New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Pretty self-explanatory
johnfoyle
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool"

Post by johnfoyle »

Thank you. I'm sorry to say I haven't listened to that feature yet , even though I linked it elsewhere. I will do , right now !
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool"

Post by johnfoyle »

I'm not sure if this an actual show. It might just be a presentation of videos of the songs.

https://twitter.com/TheWrap/status/938539372571275264


TheWrap‏

#WrapScreenings: Join @Common, @ElvisCostello, @Diane_Warren & @RyanTedder for an Evening Of Best Song Contenders Via @TheWrap's FB Live on Dec. 11 at 7PM PST.

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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool"

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The Los Angeles Times has a new interview with EC. In the print edition, EC is on the front of the Envelope section.
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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/en ... story.html

Q&A Elvis Costello on movies, music and why you won't ever see him slapping his knee in concert
By Glenn Whipp

Elvis Costello knows his way around Hollywood Boulevard. The versatile singer-songwriter played a couple of dates over the years at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s fabled Cinegrill nightclub, the place where Marilyn Monroe met Arthur Miller, and Michelle Pfeiffer slithered across a piano in “The Fabulous Baker Boys.” And nearly three decades ago, he caught “The Godfather Part III” at the Chinese Theatre, just to see how Francis Ford Coppola used his song, “Miracle Man.”

Costello returned to the Roosevelt last month to perform a brief set following the AFI Fest premiere of “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” the story of the romance between a young British actor and Hollywood legend Gloria Grahame in the last years of her life.

Inside the hotel’s intimate lounge, Costello sang, “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” a lushly orchestrated, bittersweet love song he wrote for the movie, paying particular attention to the film’s star, Annette Bening, in the audience. He also performed his old standby “Alison” and a song he has written for a musical adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s “A Face in the Crowd,” a project that will be going into its third workshop soon.

The following day, Costello, 63, wearing a sharp suit accented with a matching purple paisley tie and pocket square, sat down to talk about movies and music and how the two have intersected during his long career.

My introduction to Gloria Grahame came when I saw “Oklahoma!” when I was 7 or 8 ...

I never saw “Oklahoma!” Who wrote that?

Really? Rodgers & Hammerstein.

I was always more of a Rodgers & Hart. I know the songs. “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” I know from Sonny Rollins.

I’m not that big on gingham. Also, I don’t like this. [Costello enthusiastically slaps his knee.] That move always put me off. People ask me, ‘Why haven’t you written a musical until now?’ It’s because of the knee slapping. That should be in the music, not an emphatic gesture before the music. [Pause] I’m joking.

Mostly.

Mostly. My favorite musical is “My Fair Lady,” by a long way. My role model, Stanley Holloway. Fashion tips? Stanley Holloway. Always.

So you don’t know Ado Annie. I’m guessing you knew Gloria Grahame then through “In a Lonely Place” or “The Bad and the Beautiful.”

You want to hear a strange coincidence? Paul McGuigan [director of “Film Stars Don’t Die] and [producer] Barbara Broccoli came to the London Palladium last summer to talk to me about this movie. I was doing a four-night stand there. Twenty minutes into the show, I’m introducing a song called “Church Underground,” which is about a girl who dreams of being famous but instead finds salvation in the music coming up from an underground dive. And as a visual cue, I used a picture of Gloria Grahame. I always liked her self-possession. Anyway, when they saw that, they just jumped out of their skins.

What intrigued you about the movie?

Conflicts and contradictions. Those are gifts to songwriters. Gloria is vain, but also vulnerable. She takes quick offense when the difference in their ages is pointed out, but you later come to understand that and why it’s poignant. I won't say writing the song was easy. But all the cues were there.

Your performance of the song is quite moving. It’s not something you probably could have sung as well 20 years ago.

I’ve never been bothered about remaining some facsimile of how I looked as a kid. I like actors with interesting faces. I like singers with character in their voices. Quirks occur. Jimmy Durante singing “September Song.” You can’t be 25 and sing that song. Or “A Very Good Year” by Sinatra later on. I’m not there yet, necessarily.

You don’t want to be the face of the AARP tomorrow?

Truth is, I was writing those songs 20 years ago. I wrote a song called “I Want to Vanish,” which I always imagined I wanted Judy Garland to record.

I remember taking my mother to see Bob Dylan in Liverpool when she turned 70. And I remember being struck, sitting with my mother when she was 70, younger than Bob is now, by how many images of mortality were within his lyrics.

And now he’s singing the Great American Songbook.

I love his performances of those songs. It’s utterly sincere and presented with fine drama. I saw him do a show at Albert Hall 18 months ago and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

Do you spend any time on music streaming services like Spotify?

I don’t know anything about them.

Could you guess what’s your most popular song by far on Spotify?

It’d be “She.”

Yes. It has more than twice as many hits as your next song, “Alison.”

That song is a calling card. An international passport. There are countries I never would have visited without it. Korea. Macau.

[“Notting Hill” director] Richard Curtis said he was going to ruin my reputation with that song. But I told him, “Go ahead and try.” Because I had been doing ballads from the very start.

I cut a live version of the Burt Bacharach song, “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” in 1977. At that time, when people did songs from that period, they were mostly being ironic. I wasn’t being ironic. I cut “My Funny Valentine” in 1978.

So when Richard asked me to cut “She,” I thought, “What the hell.” Charles Aznavour is a great songwriter. If the composer can play against type and contrast a harsher emotion with a beautiful melody, I sure as hell could sing it.

In the movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s record store owner loves to makes music lists. For “Top Five Angry Songs About Women,” he says, “You kind of have to start with Elvis Costello, but where?” Did you appreciate that line?

I don’t get that myself. I think it’s in the eye of the beholder. “Alison” … It’s “I know the world is killing you,” not “I am killing you.” I’m not being pedantic here. It says, “my aim is true.” I am responsible. It’s not like I want to kill you, but this love that we’re in isn’t going to work out.

There’s a lot of songs that are like that. People want to hear them as angry. I’ve even seen the “m-word” attached to my name lots of times. Misogynist.

I think the songs are more about being a young man trying to work out what those feelings are supposed to be about. I’m not always writing the idyllic love song because maybe somebody does that better than me. Some of it’s from real life. I’ve lived parts of those songs. But I don’t think they’re misogynistic. I wonder if the people who think that are the ones with the problem.

“Accidents Will Happen” plays for a few seconds in “E.T.” I read somewhere that you’re still getting nice royalty checks for that. True or Internet?

I wish that were true. I remember going to see the movie, not knowing the context it was going to be used. And if you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it.

What do you remember about playing “Scarlet Tide” at the Oscars, the song you wrote with T-Bone Burnett for “Cold Mountain.”

They wanted the visual of T-Bone and I playing in the band with Alison [Krauss]. And I decided because it was an old-sounding song that I would play my oldest guitar, a 1910 Gibson.

And my memory of it is, Alison finished this beautiful performance and, as we hit the last chord, I decided I would contribute and put the guitar up to the microphone and play the final button of the song. And as I did it, the bridge of my guitar collapsed. The last chord was a complete discord on global television. Fortunately, the lights dimmed and no one noticed my clunker of a contribution. Perhaps that’s why I don’t get invited to awards shows.
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool"

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http://screenings.thewrap.com/best-original-song/


Best Original Song Contender Panel Presented by Dolby
A SPECIAL EVENING

FEATURING THE SONGS IN CONTENTION FOR

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION

FOR BEST ORIGINAL SONG

PRESENTED BY DOLBY LABORATORIES

Location:

Dolby Cinema at AMC Century City 15

10250 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90067

https://www.amctheatres.com/movie-theat ... ry-city-15

Date & Time:
Monday, December 11th, 2017
Event Starts at 7:00PM

(Check-In: 6:00pm)



The evening will be broadcast by SiriusXM’s “Volume” hosted by Alan Light

Introduction by: Sharon Waxman, Editor in Chief, TheWrap

Moderated by: Steve Pond, Awards Editor, TheWrap

Participants include:

Diane Warren and Common

“Stand Up For Something” from Marshall

Elvis Costello

“You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way” from Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

Kenneth Branagh and Patrick Doyle

“Never Forget” from Murder on the Orient Express

Raphael Saadiq and Taura Stinson

“Jump” from Step

Nicholas Britell

“If I Dare” from Battle of the Sexes

Ryan Tedder

“Truth To Power” from An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

Ryan Bingham

“How Shall a Sparrow Fly” from Hostiles
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by Neil. »

Well, our fella wasn't nominated for a Golden Globe today. So let's hold out hope for an Oscar nom!
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by verbal gymnastics »

Or something at the prestigious Elvis Costello Fan Forum Awards which will be held on Saturday 27th January :lol:
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by sweetest punch »

Elvis’ Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ElvisCostello/ ): Watch Elvis Costello live on The Wrap's FB page today at 7PM PST: https://www.facebook.com/thewrap/
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: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

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https://www.thewrap.com/elvis-costello- ... ontenders/

Elvis Costello, T Bone Burnett, Common and More to Talk Up Their Oscar Song Contenders

Common, Diane Warren, Common, T. Bone Burnett and other top songwriters will gather Monday to discuss their work on some of this year’s most buzzed-about films.

TheWrap is sponsoring the 2018 Oscar Song Contender event, which includes a screening of clips from films featuring the songs as well as a panel discussion moderated by TheWrap Awards Editor Steve Pond.

Participants include:

• Multiple award-winners Diane Warren and Common for “Stand Up for Something” (from the film Marshall)

• Academy Award-winning singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham for “How Shall a Sparrow Fly” (from the film Hostiles)

• Raphael Saadiq and Taura Stinson who along with Laura Karpman wrote “Jump” (from the film Step)

• Academy Award-winning actor, writer and director Kenneth Branagh who now adds songwriter to his list of accomplishments by writing the lyrics to “Never Forget” (from the film Murder on the Orient Express) written with Patrick Doyle

• Music chameleon and raconteur Elvis Costello will discuss “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way” (from the film “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool”)

• Legendary songwriter, producer and musician T. Bone Burnett & OneRepublic Frontman Ryan Tedder for “Truth to Power” (from the film “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”)

Exclusive video from the evening will be available on TheWrap’s Facebook page.

The program, hosted by TheWrap founder and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman and presented by Dolby Laboratories, will also be re-broadcast on Monday, December 18, at 7 p.m. on SiriusXM’s music talk channel Volume.
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: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by johnfoyle »

Tony Cariddi‏
@tony_cariddi

@ElvisCostello explaining a songwriter’s job to echo the emotions of the movie @Dolby sponsored #wrapscreenings panel

https://twitter.com/tony_cariddi/status ... 1616758784

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https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status ... 6117395456 Sharon Waxman‏
@sharonwaxman

Yeah it’s best song contender photobomb w Diane Warren, @ElvisCostello Tbone Burnett, music greats @TheWrap event! #wrapscreenings

Image

https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status ... 4885630977 Sharon Waxman‏

.@ElvisCostello explains to @stevepond why songwriting was his first love. Tbone Burnett at right @TheWrap

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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by docinwestchester »

You can watch the The Wrap video here:

https://www.facebook.com/thewrap/videos ... 740083664/

If that link doesn't work, it's on their facebook video page:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/thewrap/videos/
sweetest punch
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

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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: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by sweetest punch »

Paul McGuigan talks about the new Elvis song at 17:40: https://youtu.be/MHcAIIF-9r4
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: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.thewrap.com/best-original-s ... e-burnett/

Oscar Contenders Elvis Costello, Common on Writing Songs That Leap Off the Screen

The credits start to roll, the lights come up, and as the crowd stands from their seats, they hear a song. It’s hard enough to keep an audience occupied for two hours. Now try holding their attention for just another two minutes before they’re out the door.

“I was hoping I had a song I could sing for as long as people wanted to hear it,” said Elvis Costello, an artist and rocker who knows a thing or two about music made to grab you. “If a song can last just until people can get to the lobby, you’re doing all right.”

On Monday night at the AMC Century City 15, TheWrap and Dolby hosted Costello and nine other Oscar contenders for this year’s Best Original Song race in a panel discussion about the songwriting craft. They explained their goal as musicians is to write music that can linger and last well beyond the end of the film.

Whether it’s Common and Diane Warren writing a call to action at the end of “Marshall,” OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and T Bone Burnett writing a love letter from Mother Earth at the end of “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” or Kenneth Branagh and composer Patrick Doyle writing a forlorn, emotional capper for “Murder on the Orient Express,” they want their songs to make an impression.

“You want this to go further than just the film,” R&B singer Raphael Saadiq told TheWrap’s Steve Pond about “Jump,” a song he wrote with Taura Stinson for the documentary “Step.” “I just wanted to make sure that we put together something that speaks for them beyond the scope of the film,” Stinson added.

“I want the words to be something people can live with and walk with and can eventually, God willing, change their lives,” Common said about his song with Warren, “Stand Up for Something.”

Their closing track to the movie about Thurgood Marshall is a stately, yet bluesy and bass-driven march about finding meaning in life by taking action. “It all means nothing if you can’t stand up for something,” Warren’s lyrics read.

Warren said she was inspired by the early ’60s work of Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. “Those times were so hard, but those songs were so hopeful. They inspired you to want to change the world,” she said

If Warren is nominated for “Stand Up for Something,” it’ll be her ninth Oscar nomination, a number she’s earned by collaborating with everyone from Lady Gaga to Aerosmith to Rita Ora. Her new collaborator, Common, earned his first Oscar with John Legend for the song “Glory” from “Selma.”

“Do I want to be a downer and stay in that dark place that we were all in for a while, or do I want to put hope out there and really inspire people?” Common asked, reiterating Warren’s message of hope in troubled times. “Don’t just sit down, stand up and do something.”

Tedder and Burnett could relate to the songwriting challenge of creating a song for the times. Their track “Truth to Power,” a wistful piano ballad that scores the end of the Al Gore climate-change doc “An Inconvenient Sequel.”

Burnett and Tedder referred to their song as a letter from a lover scorned, but instead of a person, it’s the Earth breaking up with humanity. Unlike his work for his band OneRepublic, Tedder said that the film itself was his muse, and the challenge was to tap into what the story is telling you.

“I have to believe it coming from me. I can’t play a character in a movie. Ultimately it has to be authentic to your own voice,” Tedder said, adding that he was moved after speaking with Gore and learning more about climate change. “I have to connect with the content, I have to believe in the film, I have to care.”

That was a different challenge than what other songwriters faced.

Ryan Bingham, an Oscar winner for “Crazy Heart,” or “Murder on the Orient Express” director Kenneth Branagh, wrote his song for Christian Bale’s 19th-century soldier in “Hostiles” and said he imagined an Irish immigrant with just a small mandolin to his name strumming a forlorn folk song while camping out under the stars.

“What would this character play in 1890? Where’s he from? What’s his background, what’s his roots?” Bingham said. “It all had to start from there.”

Kenneth Branagh and Patrick Doyle similarly collaborated closely to find the right tone that could capture the loss felt by Michelle Pfeiffer’s character during the emotional capper of “Murder on the Orient Express.” Doyle described their song’s lilting piano counter-melody as “simple, but so powerful” atop Branagh’s “totally inspiring lyrics.”

“We felt like [the movie] needed emotional closure, a punctuation mark. It was the moment you could perhaps understand with music people in the story who were hurting and perhaps beginning to heal,” Branagh said, comparing his song “Never Forget” to the Irish ballad “Danny Boy.”

Costello said he had to grapple not just with the emotions of “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” but with his own legacy. At one point, the film uses Costello’s “Pump It Up” to set the scene.

“It was used as a historical marker, which is an unsettling moment for any songwriter, especially when it’s 40 years ago,” Costello joked.

His new song for the film, “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” has an elegant and classical charm with its jazzy, brushed percussion, a lush horn section, a simple piano melody and Costello’s warbling crooning. The filmmakers came to see one of his performances, and they knew he was the man for the job when they saw Costello use an image of the film’s subject, Gloria Graham, during the show.

“Your job is to echo the feeling of the film, it’s not to compete with it, not to argue with the director, writer or character, but to try and be in some sort of sympathy with the emotion of the film,” Costello said. “People are usually pretty quick to get out of the theater, so you’ve got to give them a few bars to get their attention.”

Watch the full video from the panel discussion via Facebook Live, or hear a re-broadcast on Sirius XM’s “Volume” hosted by Alan Light on Monday, December 18 at 7 p.m. ET.
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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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by johnfoyle »

http://variety.com/2017/music/news/elvi ... 202637190/

DECEMBER 12, 2017

With a ‘Film Stars’ Song in Contention, Rock Star Elvis Costello Reflects on Moonlighting for the Movies
The song “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way" is an emotional double entendre.

By Chris Willman @chriswillman

Elvis Costello wrote the closing song for the new movie “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” but it’s a classic from his own canon that director Paul McGuigan planted as an Easter egg for music buffs. Costello’s “Pump It Up” is heard early on in the film to establish the late ’70s time frame, right before a scene that has the American actress Gloria Grahame (played by Annette Bening) meeting her younger Liverpudlian boyfriend (Jamie Bell) for the first time. Just after “Pump It Up” is heard on the soundtrack, the two lovers-to-be dance to “Boogie Oogie Oogie” — a cheeky nod to one of the silliest awards upsets of all time, when the ephemeral disco group A Taste of Honey famously beat Costello for the best new artist Grammy.

“You know what? It didn’t register,” admits Costello, who didn’t get the embedded joke when he first saw the film, and whom the director never bothered to tip off about the sly juxtaposition. “I didn’t recognize the song, because I never heard that record [‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’]; I didn’t really listen to that kind of music then.”

That hilariously ignominious Grammy defeat hasn’t weighed much on Costello’s mind in the four decades since. He stands a shot at a nomination for a different award with “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” the song that has brought him to a suite in the Hollywood Roosevelt today, as one of the parties being talked up for contention for “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.” In contrast to the signature song that McGuigan threw into the movie as 1978 source music, Costello’s new end-credits theme couldn’t be less pumped up.

His contribution to the film is more of a piece with the 1998 album he did in collaboration with Burt Bacharach, “Painted from Memory” — which, incidentally, did finally get Costello his first (and still only) Grammy. If people hear some lingering echoes of Bacharach’s style in this new solo composition, “that wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Costello says. “That would be good pedigree, as they say in the dog world! I learned from listening to Burt that sometimes those unusual combinations of instruments can give you that sound that you want. I would never presume to orchestrate like he could, but you can hear those flugels,” a Bacharach-esque touch amid the small orchestra that Costello wrote the arrangement for.

The title, “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” is an emotional double entendre, taking on different meanings in different verses to reflect Grahame as someone who alternately invites and shields herself from the male gaze. “When you first see Gloria in the story, she’s in the grip of mortal illness, and then when the story flashes back to their first meeting, she’s very seductive,” says Costello. “They have this flirtation, and then it very quickly reveals her vulnerability, as the minute he points out their age difference, she gets mad at him. You didn’t have to reach very far to find the stuff for the song.”

Costello is enough of a Grahame fan to have put her photo up on the big screen behind him on a recent tour to illustrate a type of female character he was singing about in his song “Church Underground,” “about a girl running away from home with the hope of becoming a notorious movie femme fatale.” McGuigan and producer Barbara Broccoli came to a concert to ask him to write the theme, “and it was complete coincidence that I picked Gloria’s picture. They must have thought I was a mind reader when they came to ask me to be involved in the movie.”


Another coincidence: when he read the script, he was startled to see the name of his best friend of 35 years — playwright Alan Bleasdale, who was best man at Costello and Diana Krall’s wedding — mentioned as a minor character who employs the male lead in a British play. “Alan never mentioned that he’d had an actor working for him who was involved with Gloria Grahame — I mean, why would he? — but when I saw his name in the script, that was really strange. I guess it was meant to be.”

The man who wrote “Complicated Shadows” had long been drawn toward Grahame, one of the queens of noir. “I like the conflicted nature of the characters that she seemed to be good at playing,” he says. “I mean, sometimes the parts that Gloria Grahame played were very simple to understand, but there’s a couple of films where they’re quite complicated. In ‘Human Desire,’ the Fritz Lang film, that’s a pretty complicated character — on the face of it, a hard, kind of murderous person, but there’s a reason for it.”

