Look Now , October 2018

Pretty self-explanatory
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bronxapostle
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by bronxapostle »

Arbogast wrote:Who cares about the UK? Where are the New York dates??
:lol: :lol:

Now, now....some of US have UK friends.
We must share the wealth, just sometimes.
sulky lad
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by sulky lad »

Thanks, BA
One day I'll be in NY for a Costello show - that's a promise not an aspiration !!
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docinwestchester
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by docinwestchester »

sulky lad wrote:Thanks, BA
One day I'll be in NY for a Costello show - that's a promise not an aspiration !!
When that happens, we will celebrate with a preshow gathering.
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by sulky lad »

The Doc wrote
When that happens, we will celebrate with a preshow gathering.
:D :D :D
jardine
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by jardine »

look now for whales.
"I see you looking at me
Looking at how you looking at me"
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jardine
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by jardine »

Does anyone have sales figures for Look Now? I guess I would also ask someone to help me understand them. I no longer have much sense of what a 'good' or 'bad' sales figure would look like, especially in e.c.'s case.

I guess my main question is what sales are required for a CD like Look Now to at least break even? What level of sales is needed to make CDs financially worth it for e.c.? I know that cds, to a certain degree, promote a tour and vice versa, but I expect that Elvis is no longer stuck in that sort of cd/tour/cd/tour loop. I also expect that a beautiful thing like Look Now is not at all made simply with financial considerations in mind. However . . .
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by Miclewis »

Well, I came up with a full tracklist for Look Now. Though, it doesn't really work as a double album yet - just a very long (too long) single album/CD:

1. Under Lime
2. Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter
3. You Shouldn't Look At Me That Way
4. Stripping Paper
5. Unwanted Number
6. The Lovers That Never Were
7. I Let The Sun Go Down
8. Adieu Paris (L'Envie Des Etoiles)
9. Mr. & Mrs. Hush
10. Dishonor The Stars
11. Photographs Can Lie
12. The Final Mrs. Curtain
13. I'll Still Love You
14. Down On The Bottom
15. Don't Look Now
16. Everyone's Playing House
17. Suspect My Tears
18. If You Love Me
19. Why Won't Heaven Help Me?
20. He's Given Me Things
21. Isabelle In Tears

Another 4 track EP and we will definitely have a double album.
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And No Coffee Table
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by And No Coffee Table »

Lyric video for "Mr. & Mrs. Hush":

jardine
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by jardine »

two things. first, slightly odd to see a new video this late in the day, and for this song...which, before this, seemed slightly peripheral. . second, i don't tend to like these especially, but, to tell the truth, this made me like this song a lot more than i have before. not sure if it allowed me to focus on the lyrics differently, or what...hmm. and that burrrrrbbbbly bass line from Davey is amazing. thanks for posting.
Neil.
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by Neil. »

I love this video - it's so alive and constantly shifting. Terrific job. I think he must have produced it as a foretaste of the Blondie tour rather than to promote the album last October.
jardine
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by jardine »

yep, that makes sense re: the tour. perhaps even a set-up for a duet on the tour?

and there is something about eammmonnn szinger's artwork that i really like. the portrait of the couple in this vid, stuck together back to back, with all the garishness of the looknow orbit. amazing. hoping for lots more on the 45s collection
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Re: Look Now: new album announced!

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... eo-826604/

Elvis Costello Gets Psychedelic in ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hush’ Video
Track appears on singer-songwriter’s 2018 LP, ‘Look Now’

Elvis Costello & the Imposters invite fans into a psychedelic castle with their trippy lyric video for recent song “Mr. and Mrs. Hush.”

The animated clip opens with a slow zoom in on the regal, keyboard-adorned palace. “I tripped through the house of mirrors/Distorted my suspicions and fears,” Costello sings, fittingly, over the funky, horn-fueled groove. “There is a place where the secrets begin/I gave my name and they invited me in.”

The scenes explore increasingly bizarre rooms as the song builds, showing lava lamps, surreal paintings, Christmas lights, floating skulls, winding staircases, knights, crying clowns and merry-go-round horses.

