's a version of The Angels and When I Wear My Red Shoes. And the rhythm of it is like Wooly Bully by Sam the Shaman, the Pharaohs. I hadn't found what I later sort of felt was like the birds kind of spacing. The song was set to a totally different motive originally. What were the other influences on your lyric writing? Your lyric writing is so strong, so unique. What were you reading at the time? I was reading pulp fiction, a lot of it. You know, like, that's what's in watching the detectives. I read a lot of Graham Greeman as a teenager.
37:09He was somebody that I think became his impact on stories and the kind of outlook and the moral point of view is in some later songs, but I wouldn't say he's evident in these songs. But I didn't really have any pretensions to any literary sort of elevation. It's very notable that my first five records don't have printed lyrics because I honestly believed at that time, and I've since revised it, that they had to be heard or understood all at once with the music. And I kind of thought it a little bit redolent of the things I didn't respond to about Californian music that I had loved. There was a sort of a slightly precious sort of now my art, you know, and I didn't think that's what we were doing, particularly not that year.
38:02I had wondered if your interest sort of in gangsters and the underworld came a little bit from your father's occupation because he must have known some characters. He would talk sometimes about somebody called Sid the Thief or something like that. There were characters in the dance hall he would sometimes tell me or tell that he would be... My parents spoke to him when I was quite young, but he would come for supper or come for a Sunday lunch, and he would gale us with various stories about different colorful people. And I got to kind of, like, hang out with him. Sometimes when I was a young teenager, I'd go to a lock-in with him on a Sunday afternoon in a pub that was run by his former singing partner and hear him and his friend, who was the guy who wrote Hard Day's Night, Alan Owen, who was a, you know, would-be Brendan B.M.
38:50kind of character. And they would talk very expansively about colourful people. And I probably, in my mind, I've embroidered it a little bit to seem like we were in a Damon Runyon book, but it wasn't really like that. It was just some people kind of having a drink, you know. And I'm sitting there with my shamby in the corner, like, wondering about the adults, you know. Do you remember writing particular lines? I'm thinking of, she's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake, which I think would make any pulp writer pretty proud. I wish I could say I did. I remember the speed with which I wrote that song might have overwhelmed that, because I wrote it in one sitting.
39:25So, you know, I don't think I had time to stand back and admire my own work, if I even had that impulse to do that. um i have ever had occasion in going back to assemble this uh set of when we went back to the notebooks that i kept that you mentioned before of course one of the things that one of the reasons that second disc in the set is called the blueprint is because it quite literally is the blueprint in some cases where i had whole you know couplets whole stanzas whole entire lyrics that I kept and I discarded the music thinking that the songs didn't speak up for themselves enough in the musical setting and found entirely different musical settings.
40:11So Leave a Man, the lyrics of Leave a Man become Accidents Will Happen, the words of I Can't Turn It Off become Watch A Step, Citizen Junction becomes King Horse. And those are very different music. They're not even remotely the same. uh are the words always written with music in mind or no they all exist in music and are on this record in the original graphs and there are in the notebooks some titles and even some whole lyrics that i don't have music for there's one called sad holiday that has lyrics that ended up in lipstick vogue but i have no memory of what the original tune was of that first iteration it's only the ones that I thought well enough to demo when I was given the opportunity and I didn't own a tape recorder of any consequence so I used to borrow one, Rivox, to record my...
41:04I only made a couple of these bedroom demos and then I had the opportunity to go and record in Dave Robinson's studio, Open Anchor and the other things that are in this set are literal demos that were recorded at Pathway Studios between my first recording session with Nick Lowe and John McPhee for Mystery Dance and the beginning of working with Clover as a band. And I cut six songs in one take, which were most of my Am Is True, because I wanted to kill this idea that Stiff had at that time, that they were going to put me on one side of the record and Eric on the other. Kind of like two, what's it called?
41:50Two guitars, two fabulous guitars. There's a record with Chuck Perry and Bo Diddley. That's one side each, you know? And I remember there was like lots of ideas came through in those early days. Because I was still working in an office. I'd go to Stiff and they'd say, we've got this great idea. We're going to put you on a awful record. And that's not going to happen. I was not good at speaking up for myself, but I just had to illustrate it. And once they heard the other songs, It just made a nonsense of it. Were you very competitive as a songwriter, as a performer? You were surrounded by some great talent.
