"I might do something expectedly..."

Pretty self-explanatory
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sweetest punch
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"I might do something expectedly..."

Post by sweetest punch »

From this thread: http://www.elviscostellofans.com/phpBB3 ... =2&t=10762
and this interview : http://www.pressdemocrat.com/entertainm ... artslide=0

(...)
Q: Will you be introducing any new songs on the tour?

I may well do. I’m not going to commit to that, or announce it, because then the pirates will be there with their fingers lurking over the “record” button. Then everything you do is overheard before you’ve got it to where you want it. That’s one of the best ways to discourage recording conventionally. There’s no obligation on my part to release every single thing that I write. I like to know what I’m offering people, and give ‘em a square deal. I might do something expectedly, but you won’t know when it’s coming.

Q: Are you continuing to write new songs on a regular basis?

I have written a phenomenal amount of songs over the last four years, all of which have been for stage musicals, three of them in different states of preparation. It is slightly frustrating to have really good songs you’re dying to play for people, but of course, if you’re writing them for a production, you have to be patient and wait for that opening night.

-------------
Let's keep our fingers crossed and let us hope that a new EC and The Imposters album will come to us 'expectedly'!
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
johnfoyle
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by johnfoyle »

because then the pirates will be there with their fingers lurking over the “record” button.
So, it's all Sulky's fault..... :D
bronxapostle
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by bronxapostle »

Not my fault. :lol: :lol: :lol:
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docinwestchester
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by docinwestchester »

"everything you do is overheard before you’ve got it to where you want it"

--Yeah, by about 100 people in the entire world.

"That’s one of the best ways to discourage recording conventionally"

--Really? He can't possibly mean that. Early versions of songs by many artists have been performed and bootlegged since the days of analog tape recorders hidden in jean jacket pockets (ahem....ba....). They are very cool to hear if you're a hard core fan. And we still buy everything that's officially released.

"you have to be patient and wait for that opening night"

--I'll be there Elvis, and I'll pay for the ticket too. Might even put on a tie.
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verbal gymnastics
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by verbal gymnastics »

The comments referred to by our board friends are spot on and make Elvis's comments seem very dated.

Does Elvis think that people who record shows keep their fingers on the pause button until the artist says "Here's a new song"? :?
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
sulky lad
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by sulky lad »

It seems Elvis never seemed to mind "bootleggers" as distinct from "pirates" and I'm sure there's a quote which I paraphrase as " live bootlegs can be fun but studio bootlegs are the work of pirates and thieves" which I felt sort of left people who recorded concerts off the hook just a bit. I know it is illegal and yet I love bootleg recordings of live concerts especially one offs such as the Brooklyn Bowl with the Roots or Liverpool The Picket with Allen Toussaint and loving them doesn't make them legal or morally right. However, I really don't understand the latest argument against live recordings in this context. Surely Elvis knows how to copywrite new songs - he mentions in Unfinished Music about sending himself cassettes in sealed envelopes to prove ownership and authorship, and I'm sure he know has much more sophisticated and professional ways of storing and proving his ownership - and how many of his compositions have been stolen from live recordings ? As Doc says, anyone looking at the sites that have these recordings available normally show a total number of downloaders at between 100 and 200 - unless it is a radio or TV broadcast and I can't really imagine too many professional musicians would be numbered amongst those looking to "pinch an idea" or get a march on him. I'd like to hear from him to see what he thinks of Squeeze amongst others selling recordings of their concerts immediately after their shows. As Doc says, us hardcore fans pay a lot of money to buy virtually everything going including increasingly exorbitant prices for concert tickets and for some of us, a permanent reminder of a show is a bonus with nothing more sinister than a chance to relive the excitement of such a brilliant occasion. If he's worried about loss of revenue, then why did the re-issues series with the second Live CD come to an abrupt halt before Get Happy ? This would have been a great opportunity to thwart some of the bootleggers.
PS my finger only hovers over the Pause button when some Irish chatterbox is talking all the way through the show :shock:
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bambooneedle
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by bambooneedle »

All I want is "a square deal".
MOJO
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by MOJO »

I have an idea to lock down cameras and recording apps on mobile phones within a stage / live entertainment environment. Who wants to invest? :)... The artist should have control of what gets posted online. I've seen a few bad live recordings on YouTube and feel they misrepresent the artist(s). You know, like the douche in the upper balcony with a shakey hand and no sense how much his/her video truly sucks. Totally annoying.
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by sulky lad »

Without sounding like a dinosaur ( and who knows what noise a Stegosaurus made anyway) isn't part of the problem for Elvis the internet ?!
In the good old days, someone smuggled in a cassette recorder up their jumper and then either advertised in a national music paper or a fanzine and (for the most part) traded their recordings for others that they didn't have. If you were an ardent fan, you sought out the concerts and collected them by investing time and money to send duplicate recordings to other fans who reciprocated. Nowadays there is less discretion and so any minor clip goes up on UTube and it's more widely available. I don't have any answers or even any sensible conclusions, but as a collector of live recordings, my dream has always been to have the most exquisite recording of a show I'd attended to revisit again and again !
sweetest punch
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/what-s-on/m ... -1-7380210

Costello remains at his impish and most playful best for Belfast date

(...)
As for new material, he’s not sure when that might arrive. His last release was Wise Up Ghost, his 2013 collaboration with hip-hop eclectics The Roots, while his most recent solo album was 2010’s National Ransom.

