It Wowed The Crowd

I think I respect Elvis Costello’s 2020 album Hey Clockface more than I enjoy it. 

It has great songs, some of them woefully underrated in the bounty of riches we’ve experienced from EC in the past several years. “Byline” is a crushing ballad of loss and reflection; “No Flag” and “We Are All Cowards Now” feel like sequels to the themes on Wise Up Ghost, where Costello lyrically predicted our modern cultural climate of fear, resignation, and a war on truth. 

There were songs from Hey Clockface recorded before the pandemic hit in March 2020, but the final product is definitely reflective of the times–there are moments of terror, confusion, rage; of unexpected, overwhelming beauty. 

“Phonographic Memory” is spoken-word free poetry laid down over an instrumental bed of nylon-string acoustic guitar harmonically processed backwards and forwards, anxious and unsettling. It’s technically a B-side from the “We Are All Cowards Now” single, but it’s part of the Hey Clockface sessions, and there are other spoken-word tracks much like it on the album proper. 

It’s an interesting digression, trying out spoken word 43 years into a songwriting career that’s been both critically and commercially successful. Bold move, Cotton–let’s see how it plays out. 

On Hey Clockface, “Revolution #49” is arguably the most successful of the spoken word pieces. There’s an atmosphere and urgency created by both the instrumentation and EC’s plaintive, desperate performance of the words. But even then, it’s hard to hear it and not wonder, why not sing this? 

“Phonographic Memory” feels even more free-form than “Revolution #49,” and less substantial as a result. The story within is a snapshot of fun house mirror politics in the future (or an alternate universe of the present?), where the disembodied voice of Orson Welles is compiled from old tapes to speak truths that maybe no embodied human could manage. 

If there’s precedent in EC’s catalog for “Phonographic Memory,” it might be “A Town Called Big Nothing,” an oddity released as a single in 1987 and featuring actor Sy Richardson narrating a surrealist take on spaghetti Westerns while his father plays trumpet solos over Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas’ accompaniment. Like “Phonographic Memory,” it’s less committed to meaning and more committed to mood; what one responds to most is just the feeling conjured as the words roll by and the music floats, like an overheard conversation or a whispered threat.