Anyone Who Had a Heart (23 page)

Chapter

22

God Give Me Strength

I
got a call from the music supervisor on a picture called
Grace of My Heart
, who said they needed a song and asked if I would consider getting together with Elvis Costello to write it. I said yes. I had met Elvis once at Ocean Way studios in Los Angeles, but until we started writing together, I didn’t really know him at all.

Elvis Costello:
By sheer chance in 1988 or 1989, I was working at Ocean Way with T-Bone Burnett on the record
Spike
. We were doing this song that in my mind was kind of a Burt-influenced piece. I’d already written a few songs that were me trying to write a Burt Bacharach song. One was called “Accidents Will Happen” and another much less well known one was called “Just a Memory,” which Dusty Springfield recorded. That song was very much influenced by Burt, although when I actually sat with him and saw what he was doing, I realized I was miles off the model.

“Satellite,” the song I was doing on
Spike
, was not at all like Burt melodically but I was using marimbas and these little suspensions that reminded me of him. I don’t know what record Burt was working on but suddenly someone said, “Burt Bacharach’s down the hallway!” I went and introduced myself and asked him if he would come listen to the track.

Because I was deep within the recording, I imagined Burt would instantly hear the homage and the instrumentation. He listened as he listened to everything and said, “That’s interesting, thank you,” and then he left! He was complimentary but it wasn’t like, “A-ha! I get it now!” But he was great and it was really thrilling to meet him.

Elvis was in London and I was in Los Angeles, but they needed the song quickly so we started working together by phone and fax and pretty much put it all together in less than a week. The lead character in
Grace of My Heart
was loosely based on Carole King and a lot of the movie took place in the Brill Building, so I started writing in the six/eight, twelve/eight thing, which I hadn’t done in years.

I couldn’t go back and write something like “Don’t Make Me Over” again because I just don’t think that way anymore, but since this was for a movie about the Brill Building, I thought, “Okay. Great. I can do it.” Elvis wrote the lyrics and the music for the verse and I suggested a couple of new chords and changes, wrote the bridge, and did the orchestration.

Elvis Costello:
When the music supervisor said, “Would you write with Burt?” I went “What?” It took me all of ten seconds to answer because I couldn’t even believe it. In our first conversation over the phone, I asked Burt if we could work together on the music and he agreed to that. I don’t know what possessed me to say that but I’m sort of glad I did, because I actually got out of the gate first and wrote everything from the opening line of the vocal to the hook line and sent it to him.

Burt responded immediately and stretched a couple of the lines and revoiced some of the changes, but it was essentially the same melody. Then he added the intro figure. The fantastic thing was where he went on the choice of the bass note by saying, “Let’s make that a minor sixth,” or something. There were no uneven bars in the first body part of the song but I was rushing some of the phrasing on the back end. He stretched the melody in some sections over twice as much music so it sort of went half time in just one phrase.

And then I told him, “Oh, by the way, I’ve written a bridge.” There was no e-mail back then so we were doing all this by fax and these faxes were going back and forth with sheet music on them. I wrote a top line and then I recorded the song and played it into his answering machine. He transcribed it and a fax came back with the question, “Is this it?”

Then Burt sent me his bridge and this kind of huge symphonic thing happened in the middle of the song. I had to write lyrics to it and that gave me the way to write a third verse, and then we had the reprise and the tag and suddenly we had this epic song. That was the composition of that one. If I had said, “Okay, I’ll be the lyricist,” and waited until he had sent me something, it might have been totally different. I don’t really recall where the title “God Give Me Strength” came from. Out of thin air, I think.

I was down in Palm Beach, Florida, and I wrote the arrangement there for the strings. Then I went to New York and met Elvis so I could explain what I had written on the intro and the ending. The next day we went into the studio with a rhythm section and it wasn’t happening, so Elvis said, “Maybe you should move the synth player and you play piano.” I didn’t know this band and I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but I said, “Okay,” and I wound up playing piano like I always used to do in the old days.

