Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink Quotes

“I went ahead and read all of George Bernard Shaw’s plays for my own pleasure, because I liked the cut of his beard.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

“A lot of pop music has come out of people failing to copy their model and accidentally creating something new. The closer you get to your ideal, the less original you sound.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“Can a mere song change people’s minds? I doubt that it is so, but a song can infiltrate your heart and the heart may change your mind.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“Cook was then very handsome in a fey English way and dressed in floor-length, striped djellaba. In the role of the dead-eyed Spiggott, he intoned lines like “You fill me with inertia,” while appearing utterly indifferent to the beauties who danced in attendance. It was a scene that might have provided the basic blueprint for what would later become the Pet Shop Boys’ career.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“I didn’t know anything then about odd-metered bars of music, but as Burt told me years later, you don’t count those beats, you just feel them and the tension that they create.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“There was a Fender Palomino acoustic lying in the corner in an open case, which, as you know, often symbolizes low morals or easy virtue in paintings of antiquity.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

“I think records started getting better again because everyone was dropping that tedious pose that there was no past. You could hear that The Clash were raiding their record collections for anything that they could turn into new songs.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

“We’re not the ones making all the false promises, then getting caught in an obvious lie or with our fingers in the till. Maybe that’s why they call them “the fortunes of war.” They can be quoted on the stock exchange.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

“Once I had recognized that it was not my vocation to write a happy ending, I did my damnedest to avoid one entirely. I once referred to this process as “Messing up my life, so I could write stupid little songs about it,” and I can’t improve on that description here, but then songs are never exactly taken from life.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“There was that reference to Allan Sherman’s trip to a summer camp, in “Goon Squad.” Mother, Father, I’m here in the zoo I can’t come home ’cause I’ve grown up too soon”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“Such petty provocations became routine, but we no longer had the benefit of surprise. We played a lot of good shows back then, but the more complacent a crowd seemed, the harder we pushed, and I probably ended up appearing faintly ridiculous at times. I felt like a clockwork toy running around in green light, pulling pantomime faces in vain or in spite. I’d wind people up and then let them down. We would either thrill and amaze or disappoint and disgrace and then get out of town.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“Now wild-eyed with the last of his vapor, her husband leapt to his feet and bellowed a desperate, enigmatic question to the first glimmer of dawn light. “Did you ever see a stare like a Persian cat?” And then, out like that light, he fell back in a stupor. •”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“If everything you say sounds like the beginning of an argument, it is easy for someone to miss the joke and look for the smart remark, where only the heartfelt word is written.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“were charged with getting the computer to obey their commands, as if it were a wild, untamable beast. They were the princes of”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“It was a real party of swells.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“We’d booked twelve weeks of studio time, a fantastic amount of leeway, given that my first record was cut in a total of twenty-four hours and This Year’s Model in a mere eleven days. We”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“It was a tale of doubt and betrayal, one familiar from so many country songs, but the reason these stories turn up so many times is that, for all our vanities, there are not so many ways to be a fool, or, as I wrote once, “Man uses words to dress up his vile instincts.” Anytime I strayed into an attractive but opaque image, Loretta pulled me back to the story. If the harmony became unsettling, she wanted a plain chord to serve as an anchor to your feelings. If I didn’t know it already, I found it was just as hard to write a song using simple tools as it was to turn the fancy tricks that I’d long since put away. So, we finished the song and I went back downtown to debut the number on my favorite stage in the world, the Ryman Auditorium, where I was opening for Bob Dylan that night.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“My first lyric departed directly from Mingus’s title “This Subdues My Passion.” If you didn’t think the song was already half written after that title, then you had no business dallying with the tune in the first place. I wrote about the way that music tempers the violence within a man. This subdues my passion And it may control my rage It may stem the poison that spills out onto the page”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“A senior BBC music programmer smarmed up to me and took this opportunity to remind me of my diminished status in his petty universe, “Of course, you’d have had a lot more hits if you’d just taken out all the sevenths and minor chords.” I suppose I would have had even more, if I’d only taken out all of the music entirely and most of the words, too.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

“Paul McCartney was at the microphone singing Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” to an almost empty Royal Albert Hall. Many of the other performers on the bill were waiting to rehearse but had melted away to the edges of the auditorium to give him some space. Neil Finn was talking to Johnny Marr, Sinéad O’Connor was there with her son, and the emcee for the night, Eddie Izzard, was looking over the running order with Chrissie Hynde. George Michael arrived quietly and was waiting patiently for his turn to sing.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

“There was no way to go back. Time and the wrecking ball have taken care of the rest.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

“When The Attractions and I first played the Palais in January 1979, one reviewer unfavorably compared us to Freddie and the Dreamers.”
― Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink