Rank the Records: Trust (1981)

“I don’t wanna be first, I just wanna last…”

We know Elvis Costello is not a straight-ahead autobiographical songwriter; far from it. We also know that he’s canny about tapping his own life and times for inspiration. Building those connections in a way that feels specific and universal at the same time is one of his great gifts. 

On “You’ll Never Be A Man,” the third song from 1981’s Trust, he sings the line above. In the context of the tune, it’s a plea from the singer to build a more enduring relationship with the object of his affections. 

You can also read the line as a statement from the artist himself. He was coming off a towering run of albums, singles, and tours that had provided him with near-instant notoriety and critical recognition in the US and the UK. Creating that work had taken its toll on his sobriety and sanity. Although his songwriting had moments of nuance and sensitivity, much of the work relied on an accompanying bombast. Seen from a distance, it’s easy to imagine burnout on the horizon. 

With Trust, Elvis Costello took his first step toward his life’s work. He was able to retain everything his audience loved about him and construct an album devoid of pretension, high concepts or emotional extremes. Instead, EC focuses on detailed, observational songwriting and exquisite performances. It’s the work of an artist who wants to last. 

If Trust has a conceit, it’s perhaps the idea of artifice, as filtered through the image of the Singer as voyerusitc performer. Rather than looking out at the audience on the cover, Costello instead glances to the side, as if to say, “Do you see what I see?” The inside sleeve depicts EC, the Attractions, and an assortment of friends and crew in a stage setup calling to mind the pop orchestras with which Costello’s own father, singer Ross MacManus, would perform throughout Costello’s youth. Photographed at the Hammersmith Palais in London, he writes about the scene in Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink: 

The Attractions were word-perfect. Nick Lowe was pretending to play a tenor sax, while our engineer led the string section. All the other members of the ensemble were our road crew, the staff of F-Beat Records, and the owners of Eden Studios…

I took my central place on the bandstand, I hid my eyes behind dark glasses and buttoned up my new silk Savile Row suit.

There was no way to go back.

Time and the wrecking ball have taken care of the rest.

Perhaps this is reading too much into the image and the moment, but it calls to mind my favorite passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, describing when Jay Gatsby decides to tether his own future and sense of self to Daisy: 

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Like Gatsby, I think EC caught a glimpse of where he could go with his career in music, and whether a conscious decision or a gut impulse, determined he needed to move away from whatever contemporary sound or outrage was closest at hand, and toward a more carefully considered output. It’s not that Costello has ever been a “careless” artist, even from his earliest music, but you can hear him reacting to his own impulses all over his early records. Whether it’s the revenge and guilt of his lyrics or the articulate attack of the music, even his ballads from the first four albums sound like an emotional exorcism. He’s a raw nerve–an articulate and melodic one, but a raw nerve nonetheless. 

There’s a passion and fire to the songs on Trust, but it’s also tempered by craft and intention. Just listen to the opening seconds of the record, on “Clubland.” It’s a lush, evocative sound that along with the title and lyrics calls to mind a beautiful, dark, foreboding bar located a staircase climb down from the street above. It’s warm but threatening at the same time. You have to keep your wits about you. 

Costello keeps his wits about him on Trust, acting as the detached observer more than the angry participant in the songs. Even when he sings about “I” or “you,” there’s a distance, echoing the photo on the other side of Trust’s inside sleeve–EC as private detective, decked out in trademark overcoat and fedora, his face lit by a match as he prepares a cigarette. 

I wrote this about EC’s previous long player, Get Happy!!: 

It’s a transitional album in some ways, from the brittle edge of his first three records to the increasing depth and resonance of Trust and Imperial Bedroom. But it stands alone as an explosion of creativity and musicality from a songwriter coming into his own, backed by a band at the top of their form. 

At some point, I have to believe EC must have realized that his take-no-prisoners, burn-the-bridge-I’m-stepping-over approach to his music and his career couldn’t sustain him. He was standing within a bright incandescent flash of inspiration and attention. He was indulging in his darkest impulses as a young pop star and didn’t seem to have an eye toward next week, let alone the next several decades of a possible career in music. 

On Trust, Elvis Costello emerges fully formed–as a songwriter, as a musician, as a bandleader, as an artist. There’s no punk pyrotechnics or cheap one-liners to hide behind. And yet, he’s disguised all the same, this time as “the cynic who recognizes his own culpability,” as author David Gouldstone describes it in his 1990 book God’s Comic. 

EC goes into fascinating detail on his own songwriting inspirations and impulses for both Trust and Imperial Bedroom in chapter five of Unfaithful Music; it’s a highly recommended read. Just the mere fact that many of the Trust and IB songs seem to have been written contemporaneously speaks volumes. As we’ll soon discuss, Imperial Bedroom has an ornate, muffled sound, like a music box playing from beneath a pillow. In contrast, Trust has the bright clear sheen of contemporary pop, even if it lacks the electronic instrumentation that might have been more prevalent on the charts at the time. 

Pity the sad old pop music fan, sitting deflated at his Amazon Essentials wireless keyboard, grappling to find the words to capture what he loves in a way he doesn’t hate. 

We’re all friends here, and so I’m comfortable admitting my slavering passion for Elvis Costello’s music, which birthed this publication and keeps it humming in fits and starts. It’s that same passion that often stands in between my brain and a legible, worthwhile piece of writing about the man’s work. 

I don’t know if I’ve stumbled upon what makes Trust rate so highly for me. I know that it’s proven to be an inexhaustible resource; I listen to it regularly, almost thirty years after I discovered it and forty-plus years after its release. It still has a pull, an elaborate interior that rewards you as you wander within it. The songs feel like intricate, individual artifacts that are connected only by the curiosity of their writer and the effortless musicianship of the band. “New Lace Sleeves,” “You’ll Never Be A Man,” “Clubland,” “Watch Your Step,” “Big Sister’s Clothes”--these are all top-tier EC tunes for me, the kind of songs that if he’d written just one or two of them in a career, he’d be a legend. 

They’re all here on Trust, a capstone to the first great era of Elvis Costello’s career, where he began to chart a path forward through the vagaries of pop music and into a limitless artistic future.

Rank the Records is a recurring feature at That Fatal Mailing List, where we dig into one of Elvis Costello’s 32 studio albums (according to Wikipedia) and I provide a completely subjective opinion on how they rank against each other. What’s my favorite EC record? What’s my seventeenth-favorite EC record?! Find out as we…RANK THE RECORDS (TM).

2. Trust (1981)

6. My Aim Is True (1977)

7. Get Happy!! (1980)

12. This Year’s Model (1978)

16. Armed Forces (1979)