Something bizarre happens when people meet.
There is a 50% chance that the conversation turns to music, which is a conversation I both welcome and at the same time eagerly anticipate. Sometimes I like to try and musically stereotype new people, "You strike me as the type of guy who only listened to Blondie because Debbie Harry always had THO in her pictures,” or “this girl must really love remixed versions of that song the Quad City DJs produced for the movie Space Jam,” and so on or whatever etc.
But there is an innocent question that always works its way into that conversation that used to drive me crazy....
“What type of music do you listen to?”
Because, how the fuck do you answer this?
In the past couple years I’ve realized the answer isn’t really what matters. It's like being on a job interview... you’re just proving you can handle human interaction without sounding like a pretentious asshole or an apathetic dickhead.
In my youth, I used to think saying you like one thing short changes your chance of having a common interest, while saying “Oh, I like everything” is essentially announcing your candidacy for the Least Interesting Man in the World, which meant you needed to have an answer worth hearing. I now know that's not the case. The reality is someone is just making small talk with me.
So what kind of music am I into? Everything...but not everything…. kind of like that Meatloaf song, “I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that” (My third favorite song to wrongfully assume is referring to butt-sex, right behind Inner Circle’s “Sweat (A La La Long)” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.”) I like music that can hit you from different angles. The harder/more ways it can hit you, the better. I've narrowed these ways down to a basic three that generally work for me:
1) Ear test.
Pretty simple. You listen to the record, if you're tapping your toes, then check. Sometimes albums do this in waves like the Pixies Doolittle. You like half of the songs at first, don't like the other half, listen enough times and your taste kind of inverses with you eventually LOVING the other half you originally couldn’t handle.
2.) Wait, what the fuck did they just say?
Some people like to pay attention to the guitar parts, others dig bass lines and drum beats, which is all cool, but personally I pay the most attention to the lyrics. I enjoy being rewarded for a close listen. Tasty nugs my friends, dig and ye shall find.
And lastly...
3.) This has to be part of something bigger, like a conspiracy or some insane artistic statement that I could never comprehend.
If I'm on Wikipedia researching song origins/meanings, we're getting close. If I listen to an album enough, and it becomes the soundtrack to a movie I've written in my head with my own unstable psychosis...clear plot, beginning, middle and end- we've met the criteria.
 |
| ...that I've never been out in the sun. |
So that brings us here. Trust by Elvis Costello. My love of Costello kind of just showed up one day. I'd heard radio stuff, read the praises in Rolling Stone, seen him pop up in an Austin Powers sequel to serenade me (a la Burt Bacharach from the first film), and at some point I decided to take a run at him. I bought Rhino's double disc Elvis Costello’s greatest hits, got hooked, stumbled upon some fools folly at the local record store when three of his remastered CDs (Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom, and Trust), somehow made it into a used resale bin and now we're pretty much here.
The artwork on two of these albums was fantastically nutso. Imperial Bedroom sort of looks like what you'd expect Pablo Picasso to paint after he spent 20 minutes leafing through an issue of Hustler, and Armed Forces has a giant painting of oh I don't know, just a couple fucking elephants who seem ready to stomp the shit out of everything. In this case you can only find the artist and album name if you know where to look, whereas with Trust it's just an unassuming portrait of Mr. Costello staring at something or someone over my shoulder from just above his tinted horn rimmed glasses.
As it was, all three of these CDs were a solid chunk of Costello at his best. Trust seemed okay at first. Having experienced the full canon in retrospect provided a little more hindsight than might have been afforded when this puppy released in '81. A couple songs were instantly favorites, others didn't exactly do it for me, and you know how this usually goes... Trust seemed to hover in limbo between his bubble gum pop, and his 'slice my wrists until I bleed out in the bathtub' sad stuff. (There used to be a time when a mans only choice for music to listen to while you wallow in self-pity was to buy a stack of Willie Nelson records, but when Costello got bummed he proved that market was by no means cornered).
So track by track first impression, listening through the cd front to back, on a five sausage scale went as follows:
1) Clubland
|
(2 out of 5)
|
2) Lover's Walk
|
(6! out of 5)
|
3) You'll Never Be a Man
|
(4 out of 5)
|
4) Pretty Words
|
(5 out of 5)
|
5) Strict Time
|
(4 out of 5)
|
6) Luxembourg
|
(2 out of 5)
|
7) Watch Your Step
|
(3 out of 5)
|
8) New Lace Sleeves
|
(5 out of 5)
|
9) From a Whisper to a Scream
|
(1 out of 5)
|
10) Different Finger
|
(2 out of 5)
|
11) White Knuckles
|
(4 out of 5)
|
12) Shot With His Own Gun
|
(2 out of 5)
|
13) Fish 'N' Chip Paper
|
(2 out of 5)
|
14) Big Sister's Clothes
|
(3 out of 5)
|
For those of you Moneyball analytic fans at home, you’re probably wondering “Hmmm the album scores a 45 out of 75, does that mean he picked an album that scored at a 60% as his ultimate album? He must be smoking crack and he probably sucks at everything.” Now I’m not in any position to say if any of that is false or not - but I can tell you that this album is more of a grower than a show-er. (And it's not just me. No single from this album cracked the British top 40 and yet it still seems to always get really nice reviews from actual music critics).
