07.19.2021
ELVIS COSTELLO ON WHY HE REMADE ‘THIS YEAR’S MODEL’ ENTIRLEY IN SPANISH
Rolling Stone: Julyssa: July 15th 2021.Elvis Costello doesn’t speak Spanish, but on at least one occasion, he’s
dreamt in it.
Back in 2018, the television writer David Simon had reached out to him
about transforming “This Year’s Girl,” the prickling cut from his
pivotal 1978 LP This Year’s Model, into a duet for the second season of
The Deuce. The thought of reworking a classic might have unnerved a less
adventurous artist, but Costello, ever the shapeshifter, was intrigued.
He and his frequent collaborator, the Grammy-winning Argentinean
producer Sebastian Krys, dug into the song’s original masters and added
vocals by the singer Natalie Bergman alongside Costello’s. The process
sparked all kinds of ideas about reinvention and reinterpretation for
Costello — and some nights later, he had a dream that he’d been
listening to all of This Year’s Model in a brand-new way: in a
completely different language.
“The curiosity of this was discovering that the master tapes are in such
good condition and hearing how powerful the band sounded when you took
my voice out,” Costello tells Rolling Stone on a recent Zoom call from
Vancouver. “There was so much going on. Then, when we heard Natalie
Bergman sing that verse, I thought, ‘Well this is something different.’
And somewhere along the line, I made this leap to, ‘Let’s try to do this
in Spanish.’”