Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach: Painted from Memory
A love letter to Delor Avenue.
Confession: when no else is home or in earshot, I will play the Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach duet album (Painted from Memory) at rafter-rattling volume and sing along. The imperfect tremble of Elvis’ voice as he continues cultivating his croon gets me and validates my own fragile wobble and warble…and by fragile I of course mean tone-deaf (like Frank Sinatra with a head cold and an inner ear infection).
It’s not like Elvis hadn’t dug deep into this quasi American song stylings before, or at the very least, indulged his love for American cannon on albums like King of America and Almost Blue. The more I think about it, Chet Baker’s trumpet solo on “Shipbuilding” (from Punch the Clock) may be the best example of early Elvis testing the water. The delicate, damaged cool of Baker’s horn has so much melodrama captured within those handful of bars that you can feel Elvis break the spine of the American songbook and dogear this page, only to return to it when the right collaborator entered the conversation. Of course, that partner in crime would be Burt Bacharach.
I remember watching Elvis on VH1 Storytellers ages ago talk about his plaintive breakthrough ballad “Alison,” and how the vocal line was inspired by The Spinners song “Ghetto Child.” Even when his new wave star was in ascent, he was tipping his hand as a lover of sweet sounds.
I immediately went to Gallery of Sound first thing in the morning and picked up the self-titled Spinners vinyl from the dollar bin. I wasn’t even buying that many LPs at the time but it was the only Spinners album in the store. I had to wait until my shift at the radio station to play it. Come to think of it, this may have been what caused me to grab the stereo and turntable from my parent’s house.
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Painted from Memory marked a continued exploration into these spaces. It had been a few years since Elvis really waded into these waters so deeply, and arguably the first time he shared billing (for an entire LP) with someone as singular and iconic as Brill Building giant Bacharach. In 1998, I was fairly far from the world of jazz and singer-songwriters, but from the piano figures opening the album lead track “In the Darkest Place,” to the syrupy Baker-esque horns in “Toledo,” I was hooked.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but really Painted from Memory is a like a dozen flash scenes from an unwritten musical. It’s probably the closest I’d ever get to enjoying showtunes. They’re not Broadway in the traditional sense, but work in a way that is the mirror reflection of jazz mining Rogers and Heart. Porgy and Bess as a whole doesn’t do it for me, but Nina Simone breaking herself in half during “I Loves you Porgy” sure as hell does. When the deluxe Songs of Bacharach and Costello collection came out last year, I was not surprised to hear that the songwriting duo had attempted to turn Painted… into a musical. The skeletal sketches were present the whole time, but it never came to pass.
“Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness?” Elvis Costello
The last song I played before we left our home in Louisville for the final time was “This House is Empty Now.” Way back when I had a show called Manuscript Radio, it was my ending theme song. Back then it just felt like a way to wind down a two hour literary-tinged college radio show. From the strings and concertina playing against the delicate vibraphone and exasperated Elvis recounting a love gone cold, it was a damaged romantic quality that only a grad student emo feels-deep in an MFA program could luxuriate in so shamelessly.
“This House is Empty Now” may be one of the saddest songs Elvis Costello has ever written, its poppy tunefulness almost getting in the way of its ennui. While the subject matter of a broken home is far from the chapter closing in Louisville, it still broke my heart a little to leave our first home for life in Wisconsin. It’s not the lyrical that links this song to our departure, but the emotional resonance of saying goodbye to the physical address. When you pack away the life contained within and those contents are speeding along the interstate ahead of you, the empty house never feels more yours and yet, it isn’t. The keys leave the key ring, the locked door waits for new occupants, and the memory of space becomes a vacuum. It’s the silence that breaks your heart, because there’s not stillness settled within you. It’s a quiet that outpaces the sensation of sound, and you hope for one good song to fill this encroaching void.
From the moment of that first campus visit, Aubrie and I were in love with Louisville. As she spoke to faculty about the PhD program, I wandered through the Derby City’s record stores and coffee shops. From the Highlands to Frankfort Ave. to the Germantown neighborhoods we’d call home for nearly five years, there was an energy and creativity that seemed so vibrant in the late spring--all warm weather and green space and blue sky — it felt new and so familiar. All of the things we had loved about the south, the north, and Midwest all converging in this river city. For all of its faults, there are fewer places that mean more to me than Louisville. Even now, a little over a year since we moved, I find it hard to put into words how much our time there meant to me.
So yeah, “This House is Empty Now” will always be about leaving Louisville.
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There is streetlight on the far side of our house in Eau Claire that paints the corner of our living room window in the early hours of the morning — upper left hand corner, slightly insisting itself like a stationary halogen moon, even through our crape-thin curtains. The cats will sit in the window when it’s this early, like they’re listening to records with me. Sometimes when it’s this early I’ll write a letter I never plan on sending. Painted from Memory feels like an envelope I can tuck this imaginary note into, nestled somewhere between Costello’s voice and Bacharch’s arrangements. There are never too many words for a page, or a silence that outlasts concentric circles in black wax.