“The Roots record came out of coincidence and friendship and no one saw it coming; exactly the way these records should happen. That was an outward-looking record, not in the slightest about ways of the heart.

“New music is not something I can plan for, but I wouldn’t count anything out,” Costello adds.

“Isn’t that better though - to catch yourself singing, rather than worrying about what you’re going to sing?”
(...)
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Poor Deportee
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by Poor Deportee »

The only people collecting live recordings of new songs are hard-core fans.

Those people are guaranteed to buy your official release when it comes out, so it's not costing you a dime.

If and when the song ends up on YouTube or wherever, that constitutes free advertising (assuming it to be any good). I quite understand performers or their representatives taking down official releases that appear on such sites, even though this is ultimately futile; after all, people are apt to stream such stuff for free rather than fairly pay you for your work. But the odds of your live performance ever being released officially are miniscule.

The only kernel of a rational argument that's left to EC here is a strange creative insecurity: he will feel less comfortable risking 'under-cooked' new material on stage if he feels the performance is being recorded for all time, and therefore able to survive as a standing embarrassment to him (not unlike his attitude to 'Party Party'). I find it hard to believe that an old hand with his formidable career of achievement can be so defensive.

What I think is really going on here is just more of EC's longstanding truculence. He wants total control over his music and what happens to it, period, and resents even utterly harmless instances of this loss of control. In this, he is tempermentally ill-suited for the internet era, or so I'd speculate, just as he was for the older Record Company model because it, too, made the distribution of his work subject to the will of others.
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cwr
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by cwr »

It's strange how much EC has never really clicked with the whole "Internet" thing-- way back in the 90s, he was suspicious of it from the start, and never really has caught up in the way one would have imagined he might.

EC in the early days was always so creative with the ways he looked for new ways to release music, especially with all those different pseudonyms.

By the time he reached 1996 and was putting out "4 singles in a month" on CD, it seemed like the old tricks were no longer working. (No one really bought those discs except the absolute hardcore fans, and only a segment of those who were still listening, at that point.)

One would have imagined that EC would've been the one to record and release a "surprise" album before Beyonce, but the closest EC has come to that was almost the total opposite approach-- Momofuku's sudden appearance as an LP-only edition, which eventually became a conventional release but didn't exactly light the charts on fire.

I was reading an article recently about how Daryl Hall's Internet TV show has revitalized the past 10 years of his career and it occurred to me how it seems like it would've been a better fit for EC to be the one who did an online TV show instead of something like Spectacle, which was at the mercy of being canceled by the cable network when EC would've still liked to do more seasons of it.

Similarly, it does seem like there is a 50/50 chance (or maybe even worse odds) that all these musicals EC is writing songs for might never make it to the stage. That is not a rare thing for musicals in development, and it's easy to imagine that, for instance, a musical based on a now relatively obscure 1998 album like Painted From Memory, which wasn't exactly a hit record on original release, might not ever make it to Broadway.

As a Costello fan, it feels sad to me that in an era where it is actually easier to record and release an album than ever before, EC has arrived at a place where he no longer seems to want or need to be making recordings. I totally get it-- there's his whole back catalog, right there on Spotify, making him pennies a day-- but knowing that, if the whim struck him, Costello could easily make a voice-and-guitar album in an afternoon and release it to the entire world that very evening, and knowing that it probably won't happen, is frustrating.

(Although-- as he says, "I might do something unexpectedly"-- if anyone out there is gonna try to one-up Radiohead and Beyonce by making and releasing an album all in one day, I'd still put my money on Costello. Despite his protestations, I think he's still an artist that enjoys startling people, and I think if he ever does warm up to the idea of really using the Internet to put some new music out, he could still do something crazy that would blow everyone's minds, like putting out a new song every day for a year or something.)
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A rope leash
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by A rope leash »

I might disagree some.

Part of me would like to see Elvis slow down and take it easy. He works very hard. He could relax for a while and work on something spectacular. A song-a-day sounds like some kind of sound factory, where you're docked for bathroom breaks. Yes, it could be profitable, but what good is money if you're dead?

It's probably just me trying to fit in Elvis' shoes, but I think he has always wanted to be remembered for something extra-special. How in the world he writes anything with his tour schedule is beyond belief. Of course, we the fans understand his greatness, but none of his rock and pop career has achieved the sort of media stardom we see in the likes of Beyonce or The Beatles. I doubt he could ever get that sort of mass admiration, so what's the next best thing? Kicking everyone's ass with something undeniably perfect and unforgettable.

