I Love You Twisted

Everything is improved by a horn section. 

Not just songs. I guarantee, if a full horn section turned up right now at your place of business, you’d be delighted. Maybe you could hire one to wake you up in the morning, or tuck you in at night. Sounds delightful. 

Elvis Costello knows this, and he’s masterful at careful, calculated deployment of a horn section. You can’t just lather it onto every song, because then you’re just the Asbury Jukes, and we already have one of those, we don’t need another one. 

The horns on “15 Petals,” from 2002’s When I Was Cruel, are almost percussive at times. They’re melodic, but also punctuation, emphasis. They don’t support the vocal; they interrupt and force home their own counterpoint. 

Costello wrote “15 Petals” as a fifteenth-anniversary tribute to his wife Cait O’Riordan, so it would be tempting to start reading into those horn interruptions and the relentless percussion and making assumptions about their relationship status at the time. The truth is that this is an aggressive, unorthodox love song, one that’s compelling because it captures a relationship from an unexpected angle. 

This is not a gentle, passive love, not a love at rest. It’s not a passion that’s easily contained or reasoned. It’s a love that is active, electric, pushing participants toward it like a magnet and away from it like competing particles. It lives inside its own galaxy, its own language; inside jokes are scattered behind as it goes. 

The love in “15 Petals” is beautiful in its own way, but it’s not a Hallmark picture of romance. It’s steeped in the reality of human feeling, and in the unreality of an irrepressible attraction.