But, reading the “Liverpool” script, he gravitated toward exploring how “people don’t reside in the place where we have our most vivid memory of them. Their life continues, out of that moment where they’re most celebrated, and that’s obviously what this film picks up. Here’s a person associated with black-and-white images from film noir, but she’s acting in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in a repertory theater in the north of England, or on English television in the late ’70s and early ’80s. When you say the name, you see the image that I used in my show. You don’t see the person with the complications that life brings.”

Costello turned out for the AFI Film Festival premiere of “Liverpool” at the Chinese Theatre, running across the street afterward for a brief performance in the Hollywood Roosevelt’s tiny cellar theater for Bening, Warren Beatty and a few dozen invited guests. The setting had him reminiscing. “The last time I was at the Chinese Theatre, I snuck in to see a screening of ‘Godfather III,’ in which I have a song,” he told the audience. “My movie cameos are numerous and some of them infamous. Like, the song that the brother is singing under his breath in ‘E.T.’ is mine.” The small crowd tittered, as if Costello were making a droll joke. “It’s really true!” he protested.

It’s “Accidents Will Happen” that’s heard in passing in “E.T.,” and “Miracle Man” in “Godfather III.” These were collected on a 2012 compilation album, “In Motion Pictures,” along with 13 other Costello tracks that were written for or picked up by the movies. “I actually didn’t think they would put it out on a finished record,” he says of the “In Motion Pictures” CD. “I thought it was a playlist, and then I was kind of surprised [Universal Music] put it out in the sleeve. The [catalog songs] that were selected by [filmmakers] were always intriguing, but I did genuinely write a lot of those songs for movies.” Those original film compositions weren’t always as high-profile as the one he just did; his song “Crawling to the USA” is better remembered than “Americathon,” the movie it appeared in, and “My Mood Swings” was buried nearly to the point of inaudibility in “The Big Lebowski.”

“Then there are the complete anomalies, like singing a song you would never imagine singing, where you’re cast against type. That’s what ‘She’ would be,” Costello says, bringing up a career game-changer that came about in 1999, right after he’d released the collaboration with Bacharach, at the height of what some have referred to as his crooner phase. For the Julia Roberts vehicle “Notting Hill,” he was asked to cover an old Charles Aznavour romantic ballad. “It was like casting Wallace Beery in the Clark Gable role,” he jokes. “But the song was a damn hit all over the world” — his biggest nearly everywhere but the U.S., in fact. “Heaven knows it’s allowed me to play in countries in the world that my own songs would never allow me to play in, so I can’t complain about that. It’s been a strange life I’ve lived, to turn up and see the horror when they realize that none of my other songs sound like ‘She.’ ”

If there’s an awards injustice worse than losing a best new artist Grammy to a one-hit disco group, at least as far as fans are concerned, it would have to be the fact that “God Give Me Strength” — one of the best movie themes of the past 25 years, which he co-wrote with Burt Bacharach for Allison Anders’ “Grace of My Heart” — wasn’t even nominated for a best song Oscar. He doesn’t act as if he’s spent too many sleepless nights about it: “The film has to be known enough for people to be worrying about that,” he figures. As for kudos in general: “I was 20 years into my career before I ever went to an awards show, so I have never really seen any of that as my natural domain,” he says.

But the Oscars finally began to look at him that way — as it were — in 2004, when he and co-writer T Bone Burnett did get a nomination for “The Scarlet Tide,” from “Cold Mountain.” Costello sang it on the telecast, ultimately losing to a little-remembered Annie Lennox song from the “Lord of the Rings” finale. “If [an award] were to happen sometime, that would be fun. But it’s kind of silly to say this song is better than that song. That year, there were a couple of really good songs nominated. I wanted the one from ‘A Mighty Wind’ to win [Michael McKean’s and Annette O’Toole’s “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow”]. I really did!”

His movie songwriting career hasn’t been especially prodigious between “Cold Mountain” and “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.” But then, neither has his career as a record-maker, either. In the 2010s, he’s focused his creativity almost exclusively on a well-received memoir (2015’s “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink”), building themed concert tours, and on writing for a different kind of stage — the Broadway stage.

“Burt and I have about 20 songs we wrote for two musicals that have not been produced,” he says, including an expanded dramatic adaptation of the “Painted from Memory” album that’s gone on the back burner. “That’s separate from the 19 songs that I wrote for ‘A Face in the Crowd’” — his musical-theater update of the Budd Schulberg novel about a corrupt populist politician that became most famous in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film version. he says. “I don’t know how far away from opening night we are with ‘Face in the Crowd.’ You know that business — the theater world is a complicated amount of agreements between the resources, the cast, and the timing, apart from what the actual thing is about.

“But I have been previewing ‘Face in the Crowd’ songs in my shows with the agreement of my cohorts, [director] Des McAnuff and [book co-writer] Sarah Ruhl.” (He even played one of them at the “Film Stars” after-party; see the video, above.) “It’s a good way of getting the measure of whether these songs read to an audience on one hearing… and also thinking about what kind of voices could sing these, because it’s not going to be me singing them in the musical. All of that is all investigation, aside from the fact that it’s just thrilling to play a [new] song and have somebody go, ‘Hey, that’s good,’ or ‘That makes me laugh.'”

Meanwhile, he’s also looking at how to work “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way” into the set when he and his band the Imposters kick off a six-night residency at the Wynn Las Vegas Feb. 28, a show he’s dubbed “Now/Not Now” in deference to the mixture of oldies and unreleased material he plans to play. He delights in thinking about “what other songs does it lead to, or what other songs would you place around it? Songs do that: They gather allies.”

Will there be new songs in the set in Las Vegas that weren’t written for musical theater or a movie? The short answer is yes… although that shouldn’t get anyone’s hopes up for a new studio album from Costello any time soon. His last album of completely fresh compositions was the T Bone Burnett-produced “National Ransom” in 2010. Three years later, he released a collaborative effort with the Roots, “Wise Up Ghost,” that refashioned scraps of his old lyrics into more experimental new material. And in the four years since then, it’s been mostly radio silence on record.

For Costello, there’s nothing rote or inherently less creative about doing a catalog-themed tour. “In years gone by, you would say, ‘Well, it says on my contract that it’s time to make a record, and then we’ll go and play those songs on a tour.’ I don’t do that. I’m kind of like my own impresario. I create my own shows, into which I put the songs I have, both old and new. The last three shows I’ve done have been focused on repertoire in different ways, but they have taken advantage of the opportunity to put new songs in quite key places: the ‘Spectacular Spinning Songbook’ [in which patrons spun a wheel to select choices] did that, ‘Detour’ [a narrated solo tour] really did that, and even [the 2017 tour themed around the 35th anniversary of] ‘Imperial Bedroom’ did, by taking those songs and in some cases being able to render them more the way they were written.”

