Impulse is one of the greatest things a musician can nurture. You can have all the right building blocks to make a song, but if those instincts aren’t there to begin with, it can become difficult to make something that actually has a lasting impact. Elvis Costello lets this ability guide everything he does. Or, as he once said, “You have to follow and find the logic and then find the musical carriage for it”.
Obviously, this is better said than done, but for Costello, it’s not always about transforming personal experience into music. Sometimes, it’s letting things come to you in a natural way and letting those ideas run freely, even if they don’t make sense to begin with. One of the best examples he points to prove that this line of thinking works is his album The Boy Named If, where things sort of come out of nowhere, but it’s the belief in those stories that actually makes it work.
“I didn’t have some big blueprint,” he told The Talks, explaining that sometimes, “The imaginative aspects of songwriting just accumulate in a coherent way, or you recognise little patterns or threads in the themes”. Costello might not have lived through most of the situations he’s writing or singing about, but he knows the basic emotions behind each word and identifies with the themes enough to know how to transform them from a small idea to a world-building masterpiece.
This is probably also because, from a young age, he was sort of thrown into the hefty embrace of music, not just as an escape but as something that could represent any kind of emotion, even the ones that are hard to describe or put your finger on. When he was in school, he’d often go with his dad to watch musicians perform at a theatre under Charing Cross, enjoying music by bands he’d usually never heard of and witnessing how they’d create electricity in the moment, like a switch.
This happened the first time he heard The Hollies. He’d watched them rehearse earlier in the day, then caught their main performance a little later, and what charmed him the most was actually how they’d managed to turn up like any other young group and launch into a performance that was almost startlingly energetic. “They were carrying their own gear, and they did a rehearsal and then disappeared. Then, at one o’clock, the Hollies came out wearing shiny suits with velvet collars, like The Beatles,” Costello recalled to Pitchfork.
“Suddenly, you’ve got an actual pop group onstage. And that hit ‘Stay’ is a pretty startling thing,” he continued. “It made a big impression because the song was so immediate and also because I saw them go through that transformation from the very mundane thing of carrying their own guitars to being a band you’d seen on television or in a magazine. It was amazing.”
There are countless conversations out there about the nature of the Hollies and The Beatles’ rivalry, but the similarities in appeal can’t be disputed, especially when it comes to what Costello described as that palpable electricity felt whenever they picked up their instruments. For many like him, it wasn’t about getting into the details of who was better than who, but enjoying music that felt simple because it was fun and heartening, and the kind that gave off the same sharp energy and inexplicable hypnotism he replicated later on in his own performances.
