Elvis Costello on Getting His Stage Name and Writing ‘Alison’

Elvis Costello‘s 104-track look back at his debut album, My Aim is True — 49th Anniversary Edition, is easily one of the year’s best reissues, packed with unheard songs and era-spanning live performances. Most notably, there’s a stash of pre-debut songs that show how broad his stylistic range was from the beginning, foreshadowing his later adventures in roots, country and pre-rock balladry.

In a recent episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Costello looked back at the making of the album, some of the highlights of the boxed set, and more. You can read a condensed version of the interview below; to listen to the whole thing, check out the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.

There’s an awful lot on this boxed set, some of it upturning our perceptions of your past. But I wanted to start with something we’ve always known: “I used to be disgusted/ Now I try to be amused” from “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”  — a pretty emblematic line to have on your first album. What do you remember about writing it?
I know I began writing it leaving Runcorn Station, 15-minute ride from Liverpool Lime Street. I was on my way to visit my mother, and the song came into my head.

Now I still cannot quite understand what all of it means, except that it felt emotional to say all of these things. On the one hand, when I read it now, and particularly hearing the [alternate] version of the song [on the boxed set], which has more or less the same words, but a slightly different rhythm, it made me focus on what I was actually singing. ‘Cause obviously over years you come to feel as if you know everything you could possibly know about a song you must have sung hundreds of times. But it was always an odd one to have written at 22, the idea of mortality in the lyric.

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It came into my mind fully formed, and you don’t argue with that, including you don’t always interrogate yourself. What exactly does this mean, “I won’t get any older…”? What I’ve come round to thinking is it was a version of Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain.” Where he’s lamenting that he won’t be able to go back to this teenage place where it was that they had friends and you’re out, and you’re venturing out into the big bad adult world. Well, that’s a feeling I was still coming to terms with, despite the fact I was 21 and a father and a husband, and I was working in a responsible job. 

It’s such a good attitude to have. “I used to be disgusted….” You don’t expect that from a 21-year-old.
No, but I think maybe that’s also a little bit like saying, “I’m gonna be disappointed before you disappoint me.” You know, and that’s not addressed to any one particular person. It’s maybe just a general outlook on life. You know, and there’s quite a few songs in this group which have a relationship to disappointment. Perhaps there’s things within yourself that are not entirely admirable. That’s in “Alison,” that’s in “Stranger in the House,” which was written in this time and was recorded during these sessions.

And I think generally the outlook of these songs is bleak, but in a different way than was associated with punk, which was all, “We’re gonna wipe the slate clean and start again.” Well, that actually didn’t happen. It let a few good things loose, but within 18 months of saying there was no Beatles, no Stones, in 1977 the Clash were making London Calling, which was absolutely riddled or infested with their love of all different types of music. They always brought other stuff in, and we all sort of did. You know from the work that Lydon did after the Pistols that it referenced dub and electronic music and all sorts of things. So everybody had their own radar, and I don’t think there was any two writers of any consequence that had the same outlook.

There were some I was in more in sympathy with than others, but I never felt part of any gang. I hated the whole new wave thing. It was completely made up. It was just journalists trying to explain bands that had energy and a little edge, but were something different than punk, which in itself was a term borrowed from another culture. You know, punk really is an American term in musical terms, first from the late ’60s, and then the way it’s used to just denigrate young people. I mean, it wasn’t really about a style or whether you had a safety pin in your lapel.

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You’ve mentioned that around the time of the album, both the Ramones and the Muppets were in the top 20.
They were, simultaneously. Yeah. And then it’s up to us to decide which is which, you know? The point I was making wasn’t in any way to — I love the Ramones, but the big book of history version is that punk swept everything in its path, and that just isn’t true. Not originally, and certainly not in England.

The charts were pretty impervious to… There was a brief moment where ourselves and the Boomtown Rats were the ones who actually managed to get into the top 20. Most of the other great groups were struggling down there in the 30s and 40s because the charts were completely full of disco records or Fleetwood Mac or Rod Stewart singing a song from 10, 12 years ago already. “First Cut’s the Deepest” and “I Don’t Want to Hear It” was a big record at that time. These are all great records, by the way.

What happened after this was there was a brief period where the Attractions and I were genuine pop stars for about six months in England alone. It never really registered in America. Couple of countries in Europe treated us the same. Most of them were completely immune to our charms.. I have to be honest, and I pointed out in the notes, when people got a look at us, the record usually went down the charts the next week. I’m not being falsely modest. That was the way it was.

I was trying to decide which you had more kinship with, the Ramones or the Muppets, and it’s not an easy answer.
Oh, no. I mean, the Ramones were just a thing. They were just fantastic. But the Muppets are the Muppets, man. You know? The Muppets had great songwriters, too. Paul Williams.

