Elvis Costello Previews Upcoming LP ‘Look Now’ With Two New Songs
Update: Elvis Costello has released a lyric video for “Under Lime,” streaming above. He also released a statement explaining the meaning behind the song, which continues the story of the character Jimmie from his National Ransom album’s “Jimmie Standing in the Rain.” In “Under Lime,” Jimmie is getting ready for humiliation as the surprise guest on a Fifties game show. “This seedy and desperate vaudevillian is thrown into the company of a young woman with a clipboard, a production assistant, charged with keeping him off the sauce, while staying out of his clutches,” Costello said. “It’s a tale as old as time and as new as yesterday’s papers.”
With tour dates already booked, the ever-prolific songsmith Elvis Costello will release a new album, Look Now, this fall. The record features his longtime backing band the Imposters – which includes members of Costello’s original backing band, the Attractions – and will be his first full-length since Wise Up Ghost, his 2013 collaboration with the Roots. Look Now, which Costello co-produced with Latin Grammys winner Sebastian Krys, is due out October 12th.
Ahead of the release, Costello has issued two songs from the album: lead track “Under Lime” and “Unwanted Number.” The former is a spry, heavily textured pop rocker with Beatles-esque harmonies and horn arrangements on which Costello sings, “It’s a long way down from that high horse you’re on.”
The latter is more low-key and boasts a soul groove and lush backup vocals, which allows Costello to belt lyrics about enduring a sour relationship.
“I knew if we could make an album with the scope of Imperial Bedroom and some of the beauty and emotion of Painted From Memory, we would really have something,” Costello said in a statement, referring to the 1982 album he recently revisited on the road and his collaboration with songwriter Burt Bacharach.
Bacharach co-wrote a few songs on Look Now, and sat in on piano with the Imposters on two of them, “Don’t Look Now” and “Photographs Can Lie.” Costello wrote another Look Now song, “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter,” with Carole King.
The record, available for pre-order, will be available both as a 12-track standard edition and a deluxe edition that adds four more songs.
In other Costello news, the singer-songwriter recently canceled the last six dates of his recent European tour after a doctor discovered that he had a “small but very aggressive cancerous malignancy.” When he made his announcement, he alluded that he was able to beat the cancer with a surgery. His North American tour is set to kick off in November.
Look Now Track List
1. “Under Lime”
2. “Don’t Look Now”
3. “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter”
4. “Stripping Paper”
5. “Unwanted Number”
6. “I Let the Sun Go Down”
7. “Mr. & Mrs. Hush”
8. “Photographs Can Lie”
9. “Dishonor the Stars”
10. “Suspect My Tears”
11. “Why Won’t Heaven Help Me?”
12. “He’s Given Me Things”
13. “Isabelle in Tears” *
14. “Adieu Paris (L’Envie Des Étoiles)” *
15. “The Final Mrs. Curtain” *
16. “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way” *
*Deluxe special edition tracks