“Mr. and Mrs. Hush” appears on Costello’s 30th studio LP, 2018’s Look Now, along with “Suspect My Tears,” “Under Lime” and “Unwanted Number.” The band will promote the album — which Rolling Stone named the year’s 35th-best — with Blondie on a co-headlining U.S. summer tour that launches July 20th in Bethel, New York.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.elviscostello.com/#!/news/298446

May 31, 2019
WHERE THE SECRETS ARE KEPT

The arrival of the “Purse” E.P. and the long-delayed delivery of the 45 RPM, 7” vinyl edition of “Look Now” concludes the release of material from these sessions.

“Look Now” was conceived as a twelve-track, two-sided vinyl album, although we concede that many of you will have heard this music via a streaming service, digital download or some other obsolete medium like the CD.

The “Regarde Maintenant” E.P. was added to this collection, completing a four-sided double-vinyl edition for people who wanted to hear a little more of the music from these sessions.

“Purse” is a collection of song-writing collaborations; a song composed with Burt Bacharach, another co-written with Paul McCartney and musical settings of words by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

For those of you who are curious to know more about these songs and their relationship to the music of “Look Now”, you should look no further than the first song, “Everyone’s Playing House”.

Astute listeners may detect a thematic musical link to the “Look Now” song, “Don’t Look Now”, this is because they were originally written to be successive numbers, in a stage adaptation of “Painted From Memory”. To carry the story forward I wrote a variation based on Burt Bacharach’s open melody leading to a refrain of my own invention that had something of the schoolyard taunt about it.

I imagine that the hardest aspect of writing the script for this show was to find an agreement between a new dramatic narrative - by Chuck Lorre and Steven Sater - with the existing stories contained or implied by the songs from the original record album.

As their storyline developed, Burt Bacharach and I were called upon to turn the corners by writing new songs for specific characters rather than people I had imagined or the parts of my own experience found in the first folio of songs.

Burt and I worked together and independently to create this expanded score and the “Look Now” sessions saw the first recording of full-band arrangements for “Stripping Paper” - which I wrote alone and “Don’t Look Now” and “Photographs Can Lie”, for which I wrote lyrics to Burt’s music.

Two more songs, which I instigated, were attempts to drive a developing plot in a new direction. A song of doubt and betrayal, “Why Won’t Heaven Help Me?” and “He’s Given Me Things”, a song describing a drastic reversal of the initial fortunes in the story, in which the penniless model has become a woman of substantial means, whose tycoon husband hires the now disgraced artist to paint her portrait in humiliating circumstances.

Actually, none of this was to be found in Chuck and Steven’s script (or “book” as it is called in the musical theatre) but I wrote the song anyway in an attempt to divert the tale in that direction and Burt helped me make sense of the music in the bridge, while he only changed one note of the vocal melody of “Why Won’t Heaven Help Me?” and didn’t regard this as a sufficient contribution to call it a co-write but this still left us ten new songs to augment the titles selected from the original album.

I won’t try to tell you the entire story, as it was still a work-in-progress when the show seemed to run aground with proposed producers and theatrical houses, probably due to absence of opportunities for tap-dancing and a preponderance of slow, melancholic ballads. Broadway just isn’t crying out for Eugene O’Neill On Ice or even on roller skates.

So back to “Purse” - “Where the secrets are kept” - you can now get yourself a cardboard box to act as the stage, one of those books of cut-out dolls and recreate the opening scene of “Painted From Memory”, if you so wish.

The show was to open on a young woman serving as a life model for an older, apparently respectable and successful society painter. Quite why he is painting an unknown, penurious woman is unknown but as “Don’t Look Now” unfolds it is clear that the subject suspects that the painter’s interest is not entirely artistic.

The song concludes with the observation, “I see you looking at me, looking at how you’re looking at me” and the command, “Oh, don’t look at me now”, the young model would then cross to another part of the stage where a sumptuous dining table is set.

Two women - a wife and a daughter - sit in uneasy expectation. The painter re-enters and takes his place at the head of the table. They are frozen in the act of avoiding conversation or eye contact, perhaps a glass or fork is already raised in place, when the model and singer of “Don’t Look Now” appears.

