Tell Me Now

Having recently explained my middling perspective on Elvis Costello’s first foray into country-and-western music, 1981’s Almost Blue, let’s talk about one of his many successful works in the genre. “Heart Shaped Bruise” is as good an entry point into EC’s country darkness as any; it’s just one of many songs that could serve that purpose. 

2004’s The Delivery Man may or may not be a “country” album, but it is shot through with a deep dose of roots music, from twang to deep hot Southern soul. As he’s mixing up the medicine, Costello doesn’t play up to any one genre’s expectations, but instead draws freely from whatever source best serves the song. As always, the Impostors are chameleons, adapting to the music seamlessly, dipping in and out of conventions without telegraphing a single move. 

“Heart Shaped Bruise” is a dark, brutal, beautiful country ballad about love and violence, roughly in that order. The “country” part is exemplified by the unrequited yearning, and the impeccable pedal steel work of John McAfee, who’s been a part of Costello’s music since his debut album and was also a key player on Almost Blue. “Heart Shaped Bruise” is a duet sung with Emmylou Harris, whose mere presence elevates; here, EC tosses her a softball right over the center of the plate, and Emmylou smashes it into outer space. 

Costello’s great insight in “Heart Shaped Bruise” is to complicate the phrase beyond its ; there is a bruise in the shape of a heart, but the heart itself becomes its own bruise, aching at the touch of a painful relationship. It’s a tender song, but there is an implicit urgency threaded through the lyrics; each duet partner’s verse begins with the quiet demand, “Tell me now.” As carefully as the singers approach the lyric, it remains insistent. 

That phrase also implies so much unsaid, as if whatever physical or emotional pain has been inflicted could be dispelled with a simple answer to a question. But then, the violence itself is also implied; there’s no outright reveal of a slap or a push, but how else would someone get a heart-shaped bruise? 

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There are a few other notable works that use the phrase “heart shaped bruise” but the earliest and most notable that I could find is a 1980 photograph by Nan Goldin, which now resides in the collection at the Met in New York. 

Larissa Pham authored a terrific essay about Goldin’s “Heart Shaped Bruise” for the Paris Review; I can’t recommend it enough. It really inspired me to re-examine the song, especially this passage: 

In her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison writes of having an ambivalent relationship to female pain—the twinned desires of wanting to dwell in the wound, to make art about it, from it, while also not wanting to be perceived as a woman who lingers in her own suffering. “The boons of a wound never get rid of it; they just bloom from it,” Jamison writes. “It’s perilous to think of them as chosen. Perhaps a better phrase to use is wound appeal, which is to say: the ways a wound can seduce, how it promises what it rarely gives.”

EC’s “Heart Shaped Bruise” approaches this scenario from two ends–not just the wounded, but the attacker as well. Let’s follow that assumption; the narrator of the first verse is the man, the emotionally wounded one, and the narrator of the second verse is the woman, who in a single exceptional verse lays out the interior thoughts of a lover who feels drawn time and again into abuse: 

The only suggestion of violence, “When I approach you just lash out,” is buried in the verse; her first impulse is to reach back out to pull her lover in, and when the violence emerges, she doesn’t recoil but instead considers whether she should endure the violence to stay in the relationship. She sings as though she’s under his sway, and that’s echoed in the song by a faint artifact during Emmylou’s verse–you can hear EC singing the same lyrics far in the background, which I assume is left over from his guide vocal on the original track, before Emmylou laid down her performance. 

(Whether intentional or accidental, it’s a goosebumps moment when you first hear it; I just discovered it now, after twenty years of living with the record, when I listened on headphones and had the volume up pretty loud.)

To paraphrase Jamison above, this “Heart Shaped Bruise” is a wound that seduces but also promises what it rarely gives. The cost of that bruise is far greater for the woman than the man. In fact, his opening verse slips by in a common vernacular of pop heartbreak, but a closer look reveals the cruel immaturity at the heart of his feelings: