Very, very interesting article, Linda! Thanks so much for sharing, once
again showing what this group is all about.
Nance
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 1:58 PM, Linda Gehres <ljgehres@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The legendary duet album that never was; Paul McCartney releases reissue
of record, including songs with Elvis Costello
*David Bauder The Associated Press*
The Toronto Star
<http://newspapers.web.ca/news/nr/en/The%20Toronto%20Star> , Mar. 22, 2017
Paul McCartney's Flowers in the Dirt box is as much an archeology project
as a reissue, in which listeners can discover the bones of a landmark album
that could have been made but wasn't.
Two of the reissue's three audio discs are devoted to McCartney's
songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello in 1987 and 1988, which
produced some 15 songs. Listening to the work, some of it first made
available this week, it's hard not to wonder why they didn't make a duet
album like Costello later did with Burt Bacharach. Instead, they decided
not to alter their original plan.
The mythical disc could have started with "My Brave Face" and "Veronica",
two of each man's biggest hits of the 1980s. And that was only the
beginning.
"Looking back, you could say that," McCartney told The Associated Press.
"If we'd just done a few more of these demos, we could have made a crazy
album. But we didn't. That was as far as we got."
McCartney initiated the partnership at the suggestion of his manager. The
former Beatle was looking for varied sounds, styles and producers as he
began work on a new album. McCartney and Costello worked for a few weeks in
a room above McCartney's studio in Sussex, England, where they'd write a
song a day and immediately go downstairs to record it
"There were many echoes, working with Elvis and working with John
(Lennon), because I know Elvis is a big Beatles fan," McCartney said.
They're all from Liverpool, too. McCartney worked with Costello as he did
with Lennon, two men with acoustic guitars sitting across from one another.
With McCartney left-handed, it felt to him like looking into a mirror.
"I think the key was not to turn up in short trousers with my fan club
card sticking out of my top pocket," Costello said. "I'd been asked to
write songs in 1987, knowing what I know, having done what I'd done for
that whole 10 years, which seemed like a long time then. Paul knows what
he's done and he knows I love him.
"That said, you're bound to look up sometimes and think, 'Bloody hell,
it's him!'" he said.
In this week's reissue, one disc contains nine of those 15 songs, recorded
the day they were written. Another disc features the same songs produced by
the two men later with a band added, primarily sung by McCartney since it
was his album, after all.
To a certain extent, something is lost in translation.
Take the song "Tommy's Coming Home," for instance. Inspired fun with
McCartney and Costello singing together, the tempo slows and the song drags
in the full band version.
The two-man recordings "have a lot of charm and a good deal of cheek,"
Costello said. "You can almost hear us laughing out loud at what I call
'the Mersey cadences.' It's in the blood. It's in the water. It's in him
and it's got to come out."
The songs they wrote were dispersed between the two men or left on the
shelf. Four were included on Flowers in the Dirt, including the stately
"That Day is Done" and the call-and-response "You Want Her Too."
Costello later recorded "So Like Candy" and "Pads, Paws & Claws". Some
demos creeped out through the years.
"My Brave Face" could have been as big as anything he and Lennon had
written, McCartney said. His pride in some of the songs he had written
without Costello is one reason Flowers in the Dirt took shape the way it
did. But you can hear another reason between the lines listening to him
talk. Perhaps he didn't want to pull Costello into the weight of
comparisons that he felt for all of his post-Beatles career.