Why stop throwing new records into the mix, though? “Well, somebody’s got to want to make them,” he quips, alluding to his label-less status. His only recent releases have been vinyl singles pressed in quantities of less than 1,000 to sell as collectors’ items. “One thing about the vinyl record is that it invites brevity,” he says. “The CD was a temptation to make longer and longer records. And I took full advantage of that; I don’t regret the shape or duration of any of the records I made I guessed right that we wouldn’t be doing it very much more when I effectively made a double album for my last record (meaning ‘National Ransom’). “I thought, ‘Well, this might be the last go-round,’ and it proved to be the case. So that was the right decision, to sign off from that particular cyclic continuum of record/tour/record/tour. Look at the last few years. If I had not broken off from that, I wouldn’t have had the fun I’ve had creating these shows and developing them.”

Unlike, say, the Gloria Grahame portrayed in “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” Costello is well aware he’s of a generation separate from the one feeding the hit-making machinery now, and he actually seems tickled, not reluctant, at the prospect of redoubling his efforts elsewhere. It’s the fans, he suggests, that are overly glued to their CDs. “You should never assume you have either an obligation or a right to record,” he says. “There are lots of young, great artists whose moment is [now].” But, he adds, “That doesn’t mean there won’t be any more records. It just means there better be a good reason to make ‘em.”
johnfoyle
Posts: 14851
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by johnfoyle »

Photographed by Ted Soqui for TheWrap


https://www.thewrap.com/best-original-s ... e-burnett/

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Elvis Costello and Raphael Saadiq

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Diane Warren, Common and Elvis Costello at the reception post-panel.

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Diane Warren, Elvis Costello and Sharon Waxman take a selfie.

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sweetest punch
Posts: 5958
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by sweetest punch »

http://variety.com/2017/music/news/elvi ... 202637190/

With a ‘Film Stars’ Song in Contention, Rock Star Elvis Costello Reflects on Moonlighting for the Movies

The song “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way" is an emotional double entendre.

Elvis Costello wrote the closing song for the new movie “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” but it’s a classic from his own canon that director Paul McGuigan planted as an Easter egg for music buffs. Costello’s “Pump It Up” is heard early on in the film to establish the late ’70s time frame, right before a scene that has the American actress Gloria Grahame (played by Annette Bening) meeting her younger Liverpudlian boyfriend (Jamie Bell) for the first time. Just after “Pump It Up” is heard on the soundtrack, the two lovers-to-be dance to “Boogie Oogie Oogie” — a cheeky nod to one of the silliest awards upsets of all time, when the ephemeral disco group A Taste of Honey famously beat Costello for the best new artist Grammy.

“You know what? It didn’t register,” admits Costello, who didn’t get the embedded joke when he first saw the film, and whom the director never bothered to tip off about the sly juxtaposition. “I didn’t recognize the song, because I never heard that record [‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’]; I didn’t really listen to that kind of music then.”

That hilariously ignominious Grammy defeat hasn’t weighed much on Costello’s mind in the four decades since. He stands a shot at a nomination for a different award with “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” the song that has brought him to a suite in the Hollywood Roosevelt today, as one of the parties being talked up for contention for “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.” In contrast to the signature song that McGuigan threw into the movie as 1978 source music, Costello’s new end-credits theme couldn’t be less pumped up.

His contribution to the film is more of a piece with the 1998 album he did in collaboration with Burt Bacharach, “Painted from Memory” — which, incidentally, did finally get Costello his first (and still only) Grammy. If people hear some lingering echoes of Bacharach’s style in this new solo composition, “that wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Costello says. “That would be good pedigree, as they say in the dog world! I learned from listening to Burt that sometimes those unusual combinations of instruments can give you that sound that you want. I would never presume to orchestrate like he could, but you can hear those flugels,” a Bacharach-esque touch amid the small orchestra that Costello wrote the arrangement for.

The title, “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” is an emotional double entendre, taking on different meanings in different verses to reflect Grahame as someone who alternately invites and shields herself from the male gaze. “When you first see Gloria in the story, she’s in the grip of mortal illness, and then when the story flashes back to their first meeting, she’s very seductive,” says Costello. “They have this flirtation, and then it very quickly reveals her vulnerability, as the minute he points out their age difference, she gets mad at him. You didn’t have to reach very far to find the stuff for the song.”

Costello is enough of a Grahame fan to have put her photo up on the big screen behind him on a recent tour to illustrate a type of female character he was singing about in his song “Church Underground,” “about a girl running away from home with the hope of becoming a notorious movie femme fatale.” McGuigan and producer Barbara Broccoli came to a concert to ask him to write the theme, “and it was complete coincidence that I picked Gloria’s picture. They must have thought I was a mind reader when they came to ask me to be involved in the movie.”

Another coincidence: when he read the script, he was startled to see the name of his best friend of 35 years — playwright Alan Bleasdale, who was best man at Costello and Diana Krall’s wedding — mentioned as a minor character who employs the male lead in a British play. “Alan never mentioned that he’d had an actor working for him who was involved with Gloria Grahame — I mean, why would he? — but when I saw his name in the script, that was really strange. I guess it was meant to be.”

The man who wrote “Complicated Shadows” had long been drawn toward Grahame, one of the queens of noir. “I like the conflicted nature of the characters that she seemed to be good at playing,” he says. “I mean, sometimes the parts that Gloria Grahame played were very simple to understand, but there’s a couple of films where they’re quite complicated. In ‘Human Desire,’ the Fritz Lang film, that’s a pretty complicated character — on the face of it, a hard, kind of murderous person, but there’s a reason for it.”

But, reading the “Liverpool” script, he gravitated toward exploring how “people don’t reside in the place where we have our most vivid memory of them. Their life continues, out of that moment where they’re most celebrated, and that’s obviously what this film picks up. Here’s a person associated with black-and-white images from film noir, but she’s acting in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in a repertory theater in the north of England, or on English television in the late ’70s and early ’80s. When you say the name, you see the image that I used in my show. You don’t see the person with the complications that life brings.”

Costello turned out for the AFI Film Festival premiere of “Liverpool” at the Chinese Theatre, running across the street afterward for a brief performance in the Hollywood Roosevelt’s tiny cellar theater for Bening, Warren Beatty and a few dozen invited guests. The setting had him reminiscing. “The last time I was at the Chinese Theatre, I snuck in to see a screening of ‘Godfather III,’ in which I have a song,” he told the audience. “My movie cameos are numerous and some of them infamous. Like, the song that the brother is singing under his breath in ‘E.T.’ is mine.” The small crowd tittered, as if Costello were making a droll joke. “It’s really true!” he protested.