We did it that way and it came out good, and the next day we put the strings and the horns on it. Allison Anders, who directed
Grace of My Heart
, was there when we did it, and she was ecstatic. Elvis and I were saying, “This is good. Maybe we should do an album together sometime.”

Elvis Costello:
We sent off what we had written and they asked us if we would voice it for the end titles. We were at the Power Station in New York and this was the first time Burt and I had been in the same room together. We had just borrowed the studio to rehearse, so Burt and I were in there learning the song as we performed it and he was telling me how he was going to orchestrate it.

Then we went in and cut it with Allison Anders and Illeana Douglas, who played the lead role in the movie, in the studio. It was a great band, with Will Lee on bass and David Spinoza on guitar, and at the end of it, we were filmed fake-performing it with a cross fade and they made a little video. And it was like “Hold on. This is sort of a partnership here.” We had barely met and now we were doing publicity photographs together and suddenly we had gone from a standing start to making the record.

To me, “God Give Me Strength” has a certain timelessness. It worked as a period piece, but it also worked for the time when the movie was released and I was really happy with what we had done. I like to think that if the movie had been a little bit better, the song might have been nominated for an Academy Award, but that didn’t happen.

Elvis Costello:
The film came out and it didn’t really go anywhere. I knew we were technically eligible for an Oscar nomination but there was no way the film was visible enough for the song to have any kind of audience. Had it been any kind of high-profile film, I think the song would have been a serious contender. Just the scale of it. But you don’t write songs with the idea of what kind of awards you might win.

The song was nominated for a Grammy and I’d never been to the Grammy Awards, because it never seemed like anything I would ever be involved in. But Burt and I had gotten friendly by then so I said, “I’ll only do this for you, Burt.”

Burt and I were asked to present together. We went through a curtain and there was this like nine-foot spokesmodel person who was guiding us through and I noticed, not for the first time, that if I stood next to Burt Bacharach in the company of a woman, I would suddenly become invisible. Just invisible. She was a young woman but she looked at him and went, “Oh my goodness!” And I was just some bloke who was standing there.

Some years later, I got to read the citation when Burt was given the Polar Music Prize. I was standing in the lobby of the Royal Concert Hall in Stockholm with Burt and the other two honorees, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Bob Moog. Quite a group. Here comes the queen of Sweden and she sees Burt, and I could see her just go weak at the knees. She looked at Burt and went “Whaaa,” and I thought, “Here we go again.” Everyone else just becomes invisible.

About a year later, Elvis and I started working on an album together that took us months to do. Except for “God Give Me Strength,” nothing was ever fast with Elvis and me. We started in a room in my condo in Santa Monica with me at a keyboard, an acoustic piano, and a synthesizer playing stuff over and over. Then Elvis would go his way and I would go mine but neither of us could ever let it go. I could call Elvis at four in the morning and I knew he would be awake thinking about the same thing as me.

Elvis Costello:
So I rang Burt up and said, “What do you think about doing a whole record together?” I went to a writing apartment he had on the edge of Santa Monica and Venice and we worked in a room and got started. It only occurred to me later that the only other person he had ever written music with was Neil Diamond. We both came up with openings or sections of music and in some cases, we ended up writing the complementary or bridging section. In some cases, the music was complete.

It doesn’t make any of us better to know who wrote which portions of what song, but I don’t know whether you can tell who wrote what. I think the assumption by most people reading the credits was that Burt wrote all the music. In fact, he wrote all of the music to just three of the songs. One of them was “This House Is Empty Now,” which I wrote a bridge for that we didn’t use, and the only purpose that served was to prove that the song, despite its length, needed one. He then wrote the one that you hear and replaced mine because the one I wrote wasn’t as good. “The Long Division” is entirely his. “Such Unlikely Lovers” is entirely his.

All of the other songs are some kind of collaboration in different proportions. The collaboration also grew and changed with how much comfort we had with one another. Once we started to get into the rhythm of this language, the songs stopped sounding like my idea of what Burt sounded like, with him correcting me like I was doing some kind of crazy, very esoteric exam. It became a dialogue, not because we were so in tune, but because we could literally complete each other’s sentences in songs like “I Still Have That Other Girl.” And there were sections where we were writing within the phrase together.

Most of the songs were written with us both sitting at a piano or a synth and playing together or me standing and waving my arms around going, “That’s it!” If I suggested a musical phrase, he would get inside it and stretch it over a longer framework. It was his idea to take “Painted from Memory” off the piano and put it on the guitar. In “My Thief,” we actually wrote the two sections and then Burt did these incredible things to make it hold together.

From the point of view of being the lyricist throughout, I had to listen to what was being said in the music whether or not I had anything to do with it but particularly when there were these sections where I would go, “Oh my goodness, what is this saying?” I took away some of the pieces in instrumental form and really struggled for a while trying to match the scale of the composition with baroque lyrics.

What I then realized was that I was competing with the music rather than complementing it. What I had to do was to listen to the voice in the song and what it was saying and arrive at the feeling of it. I didn’t think for a moment we were writing songs that were in any way comparable to what Burt had written with Hal. I was quite happy just to be where we were but it did give me an appreciation of what an incredible technician Hal was. That he could write songs that opened up in the right places for the melody but beyond that were not merely facile but also stories that moved you and used language that was familiar without being clichéd. It’s a very, very difficult balance.

On “This House Is Empty Now,” I kept singing the word “remember” over and over while I was playing a passage on the piano, so Elvis used that to shape the lyrics for the song. Elvis later told me he was worried he wouldn’t be able to come up with words to match the music we were writing, but once he broke through with the lyrics for that one, it all started to flow for him.

Thematically,
Painted from Memory
was about lost love. Elvis always liked to call it a heartbreak record of sad songs for people who luxuriate in melancholy. Even though we would work together for four or five days at a stretch every couple of months, it still took us two years to finish writing all the songs.

Elvis Costello:
Then I came up against the non-negotiable aspect of the shape of the melody. Like what Carole had been through with Burt. “Could it just have a three-syllable word here that makes sense or makes the rhyme?” “No.” Of course, Burt didn’t know that I didn’t know the terminology. “A sixteenth note? What’s he talking about? Is that a semiquaver?” I’m thinking in quavers because that’s the little bit of learning I have. He’ll joke about the fact that we were both up at three o’clock in the morning and he knew I was the other person pacing about that one phrase. He’d call and say, “Elvis. I’ve got it!” You’d think we were safecrackers or something. It was absolutely fantastic.

Perhaps the most thrilling thing is that when we wrote “I Still Have That Other Girl,” we were tinkering with the melody and we came to this part of the song where Burt said, “I think it needs a bridge.” And he started sketching there and then in the room. I looked at him and his eyes were back in his head and he was playing and it was so thrilling that I went, “That’s it. That’s it!” When we stopped the tape, he said, “What did I play?” We just about managed to decipher it with me blurting out over it. But at that moment, Burt had just left the room. He had gone somewhere. It was like, “Oh my God, that’s him composing.”

I was sitting at the keyboard and we were up to the bridge. I just started to play something that was off a little metrically and changed bars and Elvis said, “What is that?” I said, “It feels pretty good.” It seemed to evolve from where Elvis had been with the opening verses and he was very enthusiastic about it. I didn’t remember what I had played, which is the reason I always run a tape when I’m at the keyboard and just communing with music.

I don’t want to stop to write it down, because by the time I do, I could lose half of what I did. I want to be able to leave the keyboard and hear exactly what it was. I can check it on the tape and then go away and listen to it in my head and get a picture. I know there are people who go from one bar to the next but I can’t. I’ve got to see the whole perspective of how the song evolves. It really worked on “I Still Have That Other Girl” and made the song more immediate than some of the others we did on the album.