Painted From Memory (1998)
by Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach
During the 1990s revival of Easy Listening, the undisputed
king of the genre, Burt Bacharach, once again reigned and although there were
no new hits, the songs from his golden years of the late 1950s through to the
early ‘70s regained their currency with a new generation. In his seventieth
year, Bacharach began a new project with a collaborator more than a quarter of
a century his junior*1. He and Elvis Costello had first worked together a
couple of years previously on the song ‘God Give Me Strength’ which they had
contributed to the film Grace Of My Heart
(1996), a fictional story about a Brill Building
Apart from occasional collaborations with the likes of Bob
Hilliard, Mack David (Hal’s brother), Carole Bayer-Sager and Cathy Dennis, the
vast majority of the extraordinary number of singles composed, arranged and
produced by Bacharach – over seventy US
Top 40 hits; over forty in the UK – were co-written with lyricist, Hal David.
The Bacharach / David brand was a highly distinctive mark of quality and their
songs feature an unusual unity of sound and style.
Costello, on the other hand, has proved himself to be one of
popular music’s most eclectic characters. Coming to the fore in the late 1970s
as part of The New Wave, he quickly began to experiment with different styles
such as Soul and Country in albums like Get
Happy! (1980) and Almost Blue (1981).
He has branched out into classical
music with The Juliet Letters (1993),
a collection of chamber pieces with the The Brodsky Quartet, and the ballet, Il Sogno (2004). He was also involved
in jazz collaborations with singer Marian McPartland and songwriter Allen
Toussaint. In addition, he worked as a producer with The Pogues, The Specials
and Squeeze and has co-written songs with Paul McCartney. He has regularly
contributed songs to films, such as the hit version of Charles Aznavour’s torch
song, ‘She’ from Notting Hill (1999) and
the Oscar-nominated ‘Scarlet Tide’ from Cold Mountain
The partnership between Rock’s Renaissance Man and The Lord
Of Lounge may not, therefore have come as too much of a surprise, but Costello,
on the face of it, must have been a very different prospect for Bacharach when
compared to his old wordsmith, Hal David. Where David was economical and
understated, Costello had frequently been verbose and flashy, his songs
sometimes tending to get lost in his convoluted wordplay, but from Painted From Memory onwards, Costello
develops a quieter, less busy approach. The songs are all co-credited (as is
production) and Bacharach himself may have had a hand in some of the lyrics –
he certainly wrote all the words on his next album, At This Time (2005) which featured not only Costello in a
supporting role, but also Rufus Wainwright and – gulp – Dr. Dre. That record is
nowhere near as successful as Painted
From Memory, on which Bacharach wisely elected not to sing himself (thus
saving listeners from the tuneless croak he occasionally indulges in on his
solo outings).
The billing on the album is intriguing: ‘Elvis Costello With
Burt Bacharach’. One might have expected Bacharach’s name to have appeared
first – after all, he is somewhat higher up the pop music totem pole than
Costello and has age-seniority as well as the edge in terms of alphabetical
order. Film stars, of course, agonize over star-billing and Paul McCartney has
in recent years been subject to fits of paranoid brooding about the ‘Lennon / McCartney’
credit that appears on all Beatles records apart from their debut album (and
which, apparently, Lennon persuaded him sounded better and made more sense
alphabetically). Does Costello’s top billing on Painted From Memory imply that he was responsible for the lion’s
share of the music and lyrics with Bacharach perhaps supervising the
arrangements?*2
In any case, proceedings open with ‘In The Darkest Place’
which should convince listeners that they are in for a high quality experience
– depending, that is, on how they cope with Costello’s singing, which is
something of an acquired taste. Not noted for hanging back, he grabs the song
by the scruff of the neck, unafraid of pushing his powerful baritone to its
limits. The song drifts in quietly though, with a flute hovering over minor
chords on a piano and fades out with Costello and the girl singers sadly
repeating the title phrase. In between, he wrenchingly speculates about the
woman who has dropped him, reflecting that she’s probably handling their separation
much better than he is.
The gentle lilt of ‘Toledo
‘This House Is Empty Now’ is one of the stand-out tracks, a
beautiful song with chiselled, poetic words that Costello sings both
melodically and soulfully (not an easy trick to pull off). With a title like
that, it is, of course, reminiscent of ‘A House Is Not A Home’, but the later
song stands up well on its own merit. In another setting, the tinkling vibes,
doleful fretless bass and wistful musette (a kind of cross between bagpipes and
an accordion) would sound downright sappy, but here the tune and words are too
strong to be undermined. The reference to ‘all our friends must choose / who
they will favour, who they will lose’ has the bitter ring of experience about
it as does the following verse:-
‘The walls were lined with photographs
Remember the glass we charged with celebration’,
But now I fill my life up
With all that I can to deaden this sensation.’
Remember the glass we charged with celebration’,
But now I fill my life up
With all that I can to deaden this sensation.’
Then, on the bridges, Costello’s voice, racked with emotion,
picks up the figure played by the yearning solo violin in the song’s intro:-
‘Do
you recognise the face
Reflected in that fine silver frame
Were you really so unhappy there?
You never said.’
Reflected in that fine silver frame
Were you really so unhappy there?
You never said.’
