Elvis Costello & The Attraction

NJ: I'm reading a book right now that's about you — Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello.

EC: Oh, my God.

NJ: And it talks about the first song you ever wrote.

EC: "Winter," it was called. And it was in E-minor. You can see I got started right away with the cheerful music.

NJ: Is there a recorded version of that somewhere?

EC: No, I was just 13 then, and the earliest recordings I have are one or two songs from when I was about 17. Usually what I did — and I don't know whether you do this — was write into a notebook. I still do it that way. You fill up a notebook and you think, "Well, out of that notebook you might get three or four songs." What about you? How do you do it?

NJ: I keep a lot of stuff on the computer, but I also do it on my phone. For me, typing on my computer is more of a convenient way sometimes to do things, because I don't have much time. I have to put it down quickly. Then, when we're in the studio, I can send the lyrics off to the brothers.

EC: Oh, yeah? I wrote a song recently like that — actually, with Rosanne Cash and Kris Kristofferson. He lives in Hawaii, and she lives in New York, and I was in Vancouver. And she said, "I've got a bit of a song. Do you want to see if we can write it together?" So she wrote one verse. I wrote the next. And it was like a chain letter. Do you ever, like, wake up in the night and think of a line?

NJ: Yeah, all the time. "S.O.S." is actually one of those songs.

EC: Do you ever think, "I'm really tired. I should get up and write that down, but I'll remember it in the morning"? Always write it down — there's nothing more torturing than when you don't write it down and you go, "I know I thought of a line, but I have no idea what it was." I keep a notepad by the bed, and I learned how to write in the dark, so if a line comes in my head I don't even need to turn the light on and write it.

NJ: Do the lyrics usually come first, and then the melody?

EC: It used to be lyrics first, and then it was everything at once. Then for a while it was music first, and I changed it around. I know a lot of groups now, they make the music first. They make a whole track.

NJ: There have been times before when we've had some type of musical idea that we work on first and then come up with the lyrics later. But for the most part I think we pitch it all together at the same time.

EC: Don't you feel like it's a song if you can pick up a guitar and play it?

NJ: Yeah, I usually find that if I try to take a track and write a melody to it, there's no creative experiment that can happen.

EC: 'Cause it's already blocked out.

NJ: What's your take on if you have a pre-chorus in the song and you use the same lyrics in the first verse and the second verse? Because with my brothers it's like, sometimes in songs we'll just say, "Oh, that sounds good here, too."

EC: I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Some songs that are very simple and repetitive are very effective. I mean, I've written a lot of words, and I'm kinda known for piling up images, but that doesn't mean I don't like songs that are very simple. Probably a little bit like somebody with straight hair wishes they had curly hair and vice versa, you know?

NJ: In the last, like, 10 years, is there a pop record that you were surprised to have really liked?

EC: I always said the hardest thing in the world is to have a hit with a good song. I can think of lots of so-called contrived pop songs that are great. Motown was very calculated in the way they did things, but they had brilliant writers. And there are really beautiful melodies in Radiohead songs. Some people are frustrated because Radiohead won't make their records sound conventional. Most good music is like that. One record doesn't sound like the next one. The best things were made out of surprises.

NJ: Yeah, there's this group the Zutons, they're a British group, and their songs invite you to sing along. I wish I could kind of take on their writing abilities for a couple of days.