It’s “Accidents Will Happen” that’s heard in passing in “E.T.,” and “Miracle Man” in “Godfather III.” These were collected on a 2012 compilation album, “In Motion Pictures,” along with 13 other Costello tracks that were written for or picked up by the movies. “I actually didn’t think they would put it out on a finished record,” he says of the “In Motion Pictures” CD. “I thought it was a playlist, and then I was kind of surprised [Universal Music] put it out in the sleeve. The [catalog songs] that were selected by [filmmakers] were always intriguing, but I did genuinely write a lot of those songs for movies.” Those original film compositions weren’t always as high-profile as the one he just did; his song “Crawling to the USA” is better remembered than “Americathon,” the movie it appeared in, and “My Mood Swings” was buried nearly to the point of inaudibility in “The Big Lebowski.”

“Then there are the complete anomalies, like singing a song you would never imagine singing, where you’re cast against type. That’s what ‘She’ would be,” Costello says, bringing up a career game-changer that came about in 1999, right after he’d released the collaboration with Bacharach, at the height of what some have referred to as his crooner phase. For the Julia Roberts vehicle “Notting Hill,” he was asked to cover an old Charles Aznavour romantic ballad. “It was like casting Wallace Beery in the Clark Gable role,” he jokes. “But the song was a damn hit all over the world” — his biggest nearly everywhere but the U.S., in fact. “Heaven knows it’s allowed me to play in countries in the world that my own songs would never allow me to play in, so I can’t complain about that. It’s been a strange life I’ve lived, to turn up and see the horror when they realize that none of my other songs sound like ‘She.’ ”

If there’s an awards injustice worse than losing a best new artist Grammy to a one-hit disco group, at least as far as fans are concerned, it would have to be the fact that “God Give Me Strength” — one of the best movie themes of the past 25 years, which he co-wrote with Burt Bacharach for Allison Anders’ “Grace of My Heart” — wasn’t even nominated for a best song Oscar. He doesn’t act as if he’s spent too many sleepless nights about it: “The film has to be known enough for people to be worrying about that,” he figures. As for kudos in general: “I was 20 years into my career before I ever went to an awards show, so I have never really seen any of that as my natural domain,” he says.

But the Oscars finally began to look at him that way — as it were — in 2004, when he and co-writer T Bone Burnett did get a nomination for “The Scarlet Tide,” from “Cold Mountain.” Costello sang it on the telecast, ultimately losing to a little-remembered Annie Lennox song from the “Lord of the Rings” finale. “If [an award] were to happen sometime, that would be fun. But it’s kind of silly to say this song is better than that song. That year, there were a couple of really good songs nominated. I wanted the one from ‘A Mighty Wind’ to win [Michael McKean’s and Annette O’Toole’s “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow”]. I really did!”

His movie songwriting career hasn’t been especially prodigious between “Cold Mountain” and “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.” But then, neither has his career as a record-maker, either. In the 2010s, he’s focused his creativity almost exclusively on a well-received memoir (2015’s “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink”), building themed concert tours, and on writing for a different kind of stage — the Broadway stage.

“Burt and I have about 20 songs we wrote for two musicals that have not been produced,” he says, including an expanded dramatic adaptation of the “Painted from Memory” album that’s gone on the back burner. “That’s separate from the 19 songs that I wrote for ‘A Face in the Crowd’” — his musical-theater update of the Budd Schulberg novel about a corrupt populist politician that became most famous in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film version. he says. “I don’t know how far away from opening night we are with ‘Face in the Crowd.’ You know that business — the theater world is a complicated amount of agreements between the resources, the cast, and the timing, apart from what the actual thing is about.

“But I have been previewing ‘Face in the Crowd’ songs in my shows with the agreement of my cohorts, [director] Des McAnuff and [book co-writer] Sarah Ruhl.” (He even played one of them at the “Film Stars” after-party; see the video, above.) “It’s a good way of getting the measure of whether these songs read to an audience on one hearing… and also thinking about what kind of voices could sing these, because it’s not going to be me singing them in the musical. All of that is all investigation, aside from the fact that it’s just thrilling to play a [new] song and have somebody go, ‘Hey, that’s good,’ or ‘That makes me laugh.'”

Meanwhile, he’s also looking at how to work “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way” into the set when he and his band the Imposters kick off a six-night residency at the Wynn Las Vegas Feb. 28, a show he’s dubbed “Now/Not Now” in deference to the mixture of oldies and unreleased material he plans to play. He delights in thinking about “what other songs does it lead to, or what other songs would you place around it? Songs do that: They gather allies.”

Will there be new songs in the set in Las Vegas that weren’t written for musical theater or a movie? The short answer is yes… although that shouldn’t get anyone’s hopes up for a new studio album from Costello any time soon. His last album of completely fresh compositions was the T Bone Burnett-produced “National Ransom” in 2010. Three years later, he released a collaborative effort with the Roots, “Wise Up Ghost,” that refashioned scraps of his old lyrics into more experimental new material. And in the four years since then, it’s been mostly radio silence on record.

For Costello, there’s nothing rote or inherently less creative about doing a catalog-themed tour. “In years gone by, you would say, ‘Well, it says on my contract that it’s time to make a record, and then we’ll go and play those songs on a tour.’ I don’t do that. I’m kind of like my own impresario. I create my own shows, into which I put the songs I have, both old and new. The last three shows I’ve done have been focused on repertoire in different ways, but they have taken advantage of the opportunity to put new songs in quite key places: the ‘Spectacular Spinning Songbook’ [in which patrons spun a wheel to select choices] did that, ‘Detour’ [a narrated solo tour] really did that, and even [the 2017 tour themed around the 35th anniversary of] ‘Imperial Bedroom’ did, by taking those songs and in some cases being able to render them more the way they were written.”

Why stop throwing new records into the mix, though? “Well, somebody’s got to want to make them,” he quips, alluding to his label-less status. His only recent releases have been vinyl singles pressed in quantities of less than 1,000 to sell as collectors’ items. “One thing about the vinyl record is that it invites brevity,” he says. “The CD was a temptation to make longer and longer records. And I took full advantage of that; I don’t regret the shape or duration of any of the records I made I guessed right that we wouldn’t be doing it very much more when I effectively made a double album for my last record (meaning ‘National Ransom’). “I thought, ‘Well, this might be the last go-round,’ and it proved to be the case. So that was the right decision, to sign off from that particular cyclic continuum of record/tour/record/tour. Look at the last few years. If I had not broken off from that, I wouldn’t have had the fun I’ve had creating these shows and developing them.”

Unlike, say, the Gloria Grahame portrayed in “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” Costello is well aware he’s of a generation separate from the one feeding the hit-making machinery now, and he actually seems tickled, not reluctant, at the prospect of redoubling his efforts elsewhere. It’s the fans, he suggests, that are overly glued to their CDs. “You should never assume you have either an obligation or a right to record,” he says. “There are lots of young, great artists whose moment is [now].” But, he adds, “That doesn’t mean there won’t be any more records. It just means there better be a good reason to make ‘em.”
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: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by sweetest punch »

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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Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", show in L.A. , Dec. 11 2017

Post by johnfoyle »

The song make the longlist for a Oscar

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/12/oscars ... ssion=true


Oscars 2018: Academy Reveals Best Original Song Shortlist, Including Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Mystery of Love’

Zack Sharf December 18, 2017


The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the 70 original songs still in contention for the Oscar this year. Five of the shortlisted songs will earn nominations, which are set to be revealed on January 23. Original songs from “Call Me By Your Name,” “Battle of the Sexes,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and more all made the shortlist this year. “City of Stars” from “La La Land” took home the prize last year.