42:25I mean, Ian Rurie is... It wasn't that... Ian, I really loved. We toured the first sort of theater tour that we ever did was on a package tour with Nick Lowe and Rekles Arrok and him. And there was a degree of competition because the original idea of the tour was very democratic and there was a rotating bill, which meant that, you know, after about three nights or one, really after one time around the circle, the first four shows, it became really obvious that the other two acts could not follow either us or the blockheads. They just couldn't. It just didn't work. That's show business. And I probably knew that as well as anybody that was on that tour because I'd watched show business at work with my father.
43:11I thought, just in showcraft, this doesn't work. Nothing against the quality of the individual songs. Ian's so dramatic. He really should have closed every night. He had the command as a performer. I was still learning it. But, you know, you couldn't say one was a better band, but we could both really play. Both bands could play. The other three, anyway, not me, but the other three could play. The Blockheads were a great group. So, of course, it was a bit competitive, but only in a sense of it. I'm sure all package tours, you know, are. I mean, Joyce Moore told me once that, you know, Sam, he loved Wilson Pickett, but it was always difficult to play on the bill with him because if you played before him, he'd be angry with you that you were headlining.
43:57And if you went on before him, he'd accuse you of trying to stage himself. I don't know how true that is, but it rings true, doesn't it? You know, because musicians can be competitive.
44:11Justin Richmond:It's called Before the Moment, a new series hosted by the legendary Niall Rogers. You know him as the producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of Chic. But in this series, he's hitting the road to sit down with some of today's most fascinating artists. From hitmakers like Miguel to rising stars like Alex Warren, Niall explores the stories behind the careers, the songs, and the moments that changed everything. Because every artist can point to that turning point. That moment before the breakthrough, before the success, before everything changed. Through candid conversations and personal stories, you'll hear what happened before the moment that made them who they are today.
44:46Justin Richmond:Listen to Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now, imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans.
45:22It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT.
45:47Justin Richmond:You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans. Songwriting is all about craft and finding the right creative headspace. The G2 Boost Collection from Pilot is designed to support that process. Grounded in color science, these premium G2 gel pens come in curated packs that help fuel different mindsets. Green for balance, blue for productivity, purple for creativity, and pink for optimism. Choose the G2 Boost Collection that matches the creative moment and let the ideas flow. In the liner notes, there's a lovely quote from Roseanne Cash, who talks about this album coming out.
46:33And she says that, you know, when she heard My Aim is True, she realized she had to up her game. And that a song like Seven Year Ake wouldn't have been written. That was a big compliment that she paid me. I mean, she's such a terrific lyricist. But everybody has to learn. and if you think about the comparative shadows of her fathers, she lived in the much bigger shadow, not because she wrote anything like Johnny, but because people wanted her to be her father's daughter initially and for her to stay around, she was living in California, and for her to have such a singular but separate voice and in more recent years to have managed to kind of actually acknowledge the gifts that both her parents gave her in her musical understanding is something I can really relate to.
47:28That's probably one of the areas that why we're friends because we can understand that really well. I wanted to ask you about writing Stranger in the House and Just a Memory. They're such perfect songs for those artists, for Dusty Springfield and for George Jones. Did you have them in mind when you wrote those songs? George's records were hard to get in England. I learned about George Jones and Mel Haggard, and even to a degree Johnny Cash, whose most of his hit records were novelty records, like Boy Named Sue or One Piece at a Time. Most of the ones that I was aware of. I knew about Hank Williams for some reason.
48:08I kind of got into Hank Williams. But then I started to trace forward, and I found that. So I just had lots of different people's styles. It was the simplicity, simple chords, and the structure of the song paying off to a refrain and the pace and the rhythm. Billy Sherrill told me he knew it wasn't a Nashville demo because it had an electric rhythm guitar on it and that's how he knew it wasn't recorded in Nashville. They never would have let anybody play the rhythm part on an electric. I couldn't afford a thousand strings. But it was styled in that weeper style, you know, that by then had absorbed quite a lot of George Johns.
