The chaotic life and career of the great Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello's 674-page memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, has to be the most unlikely bestseller of the year.

Costello has never been a superstar in the United States. Several singles released between his 1977 debut (My Aim Is True) and the late 1980s were regularly featured on FM radio and MTV in its early years. But these songs — "Watching the Detectives," "Alison," "(The Angels Want to Wear My) Red Shoes," "Pump It Up," "Radio Radio," "Oliver's Army," "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," "Everyday I Write the Book," "Veronica" — weren't blockbuster hits. They sold decently and were appreciated by people with a taste for cerebral, tuneful, edgy pop music.

The market for songs like that has always been limited, but today it is utterly marginal.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

And yet, there Costello's book sits at number 13 on The New York Times Bestseller List, showing that a substantial number of readers are interested enough in the story of Costello's life and music to purchase a substantial tome devoted to the details.

That's especially surprising because of the long-term downward trajectory of Costello's career. Quite apart from changes in the music business over the past few decades, Costello has transformed himself since the early 1990s from a critics' darling with a modest but loyal following into the epitome of a "difficult" artist whose new releases barely register on the pop charts.

First there was the collaboration with a string quartet that was closer to Shostakovich than "Eleanor Rigby." Then the record co-written with Burt Bacharach that sounded exactly like…a Burt Bacharach record. And another consisting entirely of unselfconsciously syrupy torch songs inspired by the experience of falling in love with jazz musician Diana Krall. And another on which he collaborated with Swedish opera singer Anne Sophie von Otter. And another with jazz pianist Allan Toussaint. And another with hip hop band The Roots.

Interspersed with this jumble of projects were a series of more traditional rock records, though they, too, have been increasingly difficult to like. Not only has Costello's once inexhaustible capacity to craft intricate but instantly winsome pop melodies faded over the past 15 years, but for longer than that he has perversely insisted on recording and mixing his records in such a way that his greatest weakness as a performer is consistently accentuated.

I'm talking, of course, about his singing. As anyone who has heard it is aware, Elvis Costello's voice is not beautiful. A thick, nasal baritone with a wide vibrato, intermittently uncertain pitch, and a tendency to curdle into an aural sneer, it is a classic, unforgettable rock voice — making a virtue of its imperfections to convey emotional authenticity and provoke a cathartic bond with ordinary men and women in the audience.

At least that's how it was on his early albums, which made sure not to draw undue attention to Costello's voice in the studio or at the mixing board. Costello's hectoring, adenoidal singing drew quite enough attention to itself, and it was most effective when it functioned as the lead weapon in the formidable musical arsenal wielded by The Attractions, Costello's terrific backing band on his best early records.

But with King of America (1986), the first album since his debut to be recorded without The Attractions, Costello began to place his voice front and center. First it was highlighted in the mix. Then recorded completely "dry," with no reverb to soften its rough edges. Then highly compressed, which had the effect of highlighting and foregrounding imperfections, and rendering its natural loudness even more obtrusive.

During this same period, Costello's experiments with non-rock genres led him to begin writing convoluted melodies that regularly leap complicated intervals and push him to the very top of his range. Sometimes, as in the hauntingly beautiful "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4," the closing track on 1991's Mighty Like a Rose, the results were stunning. But more often they were just off-putting.

Readers will find very little in Costello's memoir about these self-subverting artistic choices. What they will find instead is voluminous detail about Costello's youth, growing up in London and Liverpool as the son of jazz musician and dance-band vocalist Ross MacManus, and about the years just before and after his career took off.

At the level of the sentence and paragraph, this may be the most literate, thoughtful, generous, civilized rock autobiography ever written, with countless lovely passages devoted to recounting the thrill of discovering for the first time the genius of The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and other artists, along with numerous extended vignettes that do a wonderful job of encapsulating the blurred, numbing experience of life on the road as he and The Attractions crisscrossed Europe and North America nearly non-stop from 1977 through 1984. Costello's encyclopedic knowledge of popular music also makes the book an excellent (though idiosyncratic) primer on the knotty history of rock, pop, soul, rhythm and blues, and country.

But the book, somewhat like Costello's career, is also an undisciplined mess. Refusing to adhere to the chronological structure of most autobiographies, Costello chooses to meander forward and then back and then sideways and then forward and back again through time, on and on for hundreds of pages. For the first two-thirds of the book, individual chapters don't even explore coherent, unifying themes; they start and end seemingly at random. And there's no index. Readers looking for Costello's thoughts on "Alison" or reflections on the writing and recording of his two greatest albums — 1979's Armed Forces and 1982's Imperial Bedroom — will find the discussion of these topics scattered throughout multiple chapters, told out of chronological sequence, and interspersed with multiple flashbacks and flash-forwards to unrelated subjects.

At least we know Costello didn't rely on a ghostwriter. Though he could have used a ruthless editor.

In the book's final third, a loose narrative and thematic coherence finally takes hold, with illuminating individual chapters focusing on each of Costello's many collaborations, and with one especially moving passage telling the story of the decline and death of his father in 2011. As Ross MacManus neared the end, Costello began telling people he was ready to stop recording albums. Though at the time he explained his decision in terms of changes in the music industry, here he confesses a more personal motive: "I needed time to imagine how I could bear to write songs and not be able to play them for my father. Watching him listen to music was irreplaceable to me."

That degree of honesty and vulnerability is rare in celebrity memoirs, and there's a lot of it in this book — about family, friends, lovers, band mates, business partners, and collaborators. I, for one, would have liked more of it about Costello's own musical decisions. About his lyrics he's quite open — quoting, analyzing, admitting that he used to deploy mind-bending wordplay, rapid-fire imagery, and deliberate obscurity to conceal as much as reveal the emotional truth. But on the music, which is the one thing that most cries out for explanation, he's more guarded. (In the liner notes to reissued versions of his back catalog, Costello has shown himself to be capable of examining his past musical choices with a sharply critical eye. But not here.)

Which means, I suppose, that after reading nearly 700 pages of memoir, I'm left wanting even more from this brilliant, restless, mercurial, frustrating, sometimes infuriating artist.