Elvis has a big book and a commanding stage presence. The last year of his youth has past, and he is still selling it. It's great, it's wonderful...but I do hope he has a big Broadway hit complete with a Tony. If it doesn't happen, maybe it's time to reel it in and write that opera...or make something interesting with Diana. He could even retire to Vegas...

I don't want more, I want better. The Detour DVD, which I just watched yesterday, is a wonderful display of a talented musician with an overworked voice. It's awful sometimes. When he is rested and in good voice, however, he towers and becomes truly great.

He not a young man anymore, and we shouldn't expect it. We need to be more concerned about his well-being, rather than our desires for more. It's about him, not us. If he's worked to death, we get nothing.
Poor Deportee
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by Poor Deportee »

I take cwr's point as less about wanting EC to be a song factory, and more about his rather conservative approach to the whole internet thing. And this seems to be right - the youthful EC would have been all over the web as a way of getting his material out there.

I'd even be tempted to argue that EC has grown more conservative, not just in self-marketing, but in several aspects of his career, including music. E.g., in his early days, while he was clearly and crucially well-grounded in classic 'pop' values of songcraft and musicianship, he was also happy to put these attributes into a dialogue with the popular sounds and technologies of the era (New Wave, keyboards, Clive Langler, etc.), as well as occasional experimental tracks like 'Beyond Belief.' While he's never ceased to move around and learn and develop as an artist, at some point (the late '80s?) that development mostly discarded any concern with the 'new' - notwithstanding the disastrous WIWC, what to my ear was undercut partly by EC's reluctance to go all-in on the technological vibe, and the wonder-filled WUG, where the 'contemporary' musical values are imported courtesy of ?uestlove. The general creative orientation has instead tended to be backwards looking (pop 'classical' we might say) rather than forward-looking. I have mixed feelings about this. Certainly, part of the excitement I felt about WUG was just sheer joy at hearing EC embracing a contemporary sonic palette again. I'd like to hear a little more of that spirit from Elvis.
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cwr
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by cwr »

Yeah, my example of him hypothetically deciding to release a song a day wasn't about wanting him to work harder-- in fact, if anything, I'd kind of like to see him ease up on the grueling tour schedule, given that it wasn't too many years ago that EC's doctor recommended that he needed to stop doing so many concerts.

And one of the things that seems to have driven him away from making records is that he could deliver a double LP like National Ransom and it was forgotten within a week, even by critics. One solution to this problem is to simply stop making records a priority, which is the route he seems to have chosen, only recording now when he is invited to do a project he didn't originate (Wise Up Ghost, The New Basement Tapes, Vinyl). And if he finds that truly satisfying-- and he does seem to-- then maybe that's the fix, and National Ransom truly is the end of Elvis Costello's career as a recording artist, with a handful of fascinating footnotes to follow.

I'm not sure that there would be much point in him making another record merely to throw it out there into the void, to be streamed by people and downloaded by his hardcore fans who want to put money towards it. So, I can see how he might feel like it's all over now, and he's gotta focus on stage productions and books and live concerts, because he doesn't wanna put the effort into making a record for his hardcore fans to listen to on Spotify.

BUT: if the itch were to return, there is a way that a clever artist like Costello could harness the Internet and grab people's attention. He does seem to have Trump in the crosshairs with some aspects of his Face In The Crowd songwriting, and he's referenced Trump in the past, when talking about songs like "...This Town...", so I do keep returning to the idea that, if it struck his fancy, I could easily see Costello mustering the same venom and energy that drove him to write songs like "No Hiding Place" or "The Bridge I Burned" to write/record/release this year's most definitive anti-Trump anthem and get a LOT of attention for it. It seems like if any musician was positioned to take down Trump, it'd be EC. The court jester in him must be sorely tempted to take down a clown like The Donald, the kind of phony he's been writing about since the very start of his songwriting career.

That's just one example, but I do think that if Costello is gonna have another act in his career as a recording artist, it's not gonna be putting out limited edition 78s like he did for National Ransom, it's gonna be making his peace with the fact that he has the technology to write a song and have it available all over the word with a few keystrokes and clicks. Maybe it'll never happen, but I remain ever hopeful...
stricttime81
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by stricttime81 »

I have mixed feelings, I want to be able to see EC in concert frequently (although he seems to have abandoned the NYC area for the past couple of years), but at the same time wish he would take a break from touring to concentrate on making a new proper EC and/or EC & The Imposters record, or finalize one or more of his Broadway projects.

Although if, indeed, National Ransom was his last album, it's not a bad way to go out.
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cwr
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Re: "I might do something expectedly..."

Post by cwr »

I do get nervous that constant touring is bad for his health, and I think 2016 has sort of heightened that anxiety in me.
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