That can be hard to keep in mind living in a world of excess, but sometimes the most daring thing we can do is to strip away all pretenses, all bells and whistles, and let the pure and raw reality stand on its own. We have spent centuries coming up with new ways of masking the world as it truly exists, slapping coats of paint, makeup, and autotune on all our creations to make them appear as something more than they are. More is better, or at least that's what we are constantly being told. But what if that's not the truth?
In 1986, Elvis Costello had already done nearly everything he could. He had explored so much sonic territory over his early run of classic records there wasn't much room left for him to move into. With the power of The Attractions, they were a hard-hitting new wave punk band, a retro soul outfit, a pub rock group, all the while dabbling in mature songcraft and even old-fashioned torch songs. At just 32 years old, Elvis Costello had burned through so many layers of sound he was ready for a break.
The radical experiment he embarked on resulted in "King Of America", a record which celebrated its thrity-fifth anniversary this year, though it sounds even older than that. Elvis came to America, he worked with members of Elvis Presley's old band, and he largely took up the cause of radical minimalism.
"King Of America" is a crucial record in my own life, because it taught me lessons about what makes a great song. Often we will hear a song with layers of guitars, or keyboards, and we get caught up in some of the details of a lush production. It takes time to realize those things are nice, but they are unimportant. The sound of a recording is the polish that obscures whether the nails have been chewed down to nubs. What is truly important is what lies underneath, whether the bones of a song are strong enough to last forever, or if they are so brittle they dissolve if you shine a light upon them.
Through most of the record, The Confederates support Elvis with bare-bones instrumentation. Often, you can only hear Elvis voice, his acoustic guitar, and the rhythmic clap of the snare drum. Like one of the one-light small towns these songs could be about, we can imagine this record being recorded with the band huddled around one microphone, necessitating Elvis being put front-and-center. These songs are entirely about his poetry and vocals, with everyone else there to do the minimum required to make the songs fleshed out enough. If it was a solo record of just Elvis's voice and guitar, we would lose very little. That's why it's genius.
With the sound stripped to almost nothing, there is no hiding Elvis' country influences, or his penchant for betraying his sincerity with a pun or a joke he couldn't resist. Whether that's him singing "she said she was working for the ABC News, it was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use," in "Brilliant Mistake", or "she's so contrary, like a chainsaw running through a dictionary," in "Our Little Angel", Elvis is always a bit of an asshole. That's never more apparent than when he ruins some people's childhoods with his rendition of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", singing the sunny pop tune with a ragged voice that exposes a different side of the lyric.
And the lyrics; Elvis has written myriad clever songs, but I don't know if he ever wrote a better album of them than this one. "Indoor Fireworks" is a painful ode to the ugly side of passion, and the lines in the third verse, "I'll build a bonfire of my dreams and burn a broken effigy of me and you," say so much with a single image. That is Elvis at his absolute best, and those words would have lost their power if Steve Nieve's fingers were dancing over the keys while they were sung.
Similarly, the imagery when Elvis sings, "if they had a King Of Fools then I could wear that crown, and you can all die laughing because I'll wear it proudly," is beyond most popular songwriters. But perhaps no line sums everything up as does, "I don't speak any English, just American without tears." Elvis rips open the divide between his side of the ocean and ours, revealing how even with a shared language, even when he adopts the sounds of America, we don't ever quite understand each other.
"King Of America" is a beautiful reminder of what songwriting is. Songwriting isn't about making sounds, it's about using your voice to say things that need poetry or a lyrical lilt, things we struggle to put into conversation. There's the old adage about a great song being great even if it's played with just a voice and an acoustic guitar. That's essentially what this record is, and it proves the point.
It proved that in 1986, it proves it now thirty-five years later, and it will for as long as the recordings endure. Great songs are great songs regardless, and "King Of America" is filled with them.
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