The partnership began with “God Give Me Strength,” a song that would be used in a pivotal scene in “Grace.” It would also lead to Costello and Bacharach completing the critically acclaimed album “Painted From Memory.”
This week, UMe releases “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a box set that includes “Painted From Memory,” as well as a group of songs the pair worked on for a musical adaptation that never came together, live renditions of their collaborations and two previously unreleased recordings from the final sessions the pair did in September 2021. (There is additional music from an abandoned musical adaptation of comedian Mike Myers’s Austin Powers films.)
Originally, Costello and Bacharach were going to conduct interviews for this piece. But on Feb. 8, a week before his scheduled interview, Bacharach died at the age of 94. This interview was conducted with Costello days before Bacharach’s death and has been edited for clarity and space.
Q: The story of you and Burt begins long before you were playing music. In 1963, at the famous Royal Variety Concert featuring the Beatles, your father and Burt were actually on the same bill. You include a photograph of the two standing near each other in the liner notes.
A: The picture is actually the entire cast. And then in the detail there is my father [Ross McManus] and what I’d traced along four places along the row three right to the side of the stage. There’s Burt Bacharach, who was Marlene [Dietrich’s] musical director. He’d had some hits by ’63 for sure. And the Beatles had recorded “Baby It’s You.” And I think that’s the same year as “Anyone Who Had a Heart” was a hit twice.
Q: It does feel as if something cosmic and bizarre is going on here. That Paul and Burt are on the bill with your dad and later you’ll collaborate with both of them.
A: I thought it was curious that I ended up writing 15 songs with one of the people on that bill and 30 or more with the other. I wasn’t trying to say anything about destiny by using it in the book, but I was trying to make the point that my father wasn’t a pop star. He was a working musician all his life.
He sang with a highly successful dance band. They were actually further up the bill than the Beatles, the Joe Loss Orchestra. They were a household name. I mean, the Beatles were just the upcoming band of that year. But it is the way in which all music filtered through because of the way the BBC dominated the airwaves and the BBC was limited to the amount of popular music it could present every day by various agreements with the musicians’ union to protect the jobs of people like the band members that my dad performed with.
So you would hear songs by Burt Bacharach done by all sorts of funny combinations of instruments. The melodies would be famous almost as much as the hit record versions of them.
Q: In your notes, you use this word — Bacharachian. What does that mean to you?
A: An incredibly nuanced sense of music, both harmonically and rhythmically, and such bold choices of melody. I always cite the bridge of “Alfie” as being the most extraordinary. There’s footage of Bill Evans in Finland playing that as if it were a Bach prelude. It’s obviously a very substantial piece of music. It is an instrumental before you add the incredible words that Hal David wrote.
Q: I remember, as a kid in the ’80s, getting the Live Stiffs record and hearing your version of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself.”
A: Other versions of Burt songs done in that period were sometimes done with a little ironic spin. And I didn’t care for that. Of course, Burt wrote the score of “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Casino Royale” is a very camp film. The music is easily the best thing about that film. I mean, it’s also the best song that anybody ever wrote for a Bond film by a hundred miles, because it’s the only one that you can detach from the context. You can’t get up there and go, “I’m going to sing a great song that’s called ‘Thunderball.’” It’s a great Bond theme.
But “The Look of Love”: I’m sorry. That’s a great song. And I can speak with absolute authority about this matter. Because my wife [Diana Krall] recorded the other version of the song after Dusty. There are really only two versions.
Q: Going back to 1977 because I am curious. … In that scene, a punk rock-era tour, are people wondering, why is he doing a Burt Bacharach song?
A: Well, don’t forget, by the end of the first tour of America, we had to reach the idea that I shouldn’t play “Alison” because it was making it too easy for people to like us. So I was ready to drop the only ballad that we had. Some of these venues were very, very hot, you know. Having one slow song was something great.
And also I’d written all of the second album, which was more torrid and more informed by real experience than the first album, which inevitably was a work of imagination. So “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” … I’d loved it from Dusty’s version. And Dusty was my vocal epitome. I couldn’t possibly ever sing like her, but I can tell you, lots of records of mine, particularly slow records, whereas I’m at the microphone, I’m thinking, “How would she create this word?”
Q: When you were starting out with Burt, I imagine there was this idea of matching the drama and scale of his music to your words. And the first thing we do as writers is we use a lot of words, right?