And then I wrote the group of songs that opens The Blue Print, which you can hear have echoes of the first Bruce Springsteen album. I think you can hear that in “Losing You,” and Van Morrison and people like that I really loved. But I hope not enough to make it not my song. And I had one or two of the songs that survived into the My Aim Is True time.

And somewhere in that period, I then wrote this group of songs that had nothing to do with any of that, which are what I call loosely speaking the ragtime songs, these vaudeville-sounding songs. I consciously tried to make them sound like they were found in a trunk, sometime in 1927. And I heard a number of people who wrote expressively on a wide range of topics, most especially Randy Newman. But I also knew Van Dyke Parks’ record by then, so I knew that drawing on older styles had some mystery to it, and there were other songwriters that I liked that seemed to hint at it, not make it quite such a dominant stylistic thing. So I had a go at writing like that for a while.

You were on the verge of releasing them years ago. What stopped you?
I felt [at the time that] they revealed too much, which is why they were never released until now. I was on the verge of releasing them like 35 years ago, and then I thought, “No, they just— everybody will see.” You know, it was like showing your pictures, in clothes that you now know don’t suit you.

I really can’t hear but a glancing reference to a few singers in those songs. They just sound like somebody learning, and there should be nothing to be embarrassed about that. Everybody has to start somewhere. And again, I would be delighted if some younger writers listened to those songs and it gave them any confidence in what they were doing, because you can hear the ambition to do something, and it isn’t quite formed.

Some of the most striking stuff is almost like ragtime, songs like “Mercury Wings.” What intentions did you have for that material?
The only thing I can think was that I knew that Bette Midler had recorded, “Hello In There” by John Prine, who I was really a big admirer of. And this is the same period that Frank Sinatra was recording records of Rod McKuen songs.  You know, mainstream artists who had big, bigger audiences, if not pop audiences, sang Leonard Cohen songs. And Joe Cocker did a great version of “Bird on a Wire.” And maybe I thought if it didn’t matter of a song, maybe that would be the freaky way I would get heard as a writer.

There’s a song there, “No Star,” which I could really hear being done. Rufus Wainwright could sing that song great. It is a Judy Garland song, as I say. It’s got this almost melodrama, but it’s about the need for friendship. 

At one point, your record company brought you to their office and informed you they were going to change your name. 
I thought it was a prank. But I didn’t say that ’cause they were the ones that held the cards. It was a modest company, but I didn’t have any company except that one.

That’s what I was speaking of. The story describes a love affair retrospectively. Whatever has happened, it’s happened before the song began. And it was never a murder ballad. I cannot understand why anybody took that out of it. 

It’s just the word “aim” in there.  I never heard it that way.
No, but it has been said. But that’s not what I’m thinking of [in] the remotest sense when you examine the rest of it. And it’s a really romantic song in many ways. The songs that inform it were so unusual. I tried to write this song for a while. There’s one in the box called “Imagination Is a Powerful Deceiver,” which is the closest thing I have as a demo to “Alison.” There was no demo. I wrote the song, and we must have recorded it very soon after I wrote it because there’s no pre-recording of it.

And all I can identify in its ancestry is not within my songs, but it has a very, to me, very obvious debt to a Spinners song. The Spinners’ “Ghetto Child” has the same phrasing. Dun, dun, all pushed like that. So that’s where I got the idea of the hook, musically speaking.

It was never a hit in America, but of course it was on a very big hit record by Linda Ronstadt. And not a version that I initially was very polite about, but that really wasn’t Linda’s singing. It was more the arrangement seemed very, very much of its location, which was Los Angeles, and I was just allergic to that sound. And I really feel embarrassed now that I was ever so rude about it, that I would be chosen in the company of Lowell George and Warren Zevon and Smokey Robinson and Buddy Holly, all the people that Linda chose, was a tremendous compliment, and I just didn’t know how to take it gracefully, frankly. You know, but that was true of a lot of things I said at that time.

The way I heard the lyric’s meaning over the years is that the narrator meant well. Their aim was true, but they know they didn’t live up to their ideal conception of themselves.
I think you got it. Yeah. I think that’s right. Yeah.

Were there other names, or was Alison the first one you tried?
No, I don’t believe there were other names. I don’t know why I chose that name. It didn’t sound like a glamour plate name, like Ava or something like that, you know? Or Grace, that carried too many other associations. It was a name like the name of somebody you might have gone to school with or something. You know, Pauline could’ve been that, but didn’t scan.

