Elvis Costello 7: Almost Blue

Looking for a change of pace, Elvis took a break from the ever-faithful Nick Lowe and dragged his band to Nashville to record a pile of country-and-western covers that would have been right at home in the redneck bar from The Blues Brothers. Working with the legendary Billy Sherrill, the result was Almost Blue, a collection of songs known and unknown slathered with syrupy strings and female chorus vocals plus a little pedal-steel help from John McFee, who’d played on My Aim Is True. The closest comparison we can find would be Ringo Starr’s similarly arranged Beaucoups Of Blues. Yet it’s still cohesive, thanks mostly to the patient performance of the Attractions. (Strangely enough, the album was a huge hit in the UK, and utterly ignored in the US.)

Tracks like “Sweet Dreams” and “Success” are ideal for crying in your beer, and Steve Nieve positively shines on the piano. “Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down” and the rollicking “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)”, taken at top speed and over quickly, ignore any threat of a hangover. “Brown To Blue” was not co-written by that Johnny Mathis, but it is one of the sillier hokey tunes here, and makes an end-of-side juxtaposition with the superior “Good Year For The Roses”, which actually charted in the UK. “Sittin’ And Thinkin’” and “Honey Hush” are drunk and stupid, bookending the more emotional “Colour Of The Blues” and “Too Far Gone”. But Elvis saves his best vocals in the middle of side one and the end of side two for a pair of Gram Parsons songs, “Hot Burrito #1” (here retitled “I’m Your Toy”) and “How Much I Lied”.

Despite his overt passion for the music, and the genre as a whole, Almost Blue is still a diversion in the true sense of the word. And coming after the recent bounty of 20-track albums—and this was his fourth album in the space of twenty months—it’s awfully brief at only 32 minutes. We wanted another great album of his own songs, and thankfully, he didn’t make us wait much longer.

The Rykodisc reissue doubled the length of the original album—almost exactly—by adding five live performances from a one-off show that was filmed for a documentary about the making of the album, as well as the harrowing “Psycho” from a one-off show recorded two years earlier at L.A.’s Palomino Club. (Both of these shows included John McFee as a special guest.) Four outtakes from the sessions included two B-sides, plus a stab at “Tears Before Bedtime”, the only original from the sessions. The clear highlight was the live B-side of “I’m Your Toy”, performed with the Attractions and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Robert Kirby. (He, of course, is known to us for his work with Nick Drake; meanwhile Drake photographer Keith Morris did the same for this album.)

The Rhino reissue included even more outtakes from the sessions, four of which had been B-sides stupidly left off the Ryko, and replaced two of the live tracks (likely because they ended up using studio tracks instead) with another cover from the same show. But it did add six more songs from the Palomino gig, including two covers and countified takes of the then-unreleased “Motel Matches” and “Girls Talk”. This disc was also arranged chronologically, and began with his actual duet with George Jones on “Stranger In The House” and an unreleased one with Johnny Cash. And it was packed to capacity.

With so many of the Palomino tracks here (and one elsewhere) one wishes the entire gig could have been released, perhaps as part of yet another deluxe edition or the “Costello Show” live series. But that never happened.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions Almost Blue (1981)—3½
1994 Rykodisc: same as 1981, plus 11 extra tracks
2004 Rhino: same as 1981, plus 27 extra tracks