History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues

I'm just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
—Elvis Costello, "Beyond Belief"

Love begins with a question. In our first substantial conversation, the young woman who became my wife wanted to know if I had any thoughts concerning the meaning of Elvis Costello's last radio hit, "Veronica," a Paul McCartney-collaboration from his 1989 album, Spike. Little did she know that contemplating Elvis Costello lyrics was (and is) one of my favorite pastimes. And oh the joys of being asked to indulge an explication (by a female, no less)! I happily explained that the song is an ode to his grandmother, whose knowing glances and romantic memories survive a quietly ordered existence surrounded by nursing home personnel ("They call her a name that they never get right / And if they don't, then nobody else will"). In between her vacant stares, Costello notes the occasional smile and the penetrating look of recognition and derives an abiding encouragement from both. My wife-to-be was satisfied by my answer, and I was, to say the least, deeply gratified by her satisfaction. It was her favorite Costello song, as it turns out, and I couldn't have asked for a more fertile bit of common ground.

The affectionate interrogation that drives a song like "Veronica" ("Is it all in that pretty little head of yours?") is a defining trait of Costello's entire catalogue. The hasty listener will protest that this aging punk rocker is primarily possessed by the cleverly worded rant, the posture of a spurned lover, and a mostly unmatched cynicism. But this is only the work of pr machinery (admittedly encouraged by the man himself) that screeched to a halt 20 years ago. A close listen to "Alison" ("I know this world is killing you") or the twangy, countrified demos of his early work will reveal a more subtle context and an underlying tenderness that was there all along.

Take 1979's Armed Forces, for instance. Largely inspired by his first trip to Northern Ireland, it isn't in the name of a hopeless nihilism that he takes British imperialism to task. Ever wary of the backhanded compliment that comes with careless categorizing, Costello makes a habit of placing what might be described as protest songs right alongside the ballads and torch-song confessions. The same man who penned a lamentation concerning the weapons industry ("Shipbuilding") also recorded an album with Burt Bacharach. He eschews the easy dismissal of topical descriptions: "I don't see a subject called politics, it's just right and wrong and what happens in life." And he's happy enough with "folk music" as a category for his own work just so long as it's no more highfalutin a description than, say, "music for folks," a broad description indeed for a fellow who's recorded albums with the Brodsky Quartet, the opera star Anne Sofie von Otter, and a legend in country music production like Billy Sherrill (with 1981's Almost Blue, Costello was alt-country when country wasn't cool).

Whatever the genre that best serves to pigeonhole his latest musical preoccupation, the defining trait of his songwriting is a determination to look hard at human beings, most notably himself. "I'm an idiot," he's quick to point out. "We all are, we're all beautiful and we're all ugly." His willingness to examine the seamier side of modern man (perhaps most effectively in his chronicles of man's inhumanity to woman) can leave the fastidious listener a little cold. But this is the peculiar authenticity that marks the best of what we perhaps do well to call "folk music." It reflects confusion as well as harmony, the beautiful and the ugly. As Bob Dylan remarked in a 1965 interview, "It's weird, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts … chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything." As a lyricist, Costello stands in this tradition with people like Dylan and Tom Waits. Neither sap nor sentimentality will have the last word. His subject is all things ineffably human.

"The strangeness of man," according to Czeslaw Milosz, "rises against the wisest of theories." And the men who populate albums like Imperial Bedroom ("All pride and no joy") and King of America ("So contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary") are the kind who but slenderly know themselves. The protagonist of "Man Out of Time" has "a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge," and the casualties who struggle in the wake of these personalities tell their stories in "Long Honeymoon" and "Sleep of the Just." Exposing the skewed intentions of such would-be romantics is Costello's expertise, and his treatments are usually in the first person. It's in this spirit of self-examination and hilarity at his own expense that we might best appreciate his latest offering, When I Was Cruel.