You always thought Clover, the backing band on these recordings, were responsible for the slower tempos — then you went back and realized you were counting them off yourself.
Yeah. That was a bit of a surprise when we found that rough reel with just those count-offs, and every one of them was my voice. So I was actually feeling them in that groove, and I think there’s something to that. In rehearsals I may have gone in my first excitement of playing these songs and played them faster. But as I settled into the way they played and what they brought to it, I was happy for them to lay where they were.

You can hear on the fourth CD, the initial, faithful attempts of the Attractions in July to play these recorded arrangements. But three, four, five, six months later, we’ve got recordings that are in that set, though, where they sound like different people playing different songs, frankly. They don’t even sound like the same songs, except for the lyrics.

How much studio time did the album actually take?
The total time in which this record was recorded was probably not much over 24 hours. I think it was four six-hour sessions or six four-hour sessions. Mixing wasn’t a very complicated thing ’cause it’s only eight tracks, so there weren’t a lot of choices. 

Stiff had made the decision, despite the failure of the first two singles, to press on and release the album. We at that point did not have an American label, so we were really only releasing it to the English market and maybe the Dutch. They were the only other people that were vaguely curious. And the album came out, but I had to quit my job at that time, and Stiff had to pay my wages and we had to have auditions to find Steve Nieve and Bruce Thomas. We already had installed Pete Thomas as the drummer. I took on trust that he would be right ’cause I knew him from before. 

Are you writing new music right now?
No, those days are gone.  I kind of have the same freedom now as I had when I started out, is that nobody cares whether I make another record. There are no expectations, there are no assumptions. If anybody knows anything about me by now, they notice I rarely do the same thing twice. And if I do ever refer to the starting point blueprint of the combo band, I think that’s pretty well served by This Year’s Model and Blood and Chocolate and Brutal Youth and The Boy Named If. Do you really need another one like that?Some people would say, “Yes, of course, we would love that. That would change everybody’s fortunes.” But you know what’s also true? None of those records were successful. Commercially, no. They weren’t actually, not compared with other things that I’ve done, which ran very contrary to people’s thumbnail impression of what it is I do.

Mostly, to be truthful, what I’ve done, I’m being slightly facetious, I hope you realize that, but ’cause I don’t wanna answer the question, is that I am engaged in a lot of writing… and this was quite a big undertaking to do this particular release and write 60 pages of liner [notes]. Because I wanted to, ’cause I figured this is my last word on this, and this is never going to happen again. Might as well say this now before somebody else gets to do it for me, if you know what I mean.

So I’m just very grateful for the opportunity. I think it’s wonderful to put all of this music, even the rough sketches, even the false starts, s all part of how you get going. If anybody younger is curious to see what’s going on in this, they will see the same sort of things as they might encounter in their work, in their attempts to find their voice.

The people who followed me all along, if there are any left, may find still something different in all of this. And if nothing else, the celebratory nature of the 2007 show where Clover did appear on stage, with Pete having the time of his life being in his favorite group, and these songs were played very faithfully to the original tempos and arrangements. But surprisingly, the effect on the audience was that of joy, not like angst. So there goes so many theories about what this music represents, including my own.

And that’s about it, really. And as to the future, I don’t know….  I think we’re in an interesting time, where there’s a sort of rearguard of humans against machines, and I sense that people are not gonna go quietly. So I may be in that company. But if you never hear from me no more, there’s an awful lot you still haven’t listened to. You know, that’s why when people say, “What’s the latest record you bought?” I say, “You don’t really wanna know ’cause it’s something from 1910.” But that’s not ’cause I’m ducking what’s going on right now. It’s because there’s still so much I don’t know.

And everything I’ve ever been able to achieve in music is because I learned through listening. I have very little formal education in anything, the least of it music. But I did teach myself or was taught to write notation when I was 40, and within three years I was writing orchestrations for everything from chamber group to symphony orchestra. 

And finally, is there life left in your musical version of A Face in the Crowd?
I certainly hope so, yes. We have a new production which is now in development. What that means in this world, it’s a mysterious process to me. It seems very obvious what should happen next, but that requires the agreement of so many different constituencies. But I have the best possible combination. I always did have a great collaborator in the writer, but now different writers are writing it, so there was a decision to take a completely different view. The only thing that remains the same is the narrative and my score.

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In fact, much of my score is being restored to the balance that it had when I wrote it, only to be tinkered with by different directors, usually with disastrous results. You know, they could not puzzle out the reason why it didn’t hang together as a story is ’cause the music was all out of balance, and I’m not Richard Wagner. I’m not gonna build my own theater so I can have it go exactly. It’s collaborative art form, so you’ve got to hear other people out.

But at a certain point, you also have to say, “You know why I didn’t rewrite it? ‘Cause there was nothing the matter with it in the first place.” But the songs could tell a story, as groups of songs tend to. So let’s hope we see it, and if we don’t, it’s because we didn’t. What can I do about it?