48:49And Graham as well, I would say Grant Parsons, was also probably in there. Because I figured if the Rolling Stones could record Wild Horses, then somebody could record Strange in the House, you know, just as easily. You know, I felt lucky to do that. I think the thing about the song, it's related to Alison, in a way, in the lyrical sense, in that it has this sense of dread about what may happen in a deep love. that maybe you're not wired to be constant. And I suppose when I think about it, it was a kind of horrible realization. I think it was perhaps more true to life. I think I was role-playing when I wrote the song, and then the song came true.
49:31And that's true of both of those songs. Is that true of a lot of your music? Thankfully, no. You asked about the other one, Losing You. There is a song called Losing You. on the blueprint, which is a completely different song, except for the chorus, which is the same words as the later ballad. And I dispense with all the more arcane, and I have to say, Asprey Park-ish kind of imagery of the original draft, which was my attempt to write like greetings from Asprey Park. That was shameless, I felt. I thought it was obvious, but you might not think that when you hear it, but I was definitely trying to do that.
50:14and pays off to this pretty pure chorus, pure pop chorus. So when I had time to think about it, I thought those sentiments needed more longing and I came up with the ballad melody which we recorded in 1980 and that was totally dusty in my head because she already had a song called Losing You so I changed the title to just a memory and then my dream came true. She did actually pick it up without my bidding and the next thing I had a call while we were recording Imperial Bedroom would I take a call from her and the call came through while we were in a session and she said I love this song the producers played me this demo but it's too short it was only one minute and thirty seconds or something the demo or one minute and forty can you write another verse but nothing too lovey-dovey.
51:14That's what she actually said. And my heart broke, you know. Of course. And I did have wrote another verse for her. So, you know, that's only happened a few times. It happened with her and it happened with Chet Baker that I dreamt the song and then the person it was intended for actually recorded it. That was almost blue. So that brings us to Alison, about which much has been written. What interests me, particularly when you listen through on the album, is it's much more adventurous harmonically than the songs that precede it. Well, it was written in the Informed by Tom Bell. Oh. Yeah, because I'd heard Ghetto Child by the spinners, what you call the spinners, what we call the Detroit spinners, because there was a spinners group in England, so they had to adopt Detroit spinners.
52:07and that record with it sort of halting life ain't so easy in your that phrase that's Alison that's where it comes from you can hear that right that's where the rhythm comes from that's where the rhythm comes from but also you're using borrowed chords it starts on a suspended chord it's much different than the things well that's Mark Taplin that's listening to Mark Taplin that's just I mean McPhee on the introduction is playing something different, but the suspended chord, the suspended five chord, is, you know, that's something you hear in Tracks of My Tears and things like that. I knew those songs.
52:51And specifically, that's the way Marv Taplin played. I was nowhere near as capable guitar player as he was. But those little things where you sort of hear something that makes you thrilled, and you try to find a thing that satisfies you to the same degree. I do want to ask you a little more about Alison. Yes. I think it was the only song I looked up on, you know, Wikipedia. Yes. To see what other people thought. That'll make that. There you'll find the truth. Yeah, well, that's why I went there. Which is, you know, some people argue it's a murder ballad. No, it's not a murder ballad. Neither is watching The Detectives.
53:32you know it's describing the things that somebody's watching on the television alison is the the sense that your nature may kill the love that you you cherish most you see i find alison that's exactly what it is i've always found it an incredibly tender song it is it's a love song but it's a but it's a love song with the with the possibility of failure written into it so it's a little bit like these lines you know somewhere a broom is sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life somewhere a queen is weeping somewhere a king has no wife that's where i got it from that's hendrix i got two lessons from hendrix one was that song when cries mary and the other was the switching songs on live television they were the two things i learned from jimmy hendrix i never tried to play like him i actually truthfully love him most of all it's not to say you don't love him as a guitar player but i love him as a ballad singer because i can hear the curtis mayfield and everything in him you know and that's truthfully the two things that actually took directly from him is that's the conception of the lyrics of allison is is that song and not that song in its entirety just those couplets you add that to ghetto child and you've got like a pretty heady mix of cues i don't think you were influenced by this song but it reminds me of a song I think you talked about liking once, which is Paul Simon's Tenderness.
