Look What It’s Come To

Today, Paul McCartney is 80 years old. He is a titan of pop music, the closest thing we’ll see to Mozart in our lifetimes. And once upon a time, he wrote some songs with Elvis Costello.

Their brief, fruitful songwriting collaboration gave both of them hit singles. For EC, it was 1989’s “Veronica,” which hit 19 in the US; for McCartney, it was “My Brave Face,” which hit 25 on the charts in 1989. That 1989 McCartney album, Flowers In The Dirt, was almost produced by Costello. 

By the time McCartney released Off the Ground in 1993, both he and EC were still cherry picking songs from their fruitful songwriting sessions. (EC had featured a few on Mighty Like A Rose in 1991.) “Mistress and Maid” is one of two co-writes that rated a spot on this record. 

Flowers In The Dirt was heralded as a “return to form” for McCartney, who had already returned to form a few times since the start of his career with the Beatles, and would have a few more returns to form in the decades ahead. That makes Off The Ground the record that comes AFTER the return to form, and you can hear some of the air already deflating from the balloon. 

There are some great songs, but the production sounds listless, especially on “Mistress and Maid,” which suffers from an arrangement that’s a little too busy and a little too synthy. This performance, where McCartney and Costello performed the song together along with the Brodsky Quartet, takes a far stronger approach.

As EC himself has admitted in interviews, it’s a little too easy to assume that the biting moments in these co-writes are Costello’s, and the sweetness is McCartney. The same mistake was made when Paul was writing with John Lennon, and it wasn’t always true then either. 

I do think it’s safe to say that putting these two in a room together has sharpened both of their capabilities, to the point where the lyric on “Mistress” is as focused and powerful as anything either of them has written alone. The narrative is simple—a woman watching her lover drift away from their love, pleading for hope and terrified for the future. The scenes they sketch in the first verse—the man returning home to his usual drink, the pleading choruses where the woman wants to shout at the back of his head, “Look at me, look at me, look at me; I’m afraid”—are twisted like knives by the second verse and chorus, where the woman finally realizes there may be nothing left to save. 

Stream it here on the service of your choice.