Elvis Costello By Lori Smerilson Carson January 1, 2025 Elvis Costello By: Lori Smerilson Carson | Live Photos: Larry Marano Heading toward almost fifty years of creating amazing music that has truly entertained fans worldwide, Singer/Songwriter/Producer Elvis Costello is now bringing art to the forefront with his debut of outstanding paintings. Through years of making over thirty-three records, he inserted his incredible artistic visions into album covers. Costello’s albums started with his debut MY AIM IS TRUE released in 1977, and continued with several more successful records including Billboard Hot 100 single “Veronica” released in 1988. His music has also been recorded by other world renown musicians such as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Solomon Burke and Dusty Springfield. Costello was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003 and has earned several accolades comprising of two Grammy awards, a BAFTA, an MTV Video Music award, an ASCAP Founders, two Ivor Novello awards and four Edison awards, to name a few. In addition, he is the recipient of Queen Elizabeth’s OBE award which he received in 2019. Now, Florida fans can see this extraordinarily talented musician’s artwork at the Wentworth Galleries on January 10th at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, and January 11th at Boca Raton Town Center Mall. Taking some time from his busy schedule to correspond with my interview questions, he revealed some details about his new artwork, his music, a bit about his past, and what fans can look forward to. SFL Music Magazine: You have previous art experience with album covers. What inspired these upcoming art shows at the Wentworth Galleries? What can fans look forward to? Elvis Costello: Some people had asked for prints of my illustrations and I wondered if there might actually be an audience for these works. Wentworth thought well enough of the idea to hang a selection of images in a trial presentation earlier this year and we all like the wild juxtapositions. I realized that images that were inherently comic could sit very well next to more macabre frames and tell some kind of story or reflect different moods or focus. SFL Music Magazine: Where would you say you get your inspiration for your paintings in general? Costello: From memory or dreams, even nightmares. Some are scenes from a dancehall I visited with my father as a boy, as he was also a singer. One new painting portrays a swirling vortex of chaos and contagion, and the single word “Stop”. Some images are parodies of my own album sleeves – defacing the work of some wonderful photographer friends and that of our original art director, the late Barney Bubbles. I learned a lot in watching Barney subvert and adapt old lightbulb ads from the ‘50s and turn them into heads of rock and roll musicians. You’ll waste a lot of time waiting for this process to occur in reverse. If you know any of my album sleeves, you may recognize characters and motifs quoted from Barney’s cover painting for the album Imperial Bedroom, as I’ve transposed some of them into earlier and later jacket designs, so the images appear to have mutated into something more “Imperial” in nature. It was a kind of graffiti carried out with an electric pencil and I went from there to conceiving parodies of out- of-print romance novels and old movie posters. Some of these images were first seen fleetingly in a video screen montage behind us on the “Imperial Bedroom & Other Realms” tour, and later in some lyric videos. I created hundreds of these frames and the most intriguing of them are seen in the show along with newer works, several marking my return to working with oils, acrylics and canvas after 40 years. SFL Music Magazine: Your music has been noted as great storytelling. What would you say inspires your songs? Costello: A group of these images are imaginary illustrations for a series of short “children’s” stories carrying the same titles as the songs on our 2021 album, THE BOY NAMED IF. Stories that trace a line out of the wonder and terrors of childhood through the confusion of adolescence, the mishaps of young men, and the regret or lack of remorse in the older mind. These are all things that have been visited in song over the years for which there are no pictures. SFL Music Magazine: You have collaborated with Paul McCartney, Allen Toussaint, Burt Bacharach as well as your wife Diana Krall. What do you feel you took away from those experiences? Costello: I didn’t go to college and certainly not to art school, but working with each of those people provided more a genuine education in form and daring, in nuance and necessary strength of resolve, a measure of restraint in anger and even finding acceptance and in the case of my wife, she turned the lights back on in the world, so I could see what I was doing. SFL Music Magazine: You started your amazing career in the late ‘70s. What would you attribute to the secret of your success? Costello: Not worrying about time or trend, and always looking to do the next thing or learn something new. I didn’t learn to drive a car until I was 38. I was too busy writing songs and singing. I didn’t learn to write down a note of music until I was 40 and had yet, I had written over 200 songs by then, but eventually I found the need to learn the written code of notation and now I can orchestrate what I’m hearing in my head as I did on the 2018 album Look Now, and for a recent concert in Liverpool with student, graduates and tutors from Paul McCartney’s LIPA, a dramatic arts academy. I doubt that any of this is a recipe for assured commercial success because some people want the same beans every day. I prefer to open the can and find they are all different colours. SFL Music Magazine: What would you recommend to a new musician or artist? Costello: Just like when I paint; get your hands dirty and start boldly and then refine. With songs it sometimes helps to write all your ideas and images on a large sketch pad, the bigger the better – A2. Find the best way to start, even if it is the title. Sometimes the lines or verses find their way into the songs in a surprising order of appearance, but you can’t determine that so easily if you are flicking through the pages of a tiny pocketbook. SFL Music Magazine: In 2025 you will be touring the US with your Radio Soul! Tour and will be in Florida in July (Miami, Fort Myers, St. Petersburg). What can fans look forward to with this new show? Costello: We are going to grab these old songs by the ankles and shake ‘em until the rings slip off their fingers and then we can determine whether they are diamonds or glass, gold or tin. Sometimes there is no better way to play the song than the way I first wrote it, but time has taught me and The Imposters (and our guitar playing pal, Charlie Sexton), different things about rhythm and mood and tempo, so there’ll be surprises; songs that are transformed one night, may be played faithfully off the blueprint, on the very next evening. There’ll be songs that haven’t been heard for thirty years and songs that I’ll probably never play again, which is why it is fine if our audience has sentiment or memories wrapped up in these tunes, but it mustn’t be a mere nostalgic exercise for the musicians. We have to play the songs as we feel them today or we’d risk telling lies. SFL Music Magazine: You have written a book (UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK). Are there any more books coming down the pike? Costello: I’ve written a considerable amount of words for a series of dramatic fables that incorporate images and narratives from both new and existing songs. I’ve no idea what medium it might best serve this work or whether I will ever publish them. There are four or five outlines on different themes that I eventually hope to realize, not perhaps in theatre, while film is too expensive and television, too dull and predictable, but radio still holds some promise and mystery. At its best, it is like a pill you swallow that helps you imagine everything. We have had a busy year of record releases -”The King Of America & Other Realms” – a 6- CD set over a forty-year span and then issued the “True Story Of The Coward Brothers” – an imagined history of the deluded rock and roll siblings, ”Henry & Howard Coward” which I wrote for Audible.com, directed by Christopher Guest and for which T Bone Burnett and I wrote and recorded a 20-song full length soundtrack album on New West of “The Cowards” songs that are excerpted in the comedic drama. There are no other plans to record for the foreseeable future. No record company is sitting there imagining a new record with my face on the cover, that’s my job. Their attitude is “Haven’t people suffered enough?” Then again, I’ve had an immensely fortunate life and career, so If I stopped working tomorrow (and frankly I can’t afford to do that), there would still be albums full of songs of every stripe and shade for people might stumble into in time, as only time will tell. SFL Music Magazine: Is there anything else you would like to add about the Art show? Costello: I hope people are intrigued or amused by the show and realize that these images range from expressive and personal to simple visual jokes and affectionate parodies. They are playful, as we could once all draw, paint, sing, dance and make up verses without fear or embarrassment. One of my favorite frames is called “The Upside Down Boy”, an image of lad turning handsprings or cartwheels in a meadow. It’s good to be reminded that we could all do that before life scared it out of us. Share It!