The following tracks have been included on the Oscars shortlist for Best Original Song:

“U.N.I (You And I)” from “And the Winner Isn’t”
“Love And Lies” from “Band Aid”
“If I Dare” from “Battle of the Sexes”
“Evermore” from “Beauty and the Beast”
“How Does A Moment Last Forever” from “Beauty and the Beast”
“Now Or Never” from “Bloodline: Now or Never”
“She” from “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story”
“Your Hand I Will Never Let It Go” from “The Book of Henry”
“Buddy’s Business” from “Brawl in Cell Block 99”
“The Crown Sleeps” from “The Breadwinner”
“World Gone Mad” from “Bright”
“Mystery Of Love” from “Call Me by Your Name”
“Visions Of Gideon” from “Call Me by Your Name”
“Captain Underpants Theme Song” from “Captain Underpants The First Epic Movie”
“Ride” from “Cars 3”
“Run That Race” from “Cars 3”
“Tell Me How Long” from “Chasing Coral”
“Broken Wings” from “City of Ghosts”
“Remember Me” from “Coco”
“Prayers For This World” from “Cries from Syria”
“There’s Something Special” from “Despicable Me 3”
“It Ain’t Fair” from “Detroit”
“A Little Change In The Weather” from “Downsizing”
“Stars In My Eyes (Theme From Drawing Home)” from “Drawing Home”
“All In My Head” from “Elizabeth Blue”
“Dying For Ya” from “Elizabeth Blue”
“Green” from “Elizabeth Blue”
“Can’t Hold Out On Love” from “Father Figures”
“Home” from “Ferdinand”
“I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” from “Fifty Shades Darker”
“You Shouldn’t Look At Me That Way” from “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool”

“This Is How You Walk On” from “Gifted”
“Summer Storm” from “The Glass Castle”
“The Pure And The Damned” from “Good Time”
“This Is Me” from “The Greatest Showman”
“The Hero” from “The Hero”
“How Shall A Sparrow Fly” from “Hostiles”
“Just Getting Started” from “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast”
“Truth To Power” from “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”
“Next Stop, The Stars” from “Kepler’s Dream”
“The Devil & The Huntsman” from “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”
“Have You Ever Wondered” from “Lake of Fire”
“I’ll Be Gone” from “Lake of Fire”
“We’ll Party All Night” from “Lake of Fire”
“Friends Are Family” from “The Lego Batman Movie”
“Found My Place” from “The Lego Ninjago Movie”
“Stand Up For Something” from “Marshall”
“Rain” from “Mary and the Witch’s Flower”
“Myron/Byron” from “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)”
“Longing For Summer” from “Moomins and the Winter Wonderland”
“Mighty River” from “Mudbound”
“Never Forget” from “Murder on the Orient Express”
“Hold The Light” from “Only the Brave”
“PBNJ” from “Patti Cake$”
“Tuff Love (Finale)” from “Patti Cake$”
“Lost Souls” from “The Pirates of Somalia”
“How A Heart Unbreaks” from “Pitch Perfect 3”
“The Promise” from “The Promise”
“Kaadanayum Kaalchilambe” from “Pulimurugan”
“Maanathe Maarikurumbe” from “Pulimurugan”
“Stubborn Angel” from “Same Kind of Different as Me”
“Dancing Through The Wreckage” from “Served Like a Girl”
“Keep Your Eyes On Me” from “The Shack”
“On The Music Goes” from “Slipaway”
“The Star” from “The Star”
“Jump” from “Step”
“Tickling Giants” from “Tickling Giants”
“Fly Away” from “Trafficked”
“Speak To Me” from “Voice from the Stone”
“Walk On Faith” from “Year by the Sea”

Nominations for the 90th Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday, January 23. The officially ceremony will be held on Sunday, March 4 at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood. ABC will broadcast the ceremony ABC starting at 6:30 p.m. ET/ 3:30 p.m. PT.
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Post by Neil. »

Oof! That's a very long longlist! We can but pray.
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Post by verbal gymnastics »

I agree - how can that many songs be a shortlist? Surely the clue is in the "short" part of the word! :?
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
sweetest punch
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Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news ... -interview

Elvis Costello Talks 'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool' Song, Playing Vegas & Making More Music With Burt Bacharach

When Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool director Paul McGuigan and producer Barbara Broccoli went to an Elvis Costello show in London in hopes of wooing the British Grammy winner to write a song for their film about the life of actress Gloria Grahame, they got quite the shock.

As Costello sang “Church Underground,” from 2010’s National Ransom, an image of the Academy Award-winning actress flashed up on a mock television screen behind the singer/songwriter.

From there, it was a short leap for Costello to write “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” a haunting, piano-based tune that conveys the complex, true relationship between the aging, struggling Grahame, played by Annette Bening, and much younger actor Peter Turner, played by Jamie Bell, in the Sony Pictures Classic film, out now.

Costello, who was previously nominated for an Oscar for best original song in 2004 for “The Scarlet Tide” from Cold Mountain, talked to Billboard about a youth spent captivated by film noir, finding the right tone for the two lovers, and a potential album of previously unreleased music by him and Burt Bacharach (the two will perform at a Jan. 17 benefit in Solana Beach, California, to raise money for the victims of the Dec. 7 Lilac Fire that killed 46 horses and injured many of their caregivers).

What was your interest in Gloria?


The [2016 solo] Detour show had this fake television set onto which I could project visual cues to my songs, clues even to myself to unravel. The show was a semi-improvised, anecdotal presentation of my songs. This was quite an abstract connection between one image of the embodiment of the defiant troubled-looking still of [Gloria] in character and the psychology of an imaginary woman whom I had dreamt up this life for [in “Church Underground”]. It wasn’t really about her. I could have picked Ida Lupino, anyone else with that hint of the murderous.

All of this is a preface to Barbara and Paul came to my show at the London Palladium, and 20 minutes into the show, the person that they’ve come to talk to me about appears on the screen. I can’t imagine what went through their minds. It’s such a strange coincidence.

Do you believe in fate?


Well, I have to now, don’t I? Plus Gloria Grahame was one of the people that was in the films that inspired “Watching the Detectives.” It was being force-fed those films on late-night television in the '70s that caused me to write that song.

How did you come up with the concept for “You Shouldn't Look at Me That Way”?