After such heartbreak, a touch of light relief is called for
and an urbane alto-sax is on hand to lead us into ‘Tears At the Birthday Party’
with its deceptively jaunty, quickstepping chorus. Lyrically, it recalls
Costello’s own ‘Alison’ and ‘Indoor Fireworks’, also songs about family
gatherings gone haywire. The sun then comes out in ‘Such Unlikely Lovers’ as
unexpectedly as the arrival of a new love, which as well as making Costello
exclaim, ‘I’m not saying there will be violins / But don’t be surprised if they
appear’, also inspires him into a dash or two falsetto. It’s a lovely, breezy
song and one of the more quintessentially Bacharachian in the set.
In the rich, swelling chorus of ‘My Thief’, the narrator
feels ‘almost possessed’ by a ‘glorious distress’ when his ex-partner steals
back into his new life via his dreams. Lisa Taylor, one of the backing singers,
provides a solo coda here to sweetly reassure him not to feel threatened
because she has ‘the perfect alibi’. It’s a clever piece of work as is the
following track, ‘The Long Division’, a meditation on the mathematics of The
Eternal Triangle:-
‘Can it be so
hard to calculate -
That when three goes into two,
There’s nothing left over?’
That when three goes into two,
There’s nothing left over?’
The sultry electronic keyboards that dominate this song melt
into the title track’s reflective piano and sighing wash of strings. The
narrator has painted a portrait of his lost love which gazes back at him with
eyes that ‘smile for someone else’. It is the sort of song – and performance -
that might have found a place in one of Sinatra’s collections of blue ballads,
recorded during his trials and tribulations with second wife Ava Gardner - In The Wee Small Hours (1955) say, or Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The
Lonely(1958).
In ‘What’s Her Name Today?’, our hero, having picked himself
up from the emotional canvas, embarks on a string of affairs, beating himself
up along the way for taking out his heartbreak on the new conquests. The
self-loathing, even at the remove of second-person narrator, is still
palpable:-
‘Isn’t her smile reminiscent of someone else?
Well, is it or isn't it?
Oh, why did you decide that
You’d punish any other girl you’d meet
To try and make that feeling go away?’*3
Well, is it or isn't it?
Oh, why did you decide that
You’d punish any other girl you’d meet
To try and make that feeling go away?’*3
The closing images are disturbingly and paradoxically dark
with his latest girl ‘twisted in chiffon’ and ‘[strung] with pearls…hung up
like a chandelier.’ Costello has always been fascinated by the psychopathology
of romantic love and the whooshing cymbals which follow Bacharach’s rolling
piano at the end of this song - another stand-out track - have a distinctly
film noir feel about them.
If, by now, the impression of this being an Easy Listening
album has not quite dispelled, then ‘God Give Me Strength’ should finish the
job conclusively. Despite the title, we don’t really see the narrator turning
to religion. Rather, having finally realised that he will never get over the
great lost love of his life, he tries to summon up the commitment to put her
behind him and rise above his despair and jealousy.
But as the song draws to a close, the bile rises again and
hardens into the conviction that ‘she becomes my enemy’. The tortured image of
his replacement – from whose shirt the narrator ‘was washed out like a
lip-print’ appears and, unequivocably, he ‘want[s] him to hurt’. The air of
gloomy reconcilement to the way of things apparent earlier in the song is
overturned by the bitter resentment and burning jealousy that Costello conjured
up in ‘I Want You’, his harrowing masterpiece from a decade earlier on Blood & Chocolate (1986). After this
last eruption, we leave him forlornly murmuring over and again, ‘wipe her from
my memory’ as the steady, sorrowful horns fade away.
Painted
From Memory is a romantic song-cycle about the end of a
relationship. Its dark and dramatic narrative arc make it a powerfully thematic
album of the sort that Burt Bacharach never really got round to with Hal David.
Their partnership will be remembered for all those great, inimitable singles,
rather than any particular album.
This record is a more than worthy addition to that legacy.
Had he been around in the 1960s, Elvis Costello may well have handled some of
those Bacharach / David classics with aplomb, although whether he would have
rivalled Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and Scott Walker is a moot point. No
matter – this fine album could not have been made by any other artist*4 in
collaboration with Bacharach – and it may yet prove to be one of the best of
both their careers.
N. B.
*1 - The title track’s strings were arranged by the even more
venerable Johnny Mandel (b. 1925), whose long CV includes Frank Sinatra and
Duke Ellington.
*2 - When Costello reassembled his most successful backing
band, The Attractions, for his album, Brutal
Youth (1994) in a quest to recapture the distinctive sound of his early
recordings, he neglected to credit them as ‘The Attractions’ anywhere on the
packaging.
Ex-Attraction and
long-time Costello associate, Steve Nieve, is one of several keyboardists on Painted From Memory. Costello is heard
on the album purely as a vocalist; only one song, the title track, features a
guitar solo (and a pretty ordinary one by Dean Parks at that). Costello’s own
highly effective guitar-playing seems to have been deemed surplus to
requirements, but then, Bacharach has never demonstrated much interest in the
guitar as a instrument…
*3 - ‘reminiscent / Well, is it or isn’t it?’ How about that
for a rhyme!
*4 - There is a Jazz version of this album – Bill Frisell’s The Sweetest Punch (1999) – which
features Costello and another singer, Cassandra Wilson on a couple of tracks.
STOP PRESS - According to the Sept. 2013 issue of Mojo magazine, Costello and Bacharach are 'currently writing new songs...for a stage version of...Painted From Memory.'
STOP PRESS - According to the Sept. 2013 issue of Mojo magazine, Costello and Bacharach are 'currently writing new songs...for a stage version of...Painted From Memory.'
c. 2013 IGR
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