55:02Oh God. And the line there, of course, is but there's no tenderness beneath your honesty. And to me, that's exactly... Everything put together falls apart as well. What's happening, the balance of tenderness and honesty in Alison, I find it heartbreaking. Thank you. Well, it was intended to be. You just couldn't talk about these things out loud at that time. It was very difficult. People don't want to hear you say these things. I can say them now because it's 50 years ago and it doesn't matter anymore.
55:39But, of course, I had studied Paul Simon really, really hard. I mean, you know, when I first heard April Come She Will and things like that, I wanted to play like that. I tried to finger pick. I couldn't grow my fingernails. I didn't know that you put varnish on them. I kept breaking off. I had to take to, you know, then I got a little louder as a singer and then I realized I had to play with a pick. But when he got to that period, like from things like Peace Like a River and where he's obviously acknowledging all of these things that he, that it's kind of like his gumbo. It's like he's actually putting the people who his music he loved in the arrangements.
56:17That's one, so the towns and so forth. And Ted Innes is one of those songs. since and yeah it's it's more knowing and it's more mature than my songs but then he was more mature he was older than me when he wrote that song he wasn't the same age as i was when i wrote i was 21 or 22 maybe just 22 well i think you've got every reason to be proud of it thank you anyway thank you uh not as good as paul's songs though not not as good as you know anybody that's written American tune, you can't charge him. You just can't. Right. Or for that matter, the seven songs, which is a beautiful piece of music.
56:54This brings us to I'm not angry. I think the obvious question, because you were always described as the angry young man. Were you, in fact, angry at this point in your life? No, I think I was probably just frustrated at the weight. And it could have been as, isn't it said that, like, when the ship comes in, was written about being denied a hotel room. No, I didn't know that. I've read that story. I don't know whether it's true. It's repeated quite often. You know the song I'm talking about, the Bob Dylan song? That it was when he was on tour with John Baez and they didn't like the look of him because he was a bit scruffy and they wouldn't give him a room.
57:31And he wrote that whole song about that one barrier being put up. But of course the song means so much more. And I think quite a lot of the time I just found the language that I thought represented things I felt, but I'm not angry. How can I be angry if I'm the guy that wrote Arson? You can be both on different days, but that's about betrayal, that song. But the song, musically speaking, I think the song's a little bit of play acting as well. Again, in a sort of songwriter, certain thing, combination, I think, when people say, oh, this is very true to life, it's very autobiographical, and what's the word, confessional, hate that.
58:12you know for me the absence of craft is the thing that stops it from being enduring often now that's not true of everything there are some very raw unfiltered records that i really dearly love but they talk about johnny mitchell's like blue being confessional oh i don't know i don't know whether you're right about that listen to the craft listen to the songwriting technique that underpins it musically and lyrically and even if it was spontaneous composition it's composition at such a high level that it belies the idea that any old idea would have would have served the means you know and i suppose that's what i'm talking about i'm not trying to um retrospectively claw back the idea there was ever any frustration or anger but it was much more just not knowing who you are, what you are, what you need to be.
59:03That's expressed a lot in the This Is Model songs, particularly, which I sort of mention that in the notes for when we take these songs in a row with the attractions and the songs I'd just newly written with them in mind, obviously overwhelmed the Mime is True songs to a large degree. I'm not angry as it's Don't Fear the Reaper. You know, the gothic riff of it, the basic chord signals is illogical. and that's what I felt I love that Don't Fear the Reaper that time it was on the radio and I think I just sort of like oh I need a riff like that and of course I never told anybody that McPhee just did what he felt and it was perfect what he did was perfect I couldn't play like that I couldn't play that kind of lead guitar that he does and it gave it that kind of rock and roll feeling but then the chorus is quite musical I know you know I know what you're doing.
