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Elvis Costello: "Town Cryer"
On the days when I don’t claim XTC as my second-favorite band/artist, there’s a pretty good likelihood that I’d be saying it was Elvis Costello instead. He has had an incredible career, from his early peak in the late ’70s and early ’80s through his varied and often-excellent-but-occasionally-hit-or-miss output since. Unlike many artists in the latter parts of their career who have coasted (Rod Stewart being one of the more obvious examples), Costello has kept his edge and has put out some great albums in recent years. Very few artists are as prolific as Costello, who has something like 25 albums of mostly original material over the past 34 years, so to keep the music interesting after all those years and albums is really saying something.
The period from 1977 through 1982, however, is unrivaled anywhere else in his catalog. With only a few exceptions (King of America, Blood and Chocolate, and a couple of more-recent albums), his greatest albums are concentrated in that era. And the final great album in that stretch (prior to 1983’s sometimes great but somewhat spotty Punch the Clock) is 1982’s Imperial Bedroom. Produced by Geoff Emerick — the recording engineer on a majority of The Beatles’ albums, most notably Sgt. Pepper — Imperial Bedroom is a continuation and maturation of Elvis’s great songwriting, filtered through Emerick’s studio mastery and tricks. While not exactly aspiring to be Sgt. Pepper, it nonetheless has many more studio effects in evidence than his previous albums. Thankfully, though, those effects manage not to get in the way of the songs — which is good, because they’re a fantastic batch of songs. In fact, the album has landed on several “greatest album” lists, including #166 on Rolling Stone’s 2003 "500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list.
If Imperial Bedroom is the last fully great album of Elvis’s early career, then “Town Cryer,” its final song, is the last great song from that period. A relatively simple production compared to the rest of the album, it’s a song of heartbreak and self-pity that jumps out initially because of its straightforwardness. Although it does build into an orchestra-backed piece, the stark piano that it begins with sets the tone for the rest of the song. It’s Elvis doing some of his best Cole Porter-style songwriting, and at the same time it highlights how good his voice had become by 1982. He had come a long way from the angry, caught-in-the-throat snarl of My Aim Is True, nearly making himself over as a crooner for this song. Elvis claims he’d like to hear Barry White sing the song, but it’s hard to imagine White singing lines like:
Maybe you don’t believe my heart is in the right place
Why don’t you take a good look at my face
Other boys use the splendour of their trembling lip
They’re so teddy bear tender and tragically hip.
“Town Cryer” is proof that Elvis could do emotionally fragile as convincingly as he could do angry and jaded. As much as he lashed out at the hypocrisy of the world around him, he was always just a romantic at heart.
Original post date: June 13, 2011