The title really came from the way in which the looks between the lovers kept shifting from Gloria’s first encounter with Peter, which was kind of flirtatious. She’s quite coy. The most telling sequence is when she disrobes in front of him in a very matter-of-fact way and it happens to be when she says she’s going to audition for the [Royal Shakespeare Company] for Juliet, and he says, “Juliet? Don’t you mean the Nurse?” and she puts the sweater back on in one move. Her demeanor totally changes. He has to tell her his sexual history too. All along the way things are being revealed. It’s easy to overcomplicate these things and ennoble them as if you were very wise, but I’m just saying as a songwriter, these are all great clues as to how to write the song.

The real Gloria was considered scandalous for, among other things, her relationship with her stepson, but your song does not judge her.

[WARNING: SPOILER ALERT] Contained in this rendition of their story, I was asked to write a song that doesn’t argue with the story, doesn’t try to trump the story, doesn’t try to pull another card out. It resonates with the last emotional echo of the tale as it goes from her pulling away and Peter being left to we see the glorious Gloria skip down the aisle and accept her Academy Award in this lovely piece of real news footage and then the title card. Once you’re in that space, you’ve got about 30 seconds to grab people’s attention before they start heading for the lobby.

You do that by starting with a gorgeous, simple piano melody, and then the song builds into a fully orchestrated production. How did you develop the orchestration?

I turned it up super loud. I thought it needs to be another voice. I put the little dissonance in the second verse where there’s the high, slightly uncomfortable melody that’s up above the voice, where it says, “The flash bulbs may dazzle.” I wanted it to be a little off, one or two notes that rub against the harmony.

You even conducted the orchestra yourself
.

I’m waving my arms, pretending I know how to conduct. The music is written in front of the [musicians]. I didn’t learn to write music down until I was 38.

What led you to that?

I wrote 11 hours of television music in 1990, 1991 with Richard Harvey, who wrote a bunch of very good scores. At that time I couldn’t write music down, so that’s what motivated me. I felt like I was a poor partner to him. [Composer] Harry Gregson-Wlliams was Richard’s assistant at that time, and he’ll tell you the torture of having to decode my squeaky little things. Richard would then orchestrate them and I would argue, “Well, actually, I was hearing that a lot more romantic or a lot more aggressive.” I thought the only way I can learn how to do this is learn how to write it down accurately myself, so I did. Then I had the experience of working with the Brodsky Quartet, and that was big motivation.

When we did “Watching the Detectives,” it was the first record that Steve Nieve played on. He was 19, straight out of the Royal College, and we’d only just met. I said, “This is about detectives, I want a piano thing that sounds like Bernard Hermann,” and, of course, he didn’t know what I’m talking about, so I go [makes staccato, sharp sound], and what you hear on the record is this galloping piano thing that rushes the beat and it sounds like one of those sudden jarring gestures that Hermann would use a lot. But we didn’t have 19 clarinets or whatever he used [in] Torn Curtain; we just had a battered upright in an eight-track studio. What you imagine you have to render whether you use a fuzz-tone guitar or a symphony orchestra and everything in between. What learning to write gave me was I did have the choice. Sometimes I still want the fuzz-tone guitar to do that dramatic gesture, sometimes I want a real bass clarinet, not a synthetic sound.

“You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way” sounds influenced by your work with Burt Bacharach on 1998’s Painted From Memory and “God Give Me Strength” from the 1996 film Grace of My Heart.

I would be tremendously honored if anyone thought that. I learned a huge amount from working with Burt, and I consciously use that combination of alto flute and flugelhorn to acknowledge [the movie’s 1978 setting]. If it had been 1982, I guess it would have sounded like a George Michael song or Wham! Something that was on the radio then.

Is there another album of music coming from you and Burt?

We wrote 10 more Painted From Memory songs for a Painted From Memory musical, which got as far as one workshop and then it seemed to run out of steam because it’s a very difficult proposition to put so many slow, sad songs into a theatrical evening. I believe those and a couple of other songs we wrote for another musical project are some of the most beautiful melodies Burt has ever written.

Are they coming out?

I will make sure they damn well do, the best of them that suit me for singing. Not every song obviously suits being heard outside of the context.

You start a run of six shows in Las Vegas in February. What can people expect?

That’s called Now/Not Now. Detour was very much anecdotal, and then there was the Imperial Bedroom and Other Chambers tour, where we took a specific folio of songs and tried to find songs that naturally lived with them. In Now/Not Now, we have an opportunity to choose different songs from my catalog. There are always going to be half a dozen songs that everybody assumes are going to be in your show -- and you should be really glad. That’s a compliment. I fought that for some time, and I’m starting to get around to the way of thinking that I should show some gratitude for the fact that people still want to hear them and find the best way to play them. I’ve got a lot of new songs that I’ve never recorded. I don’t know how many of them I can put in there. In Vegas, they don’t want you to play too long. Instead of that being something inhibiting, maybe that’s a good pressure. People are used to 2-and-a-1/2 hour shows. What’s the 90-minute version of this?

You also continue to workshop a musical based on 1957 classic, A Face in the Crowd, a film that seems more relevant today than ever.

I wrote 19 songs for A Face in the Crowd. It’s a great film. We went back to [Budd Schulberg’s original short story], “Your Arkansas Traveler.” Sarah Ruhl adapted that as much as the screenplay Schulberg wrote for [director Elia] Kazan. It will be on a stage. It has a different rhythm, different presentation [from the film]. It doesn’t have the luxury of cinematic cutting. It has to do things in the frame of a theater. Like Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, it’s about the ability of television to make monsters. I wouldn’t demean the story by comparing it to the present resident of the White House because that would be somebody too mediocre to trouble with because this will pass.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Neil.
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Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2005 6:14 am
Location: London

Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Post by Neil. »

sweetest punch wrote:

Is there another album of music coming from you and Burt?

We wrote 10 more Painted From Memory songs for a Painted From Memory musical, which got as far as one workshop and then it seemed to run out of steam because it’s a very difficult proposition to put so many slow, sad songs into a theatrical evening. I believe those and a couple of other songs we wrote for another musical project are some of the most beautiful melodies Burt has ever written.

Are they coming out?

I will make sure they damn well do, the best of them that suit me for singing. Not every song obviously suits being heard outside of the context.
Shame this doesn't seem to be happening any more. I hope that Burt and Elvis try to get the songs recorded by people like Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Barbra Streisand and maybe some new young artists like Cynthia Erivo - as well as their own version, of course. Though whether they'll get anyone to pay them to do a whole orchestrated album these days is another matter altogether!
sweetest punch
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Location: Belgium

Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Post by sweetest punch »

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Neil.
Posts: 1576
Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2005 6:14 am
Location: London

Re: New Elvis song in "Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool", on Oscar longlist

Post by Neil. »

Jamie Bell and Annette Bening have been nominated for Baftas this morning. The film's also been nominated for best adapted screenplay.

There's no best song category at the Baftas, but at least the film has been given some 'oomf' ahead of the Oscar nominations being announced soon.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news ... ead%20more
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