59:58I know where you've been. And that could be a pop song from any year. That's not a rock and roll melody, a rock and roll motif. You say it's about betrayal. And it seems to me a lot of your songs, not particularly that song, you were writing at a time, I think probably more so in England than here, when appearances, propriety, being a certain figure in public meant much more. And you are often writing about the conflict of that in people's private lives, their dark sides. Yeah, I don't know whether I was standing back and writing about them. It was just happening quickly. But like I say, the character to some degree was being formed and the character overtook me or took me over, whichever way around you want to say it.
1:00:50And in 77, there's a little clip that the fourth CD in this collection, Becoming the Attractions, it's a sort of documentary account of the band coming into existence, having these Miami's True songs to play initially. And then we have pop stardom of a minor kind. And I included even just a fragment of an interview. I love that interview. This woman could not have been kinder. she was genuinely curious as to whether i would survive the process of being in a pop group and she asked me straight out if i was i are you an angry songwriter and i answered the question quite literally because i had no guile when somebody just asked you directly whereas what you would usually get was somebody who would come with a complicated theory that you know a music journalist particularly come with a very complicated theory about what they had worked out and wanted you to agree with that, with your answer.
1:01:47So my response to that was sometimes to really exaggerate what I felt. So hence the revenge and guilt thing. I said that when I'd had about five Pernos. And I was just like, unguarded. Okay, you want to get here angry? Here it is. And the guy bought it and repeated it. And I mean, I know this guy's a very good writer. I mean, he was a very good writer. But I don't know that he knew that I was putting him on. I think he took it at face value. And even if he did know I was putting him on, everybody else thought it was at face value. And that became the calling card for those first few years until it didn't serve purposes.
1:02:24I also recognized that by saying something like, I'm not angry, which obviously doesn't sound like that on the record, it's about those circumstances, about holding back the most explosive part of your anger about the situation that's described in the betrayal that's described in the song. there's a degree of distance in that there's a degree of songwriting this is not to say it's not emotional but to say there's a degree of craft like I said the melody of the release is proof of that it isn't just raw unfiltered kind of raving so I think that I worked out quite quickly that there were two things that could keep people away from me one was seeming like you shouldn't ask me and the other was I'm going to drink a little bit here and I won't hear you and in that space I heard Wayne Shorter say this in an interview so I take Wayne's example he said when he drank brandy it created a zone around him in which he could do the creative work and I absolutely understand that idea that's not the reason to become a heroin addict or something but for a little while the gin kept people away from me they couldn't be where I was they couldn't call me in that zone Nobody.
1:03:42Well, the bad news is I'm a journalist with a theory. So get ready. Okay. Take some of that coconut water. Yes. What I was saying earlier about people's dark lives being revealed, you know, to me, it animates some of your best early work. Sunday's Best, Man Out of Time, even King of America. Yeah. I think there are a lot of examples. You said confessional, we live in a very different age now. We don't live in an age where people feel they have to hide their dark side. If anything, it's the first person. That's their calling card. Yeah, it's the first person. I would never last five minutes. I wouldn't have lasted the scrutiny of social media or anything if I'd started now with the way I felt.
1:04:31I mean, there are lines in the song that if you knew how I felt, it'd bury me alive. I'm not worried about you revealing anything. What I'm asking is, as a writer, is it harder to write now about people where there's not that binary or at least that... I never think about it because I don't know that I cast myself in the present tense in that sense. you know I have a lot of songs and I have a lot of songs which I don't serve and would serve me and if I have any time left it might be to address some of those even ahead of these songs interesting yeah that's the honest truth and I'm not saying that in a melodramatic way I'm not saying oh I'm about to leave I'm not planning on going anywhere but whether I even consider some of these things that they've been well considered and I'm very grateful for the attention.
1:05:30And of course, everybody that's skeptical about this set will immediately observe that these records have been reissued before. And they've been anthologized even to a degree, but never quite as encompassing as this set. I wanted to ask you one more question, which is that you mentioned your father in this set. You talk a lot about him in your wonderful book. You also talk about your mother who didn't play an instrument, but you said understood music in a very profound way. Much more. Do you remember when she first listened to this record, what she thought? You know, when she passed, I went and had to clear her house, and she had pristine copies of all those early records.