The opening track, "45," is what Costello describes as "autobiographical arithmetic." Commemorating the end of World War II, his obsessively compiled record collection, and his own journey past middle -age, he even takes a shot at his earlier vocal style which was only occasionally coherent: "The words are a mystery, I've heard / 'Til you turn it down to thirty-three and a third." With his rock-star persona firmly asserted and deflated, he returns to one of his favored targets: a shameless industry that entertains men by making women appear to be the sweet nothings men think they require. "Spooky Girlfriend" ("When she does as she's told / We'll all turn platinum and gold") undermines the latest image exploitation of a character type, while "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" explores the lobotomizing possibilities of a successfully executed advertising campaign.

"Soul for Hire" features a mercenary lawyer feeling like a sucker for believing he could fight injustice without becoming what he beheld. And dizzying numbers like "15 Petals" and "Dissolve," for the moment, resist scrutiny, but this is happily typical of so much of Costello's work. As he puts the matter himself, "People are always asking me: 'What does that song mean?' And if I could say it in other words, or in the song, I would have written another song."

Nevertheless, I'd like to a hazard a word on "Dust … " and "Dust2 … " I don't doubt that with repeated listens these two tracks (differing primarily in style) will yield strange new meanings, but, for now, it appears that Costello is waxing eschatological as he contemplates an already underway resurrection of dust, its incontrovertible testimony, and an emergence from its heretofore silent witness concerning all goings-on everywhere all of the time: "If dust could only cry / If dust could only scream / For it's the single witness that might testify." He wonders if such worldwide, all-consuming revelation is something any of us have the wit to even desire, and in a variant of James Joyce's "Here comes everybody," he floats the notion that everything that is and was is also, somehow, coming back—a provocative metaphysical proposal to be filed somewhere between The Great Divorce and U2's "If God Will Send His Angels."

With "Radio Silence," the album closes in less speculative territory. To his credit, our man was no less scathing in 1979's "Radio, Radio" when he announced, "Radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools trying to anesthetize the way that you feel." And in those days, he was actually featured on commercial radio. But in the age of boy bands and what Costello refers to as "look-at-my-wounds" music, it's only NPR affiliates and college radio who still have the freedom to select their own playlist. Even the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack depended upon the interest of NPR stations until it was too large a phenomenon for the country music industry to ignore.

Still, as Costello notes, "There's malice and there's magic in every season." After the passing of riverboat rambling songwriter John Hartford ("Gentle on My Mind"), the "Down From the Mountain" show, an O Brother spinoff originally staged at the Ryman auditorium in Nashville, was in need of an mc for its encore performance at Carnegie Hall. As a British performer, Costello might have seemed an odd choice, but having written songs for Johnny Cash, George Jones, and the Fairfield Four, his Americana credentials were never in doubt. And he's been something of a partner in crime to O Brother kingpin T-Bone Burnett since they formed the short-lived Coward Brothers in 1985. His work has long been firmly dependent upon the intersections, the best and the weirdest, of blues, gospel, and country; what Burnett refers to as "the way back machine." With the recent craze for such historically mindful music, I'd like to think Costello will come up for the reconsideration he deserves.

Years ago when he performed with the Fairfield Four at the Ryman, he made repeated reference to the historical significance of the old revival-house-turned-music-hall, and I was pleasantly surprised when he stepped away from the microphone and ended the show with an a capella version of what had long been my favorite Costello song to puzzle over: "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4." The narrator speaks defensively of the dignity of a young woman who insists "One day my Prince of Peace will come." And amid images of regret, disappointment, and doubt he expresses a fervent hope: "Please don't let me fear anything I cannot explain / I can't believe I'll never believe in anything again." With his determined wit and an invigorating awareness of the tricks with which we bluff ourselves, his role as a folkie (in the most comprehensive sense of the word) was never more clear. Never unamused by his own vanity or debilitatingly disgusted by a world gone wrong, his peculiar take on hope and humanity is indispensable.

David Dark is the author of Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons, published in December by Brazos Press.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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