 |
| Trust me, I have one up my rear too. |
Dig a little deeper, pay attention to the lyrics. The album is a goldmine. I sat down and took notes on what I think about each song, but the result was nothing short of a George R. R. Martin novella (minus the dragons and incest), so for brevity sake, here’s an extended snapshot:
We open with "Clubland." What is this song even about…? Who gives a shit, this album is all about tones and moods. Everything is packaged to look like one thing, but actually be something else, and I think that’s where this album makes it’s mark. You hear the guitar paired with piano from the get-go, and it starts fun but ends up plenty sinister. For the longest time I thought one of the lyrics was “with a handful of bananas,” because why not? I don’t know much about current British politics, let alone what the climate was like in the 80s.
The next song, “Lover’s Walk’ is unlike anything else I’ve heard Costello do. When the guitar and piano drop out and it’s just vocals and a drum beat, it’s audible bliss. I’m still floored that this track never made his double album greatest hits.
Song three, “You’ll Never Be a Man” seems like the worlds most mediocre throwaway at first listen. But those freaking lyrics, man. At first it seems like he’s singing about being on the delivering end of a Las Vegas hotel domestic violence knockout, or maybe he’s just mad at a local politician, but again who cares? For a while I was mishearing the lyrics in a way that made it seem like he was just trying to get a reluctant lady into bed. “You strike a profile on the low side of imagination. My eyes climb down to find the point of possible saturation.” Wait, did he just say what I think he did?
The next song starts off with him getting slapped, and uses the term “booby prize.” What’s a booby prize? I don’t know, but I do know I want one. “Pretty Words” is another song that could be about 4 different things, and starts of happy but ends up with millions of people people massacred (that’s not hyperbole, it’s in the song).
Guitar licks and jumping piano keys start the next track, and it seems like it’s going to be a light ditty, but it's just as dark and twisted as the rest. “Strict Time” has some of my favorite lyrics on the album. “Oh muscles flex and fingers curl, and a cold sweat breaks out on a sweater girl.” So it’s about getting hot and heavy right? Then he makes mention to “musical valium,” “smoking the everlasting cigarette of chastity,” and “cute assistants stay alive, more like a handjob than a hand jive.” Oh. Yet another song that’s probably about something political and topical. First listen is like a solid three minutes of “wait, did he just say what I think he said?”
Other tidbits of note: “Luxembourg” and “Watch Your Step” are rife with paranoia for God only knows what. “From a Whisper to a Scream” sounds like they produced this album wasted, which they did*, and the result is a track that sounds like its playing off a cassette you left in the sun for 3 weeks. The theme spanning from “New Lace Sleeves” to “From a Whisper to a Scream” to “Different Finger” to “White Knuckles” and ending with “Shot With His Own Gun” could be it's own Greek tragedy. “New Lace Sleeves” might be one of my favorite songs ever on it’s own, but it fits well. A little too well...
I recently listened to the full album three times back to back, enjoying the first run, trying to catch the best lyrics on the second take, and then indulging my own mental breakdown with a eureka moment on trip number three. What if this entire fucking album is just one long story? IF it was, there would be sex, betrayal, jilted lovers, a philandering male lead, chicks getting smacked like a prodigy video, possible murder, and then a tease at the end. Then I listened to the vinyl press, with its track list broken into two respective sides… sweet Mother of Jesus, what if it’s TWO SEPARATE LONG STORIES?! Not positive how it works for me that well, but it does. What happens in what song I’ll leave up to you, but know that when he tells the chick to put her ring on a different finger, and he doesn't know her last name, implied adulterous boots are about to be suggestively knocked.
Of course none of this babbling is Costello’s intended effect. He wrote these as separate songs, with separate inspirations, and various targets to pen a quip about, (usually either the government or his wife, neither of who you'd say really had his “trust” at the time) but I finally realized the phrase “from a whisper to a scream” is meant to be all sorts of dirty, so I’m running with it. Get her attention, earn her trust, and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. Elvis you sly boots you.
So in short, the too long; didn’t read [TL:DR] version of this is basically:
Trust does things to me. Lots of things. That is why I pick it as my ultimate album.
*As Costello himself states on linear notes of a Trust reissue:
“This was easily the most drug-influenced record of my career... It was completed close to a self-induced nervous collapse on a diet of rough 'scrumpy' cider, gin and tonic, various powders... and, in the final hours, Seconal and Johnnie Walker Black Label."