A: There were two things I kind of had to learn. One was to listen really attentively to the music. And not compete with it. But to serve. And the second was the telegrammatic phrasing of some of Burt’s melodies. [Sings …] The Look. [Pause] Of Love. You can’t write doggerel for Burt Bacharach songs. So you have to really find valuable words to say. And basically, I don’t know whether I ever said it out loud, but to create a mood record like the Sinatra records on Capitol. And that’s why I wanted to call it “Because It’s a Lonely World” originally.
Q: And Burt didn’t like that title.
A: He just said it was too on the nose. And I said, “Well, how about ‘In the Darkest Place?’” He didn’t want to predispose the audience. And I suppose, he’s also the man that wrote “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and “What’s New Pussycat?” So I suppose when we started writing, we didn’t know that we were not going to write lots of bright tunes, that my disposition was to melancholy.
Q: Another thing you write some about in the liner notes is how these melodies push you really to the edge of your vocal capabilities.
A: I’m actually a baritone that sings in tenor register a lot of the time. Like most rock-and-roll singers are great rock-and-roll tenors. Dion DiMucci, Jon Bon Jovi, they’re natural tenors. Vinnie Gill, country singer, great rocker and can sing anything.
Q: Sometimes singers will fashion a song to fit what they feel will be easier and more comfortable. But you are really pushing yourself.
A: Well, maybe the collaborative aspect of our writing meant that we had reached a crescendo. So even that first song, “God Give Me Strength,” and Burt, he stepped up to a greater drama, which involved a really high note. But what I found curious and I make note of is that this song got covered a fair bit by some really great technical singers like Audra McDonald. And I even noted that Audra, she adapts some of the melody to her voice. And that’s acceptable. Nobody that’s covered that song sang exactly what we wrote. So I’m the one that went there. If you don’t like it, don’t listen …
Q: There is this false impression of Burt as sort of laid-back in that California way. Suave and handsome and no shoes on, but that’s not really the case.
A: The last show I did with him, it was a benefit show. And it was his core band and there wasn’t space for a full orchestra, so they were using keyboards for some of the orchestrations. He rehearsed for three hours in the afternoon to do material that he’s played his whole career.
A: During a rehearsal, he would literally stop and go, “Second desk of the violas out of tune.” I mean, he has ears and nuance and detail attention that I’ve never encountered.
Q: There’s a song you put on this box, “Lie Back and Think of England.” That’s Burt singing a demo for an Austin Powers musical that Mike Myers was trying to do. It’s quite a beautiful song, and I wonder how it would have been presented.
A: I don’t want to give anything away. But it’s a big thing to transition a film. You can’t just replay the film on a stage. So Mike was talking about a kind of serious subplot to the overall comedy that involved disillusionment with the task of a servant of an empire.
I mean, it was a conversation that one afternoon yielded that song. It wasn’t the lead character singing. It was one of the secondary characters. And so it has these strange lines out of this guy going into this reverie about being posted in Rangoon. And he’s kind of like, as I recall, an Alan Turing kind of character. It was really exceptional to me that we were being allowed to have the reason to write songs that were serious in the midst of a comedy, because that’s what musical theater should be.
Q: There is something special about hearing Burt singing at his piano. Just a tape rolling in a room.
A: He was bewildered as to why I want to put that demo out. He said it’s not finished because to him, he doesn’t release things like that. “But Burt, it’s so heartbreaking the way you’re singing it and the fact that you don’t even need to know the context.”
Q: In the fall of 2021, you go to Capitol to record “You Can Have Her” and “Look Up Again.” These are getting released for the first time on this set. Burt comes to the sessions to help produce.
A: We sat down and, of course, it’s a few years since we’d been in the room together. I went into the little vocal booth, and it’s Nat Cole’s piano, it’s Sinatra’s microphone. There’s lots of stuff to intimidate you. And the band is in Studio B, and we get a couple of run-throughs there, and I’m waiting, and it comes through the talkback. “Elvis, you’re singing the wrong melody,” and I just inverted one of the pickups into the payoff. And from then on, it was like that on every detail. “The downbeat at 60, it’s not together.”
Q: And there is that acknowledgment at the end of the session.
A: I said to Burt, “Do you want to go and say thanks?” It was a six-hour session or something. And the whole group stood up when Burt walked in. I mean, it may happen more often than I think. It’s not like I’ve done so many large orchestral sessions. And it was a mixture of some faces who had played on other sections with me and I guess with Burt. But a lot of younger people had probably never worked with him before. They stood and applauded.