1:06:11She really followed what I was doing. My mother didn't play an instrument, didn't sing in public, but had a good musical sense. And why I know that is true, because she left school at 14 and was a record sales assistant. And she used to say, when she discovered she had some kind of ear, was when, before there were, of course, long, long before there were computers that were just record catalogs. And people would come in requesting songs. And she'd say, well, what's the name of the song? And I'd go, I don't know. Well, who's it by? I don't know. Well, how are you going to say, it goes like this, and they'd start singing some semblance of the melody.
1:06:48And she would sometimes recognize it and be able to point them in the direction of a recording or even the sheet music so they could play it for themselves. She became known as the guy who knew a bit about dance, band, and jazz. That's how my parents met, because my dad was a local trumpet player. And, you know, it sounds like a sentimental story, but it really just highlights the importance of the physical object of the record, certainly in my lifetime. She had friends who were more knowledgeable still, would put records in my way that, you know, much later on became the foundation of my ability She'd be able to hear orchestral themes as separate to song-like form, you know.
1:07:28And after my dad left, she was the one who raised me. She was at the last show I played in Liverpool before the emergency, and that was the last time I saw her because of the restrictions on travel and quarantine. Every time I'd go to visit her, they'd change the rules and it wouldn't be possible. So unfortunately, she passed in that time. I mean, she had lived a very difficult last few years after a stroke. So I know that music was a great solace to both my parents as they dealt with the respective issues. My mother a stroke, my father Parkinson's. Music penetrated and bore them up in that, for which I'm grateful.
1:08:11Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming in. It's been just wonderful. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. It's really, really very surprising in a lovely way. I'm glad. I do mean that sincerely. Thank you.
1:08:50Justin Richmond:Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.
1:08:59Justin Richmond:If you love music and great artist interviews, check out Before the Moment, hosted by Niall Rogers. This new series follows Niall as he travels across the country, talking with some of today's most fascinating artists about the moments that shaped their lives and careers. From hit makers like Miguel to rising stars like Alex Warren, and Niall explores the stories behind the careers, the songs, and the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the point where everything changed, and this podcast tells the stories that came before it. Listen to Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series, on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:09:47Justin Richmond:gel pens come in curated packs that help fuel different mindsets. Green for balance, blue for productivity, purple for creativity, and pink for optimism. Choose the G2 Boost collection that matches the creative moment and let the ideas flow. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. This episode is sponsored by Navy Federal Credit Union. They offer great rates and pre-approvals that are good for 90 days. Plus, you could even get$200 when you refinance your auto loans from another lender with Navy Federal Credit Union. Learn more at navyfederal.org slash autoloans. Navy Federal Credit Union.
1:10:27Navy Federal is insured by NCUA. Credit and collateral subject to approval. Refinance loan must be at least$5 ,000 to be eligible for the$200. Terms and conditions apply. Visit navyfederal.org slash autoloans for details. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
From the publisher
Elvis Costello seemed to arrive fully formed with his 1977 debut, My Aim Is True. The look, the voice, the wordplay and the attitude were already there, along with songs like “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” that helped establish him as one of the most distinctive songwriters of his generation. But behind that seemingly sudden arrival were years spent absorbing everything from Motown and country to Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and the California folk-rock of the late ’60s and early ’70s, as Costello worked to find a musical language of his own.
Now, nearly 50 years later, Costello is revisiting that evolution with an expansive new anniversary edition of My Aim Is True. The collection reaches back to songs and demos he recorded before the album, tracing his early experiments as a songwriter through the sessions with producer Nick Lowe and the American band Clover, and eventually to the formation of the Attractions.
On today’s episode, Bruce Headlam talks with Elvis Costello about how he found his voice as a songwriter, the music that shaped him, and the stories behind some of the songs on My Aim Is True. They also talk about the “angry young man” persona that followed Costello through his early career, what he learned about music from his parents, and what he hears now when he looks back at the young songwriter he was nearly half a century ago.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Elvis Costello HERE.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.