It is unclear how (or even if) she is clothed. Perhaps she is an apparition. The family do not register her presence or move at all, as she first examines the dishes on the table, stealing a taste of cream from a bowl, contrasting the unhappy domestic scene with darker memories of her own father that are not very pretty, aware that the hypocrite at the head of the table imagines a very different scene between them -

“Do you want to slap me?
Until I can say what for
Do you want to kiss me?
Just once and no more
You play the family man in the sad aftermath
Fingers for peeping right through, just like Daddies do.
My scent is on your breath
I’m going to make you a mess
He held the glass to my lips
I’m going to make you…”

As the song says, “Everyone’s Playing House”.

The other songs on “Purse” have less complex origins.

I’ve wanted to record “The Lovers That Never Were” for thirty years and have performed the song on occasions but found it hard to get out of the shadow of the demo Paul McCartney and I made shortly after writing the song at one of our first writing sessions in 1988.

I played piano on that cut, so when it came to working out this arrangement, I felt most at home on the Wurlitzer electric piano while leaving the more expansive, orchestral flourishes of grand piano in the more capable hands of Steve Nieve.

Sebastian Krys recorded and mixed this cut in “hard stereo”, that is more radically panned than most other “Look Now” recordings, leaving space for the vocal parts and guitar figures that give our version a character and dream-like mood distinct from Paul’s unbeatable one-man and his guitar, (with his mate playing piano) version or his later more elaborate rendition on the album “Off The Ground”.

“If You Love Me” was the second of two texts from the “Forever Words” collection of Johnny Cash poems and lyrics that I set to music. Knowing the range of musical styles of the artists who were to contribute to the Columbia Records collection of those Cash words, I elected to record a ballad unlike any other contribution, as the text put me in mind of the philosophical verses of Willard Robison - writer of “I Guess I’ll Go Back Home Next Summer” and “Cottage For Sale”. Consequently, I put aside my guitar to arrange a small chamber orchestra around my own piano, mandolin and Pete Thomas’ drums for the poem, “I’ll Still Love You”.

However, when we were in the final days of recording on Sunset Boulevard, I suggested that we do one live-on-the-floor performance (all of “Look Now” until then had demanded a more considered approach to each instrumental part in order to allow for orchestration and vocal arrangements without clutter) but The Imposters remain a band for whom you only have to count off a good song to get a great spontaneous performance.

I remembered my other Johnny Cash setting, “If You Love Me” and we cut the song in a single take, adding only Steve Nieve’s Hammond organ and the electric guitar and background vocal parts which I dubbed in a small studio on Sullivan Street, NYC.

“Down On The Bottom” was one of a dozen Bob Dylan lyrics which I set to music for possible inclusion on the New Basement Tapes album, “Lost On The River”. If you’ve heard that album then you’ll know that it leads off with a superb mid-tempo setting of this text by Jim James but then the impromptu band of songwriters and accompanists recorded some 42 pieces of music over the next twelve days, including multiple, contrasting settings of the same Dylan lyric by different participants.

Producer T Bone Burnett had the task of making an attractive, balanced programme of all these songwriting contributions and performances. On one session Rhiannon Giddens and I harmonized on my ballad setting of “Down On The Bottom” but we both had to be content with our very different approaches to the title text, “Lost On The River”: being included while all of us saw some fine songs left in the can and a few titles such as “Virginia Gray” that couldn’t be recorded, even at the extraordinary pace that we sustained.

I believe there may be a plan to release another 20-track album of the remaining songs but I think that this is scheduled for 47 years from now and will be called, “The Basement Tapes Of The New Basement Tapes”.

Nevertheless, my ballad setting of “Down On The Bottom” quickly became part of the repertoire for my “Detour” show, especially when I was joined by Rebecca and Megan Lovell of Larkin Poe. We took the song from Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa to the Circus Krone in Munich, so it was only fitting that our friends should join Davey Faragher and I in the choruses of the cut which closes “Purse”, beamed into Hollywood from their lair in Nashville by the miracle of modern technology.

We hope to return to the studio on another occasion and bring you some more recordings to be heard on the medium of your choice but until then we leave you with “Look Now”, the E.P., “Regarde Maintenant” and this collection of songwriting collaborations, “Purse”.



