Elvis Costello

So I heard what it was to kind of...

turn other people's inspired ideas into just jukebox music you know it was kind of the kind of the live music version of jukeboxes or what we would now do with karaoke you know or or tribute bands you know they were doing essentially covers of of songs from the hip parade and and not the songs my father would probably chosen to sing himself he did eventually go out on his own so i learned from that that you should do what you really believe in and i

I didn't actually let people know that much that I was a country music fan because I didn't think that would go over very well in the days of the anti-Hellway.

I think that it's obvious from the songs I mentioned, we're talking about songs that are about conflict.

some sense of grievance or injustice.

I never wanted to write the slogan song.

I always wanted to write, like, a point of view that was happening within that experience that somebody could feel something about.

Yeah.

I'm also not very good at straightforward love songs, like Lionel Richie or somebody is, you know.

That's a different gift than the one I have.

I'm pretty good at finding the angle where something's a little bit off and I can talk about the...

the misgiving that you have.

And that's why I was able to write with Burt Bacharach as a good lyricist and also even co-composer of many of the songs we wrote, because I always felt that was in the music that he had written for all these great singers.

Oh, yeah.

They were both at the Royal Festival Hall when I played with Burt Bacharach.

We had all these really cool demos where we'd just written the songs and they're the best versions were the ones with him and me just, you know, looking at each other singing.

It was really exciting.

And, you know, you'll hear him recently talking about that process of writing with his new record, you know,

It was Dungeon Lane.

And it reminded me a little bit of what that experience was.