Rank the Records: Almost Blue (1981)

Almost Blue was not Elvis Costello’s first stylistic detour. In some ways, every album he released to this point has had its own sound; Get Happy!! added a heavy influence from Motown and Stax singles. 

But this was a harder pivot, from “I’m going to make my music and explore different sounds” to “I’m going to Nashville to record a country covers album with an old-school RCA producer who keeps a gun in the studio.”

Of course, since Almost Blue, Costello has become an adept stylistic chameleon, altering his approach as his tastes and interests evolved. This has usually been in the company of a dedicated collaborator–Burt Bacharach, Allen Toussaint, ?uestlove and the Roots, opera singer Anne Sophie Von Otter. Even when these collaborators are behind the scenes, their influence is palpable; Geoff Emerick engineered classic Beatles records and then produced the Beatle-esque Imperial Bedroom.  

Maybe that strong collaborative guide is what’s missing from Almost Blue. Or maybe that’s absolving Costello himself from blame. You can probably tell where I fall on the album; for me, it’s a limp effort that subsumes too much of EC and the band’s voice within a syrupy lather of pedal steel and strings. NOT that there’s anything wrong with pedal steel and strings! But you could drop George Jones or any other contemporary pop country singer into the studio and cut vocals, and you’d get roughly the same album. Instead of meeting the genre head-on and recording an Elvis Costello country covers record, he recorded a stock-standard country covers record that just happens to include him on vocals. 

By the mid-1970s, producer Billy Sherrill was perhaps “the most reliable hitmaker in Nashville” (as Stephen Thomas Erlenwine described him in his AllMusic bio). Though his longest and most successful tenure was with George Jones and Tammy Wynette, he had produced hits for just about every contemporary country artist, becoming a master of an approach dubbed “countrypolitan” for its smooth mix of pop and country sounds. 

Sherrill and Costello didn’t exactly vibe, as documented in a making-of special broadcast on the BBC around the album’s release. As EC himself puts it in the 1994 liner notes to Rhino’s Almost Blue reissue: 

After a while it was less of a collaboration and more of a contest in cultural differences and after all it cannot be ignored that cameras were rolling much of the time. 

It’s easy to imagine how their “cultural differences” fed into their inability to collaborate. The songs are exceptional; the instrumentation is lush; the singer sounds adrift within them. 

Would a better album have resulted from a producer more willing to meet Costello halfway? Could EC have escaped the assembly line production style of early 1980s Nashville even if he wanted to? It’s hard to say, except to note that in the decades since Almost Blue, Costello has recorded plenty of fine country songs, and plenty of fine songs infused with a country spirit. In those cases, he’s either produced himself or worked with a more willing partner in crime. 

It’s hard not to comment on the Almost Blue era without also touching on EC’s emotional state at the time. The album originally began life as a covers project, spanning genres, before morphing into a country covers record. From even its earliest imaginings, the song selections drifted toward tales of heartbreak, as Costello explains in the 2004 liner notes to the next reissue of Almost Blue: 

Now I had developed the notion that I might better express my feelings through other people's words and music. Country ballads suited my blue mood most of all.

For me, Almost Blue is an album of “almosts.” There’s almost a few moments where the fire seems ready to ignite and the whole threatens to surpass the sum of its parts. There’s almost not a single bad note played by Steve Nieve who emerges as the album’s saving grace. 

And it’s almost possible to imagine that in an alternate universe, Costello recorded that abandoned album of moody covers instead, and only visited Nashville to play shows and visit his friend Nick Lowe’s father-in-law, Johnny Cash.

2. Trust (1981)

5. My Aim Is True (1977)

6. Get Happy!! (1980)

11. This Year’s Model (1978)

15. Armed Forces (1979)

26. Almost Blue (1981)