For those of you who like to give gifts, there is also a Box-Set Edition of “Look Now” presented over eight 7” vinyl 45 RPM singles, each with its own picture sleeve and recalling a time in which music listeners were kept in fine fettle by getting out of their chair to turn the record over and perhaps stumbling upon an entirely different mood or narrative by playing a “B-" instead of an “A-Side” and find that this turns out to be your new favourite song.

Sadly, the Gods Of Manufacturing had different ideas and made the bewildering decision to punch a hole in each picture sleeve creating a most unfortunate and avoidable delay in these box-set editions reaching the purchaser for which I would apologize if I had been responsible for such an idiotic mistake. 



I did my best to speed the process along, by asking the artist concerned if he might accept this accidental edit of his cover images and he responded that it would be just fine with him if the labels of the discs themselves were over-printed with the missing details of each illustration but this proved to be impossible.


Then there was the matter of the Special 10-disc “Complete Works” edition and it was at this point that Concord Records and I reached a fork in the road.

I could see no reason why we should not inform purchasers that the Disc Nine and Ten of the box-set contained the same songs to be found on the “Purse” E.P., after all some people simply like 7 inches, while others prefer 12 but my objection was overruled. This is certainly not the way we conduct business at Lupe-O-Tone.

To me, it seems a shame to have done this silly ducking and diving in hope of squeezing a pitiful rooker full of money out of what began with the intention of creating a beautiful object that one might give to the one you love. Oh well. Don’t ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to, as someone once said.

Yours through music and daubs. Elvis Costello and Eamon Singer
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Dr. Luther
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by Dr. Luther »

:shock:
sweetest punch
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by sweetest punch »

I received the deluxe 7” vinyl box, and I have to agree with Elvis: it is really a beautiful object. I don’t regret buying it - au contraire.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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verbal gymnastics
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by verbal gymnastics »

At least we now have an explanation about the box set delays as well as some other new information.

This is a great read.
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bronxapostle
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by bronxapostle »

verbal gymnastics wrote:At least we now have an explanation about the box set delays as well as some other new information.

This is a great read.
Yes it is....in standard EC literary genius prose.
sulky lad
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by sulky lad »

So Elvis writes :
I could see no reason why we should not inform purchasers that the Disc Nine and Ten of the box-set contained the same songs to be found on the “Purse” E.P., after all some people simply like 7 inches, while others prefer 12 but my objection was overruled. This is certainly not the way we conduct business at Lupe-O-Tone.

To me, it seems a shame to have done this silly ducking and diving in hope of squeezing a pitiful rooker full of money out of what began with the intention of creating a beautiful object that one might give to the one you love. Oh well. Don’t ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to, as someone once said.
That's so in keeping with the Elvis I've loved and followed for over 40 years that it makes me glow and get emotional and I'm not even "man"opausal - (yet!) :shock:
jardine
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by jardine »

from the 7" thread
"Hawksmoor wrote:
Is it just my ears, or is the vocal melody of the verses of 'Everybody's Playing House' very similar to that of 'Don't Look Now'?

Moi:
ah yes, thaaaaaaaat's what it is!!! knew it sounded familiar somehow. nice catch, esp. since the 'jumpy' EPH melody buries the similarity"
and then having just exactly that confirmed by this great read and amazing details about the curves of the story...makes the songs even more alluring.

AND a great sulky glow that I feel myself. It is so wonderful to have e.c. catch my ear 42 years ago and to have THIS still happening all these years later, still good, still great, still the provocations of great work. The story arc, the paintings...the songs...this new object, this long missive...too cool for words alone to show how much I love this, despite the glitch and the twitches which will all fade from memory soon enough. Thank you.
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by Top balcony »

Oh well. Don’t ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to, as someone once said....Elvis Costello and Eamon Singer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8RhZDGLEXM
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Fishfinger king
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by Fishfinger king »

sulky lad wrote:So Elvis writes :
I could see no reason why we should not inform purchasers that the Disc Nine and Ten of the box-set contained the same songs to be found on the “Purse” E.P., after all some people simply like 7 inches, while others prefer 12 but my objection was overruled. This is certainly not the way we conduct business at Lupe-O-Tone.

To me, it seems a shame to have done this silly ducking and diving in hope of squeezing a pitiful rooker full of money out of what began with the intention of creating a beautiful object that one might give to the one you love. Oh well. Don’t ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to, as someone once said.
That's so in keeping with the Elvis I've loved and followed for over 40 years that it makes me glow and get emotional and I'm not even "man"opausal - (yet!) :shock:
That's all well and good sulky, fine words, but if he was really against it then an anonymous "insider" tweet could have let the public know some months ago. It is a nice package but full infomation would have been better.
Can't you see I'm trying to change this water to wine
MOJO
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by MOJO »

Hopefully, all the complaining will stop. It was a bit of drag to scroll through this board and see all the whining going on about a record or series of records. Sorry, that’s at least how I feel about it. Enjoy listening and looking at the art. I’m heading outdoors with my lame earbuds. For a bit o’ music on demand or maybe a little comedy. Peace.
taramasalata
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by taramasalata »

Yes, wonderful songs, and wonderful words by Elvis!

It seems somehow ironically fitting, that this romantic, "old-fashioned" in its best meaning, idea of creating this work of (cover) art got this sloppy, careless, loveless, production (mis-) treatment ... these kind of things seem not to be made for these times anymore.
The more we should appreciate this attitude.

Apart from that: Can somebody explain how in the world EPH can have reached nearly 400 000 views on YouTube in just 3 weeks when the Singles released from the "Look now" album hardly ever made a 100 000...?
jardine
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by jardine »

mojo, my sincere apologies if i made you feel bad. Stop whining!


. . . okay, apologies a few days later for being so, well, whiny. what i meant to say is that i don't think that any of us were simply whining but were trying to figure out what has happening, why it was happening, where the trouble/fault lies, why certain parties were not more forthcoming, whether ec's eventual missive what an adequate take on all this, and meanwhile how we might variously admire/admonish this lovely thing that ended up appearing. I for one was glad to have a forum in which to work through these comings and goings and found quite helpful the different elaborations that helped put my own initial response in better perspective. frankly, being accused of simply being a whiner helped in that process.this, i think, is one way i which this forum is so important re: my affection for all things e.c.

so it may be 'how you feel about it', but please consider that this also may be too dismissive, especially framed as an admonishment/accusation ['stop whining'] which then withdraws from the fray ['its just how i feel about it'].
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Re: Look Now , October 2018

Post by sweetest punch »

https://shorefire.com/releases/entry/el ... 2020-plans

The Best Albums of the Decade
By ANDREW BARKER, JEM ASWAD and CHRIS WILLMAN

Are we ready to shake it off — the 2010s? Just about, but before the decade slaps us on the behinds on our way out the door, here are some of the albums that Variety music critics Jem Aswad, Andrew Barker and Chris Willman couldn’t have made it through the terrible teens without.
(...)
Chris Willman’s 10 Best Albums

(...)
8. Elvis Costello & the Imposters, “Look Now” (2018)

This is a top 10 with, as you may have noticed, a lot of great female perspectives on it. The same goes for Costello’s “Look Now,” actually — at least half the songs on it are from a woman’s point of view, oftentimes in the first person, a perspective the veteran rocker obviously feels comfortably slipping into. He maybe had an advantage in that in how a number of the album’s songs derive from unproduced musicals he’d spent the decade working on, which provided Costello ample opportunity to try on a gown, as it were, as a writer. But this wasn’t a completely abrupt shift; even some of his earliest records had him wanting to protect women from the wolves at their door, even if his lyrical perspective may have been motivated more by jealously romantic self-interest at the time. At this late stage in the game he’s almost completely a sympathetic character writer… and “Look Now” has a lot of musical character to it, too. This ‘60s pop-influenced collection provides a fresh spin on his ‘90s collaboration with Burt Bacharach (who did co-write a few songs here): What if Dionne Warwick were backed by a band with some nervous energy to it? Popular music doesn’t get any better crafted, or — even with all the story-songs and character sketches here — any more deeply felt.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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