11.18.2022
Elvis Costello & The Imposters Announce New Album ‘The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic)’ Out Digitally November 25
H
ear “Magnificent Hurt (chelmico remix)”
On November 25, Elvis Costello & The Imposters will release The Boy
Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic), a companion to
January’s widely-acclaimed album The Boy Named If which earlier this
week was nominated for a Grammy Award for “Best Rock Album.”
This new album features live-in-the studio renditions of TBNI songs, a
version of Costello’s “Every Day I Write the Book”, numbers by The
Rolling Stones, Nick Lowe, The Byrds and Paul McCartney and a brand new
remix by the Japanese duo, chelmico.
Recorded live-in-the-studio during tour rehearsals at Memphis Magnetic
Recording in October 2021 and May 2022, the album captures the band
playing, as Costello puts, “Some of our favourite songs while
negotiating with any tricky angles in our new tunes.”
The first song to be released is the sole track not recorded in Memphis,
a new remix of “Magnificent Hurt” by Japanese female rap duo chelmico,
who Costello first heard performing the theme to the anime show “Keep
Your Hands Off Eizouken!”
chelmico say “Can’t believe we did a collab with Elvis Costello & The
Imposters!! Who knew this could happen in real life!? When we were
talking on a Zoom call, Elvis said we can do whatever we want so we
just did! Please enjoy our interpretation of the world of Magnificent
Hurt. The beats by ryo takahashi is just a perfection! We’re all HAPPY
that Elvis is happy with the track!”
The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic) is released on EMI, with
Capitol Records as the release partner in the US.
Read Costello’s essay about the record below.
The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic) track listing:
Magnificent Hurt (Costello)
Truth Drug (Nick Lowe)
Penelope Halfpenny (Costello)
So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star (McGuinn/Hillman)
What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love? (Costello)
The Boy Named If (Costello)
Let Me Roll It (Paul McCartney/Linda McCartney)
Every Day I Write The Book (Costello)
Out Of Time (Jagger/Richards)
Here, There and Everywhere (McCartney)
Magnificent Hurt remix (Costello/chelmico)
THE BOY NAMED IF (ALIVE AT MEMPHIS MAGNETIC) By Elvis Costello
When The Imposters and I entered Memphis Magnetic studio in October 2021
it was the first time we’d been face-to-face or side-by-side while
playing the songs from “The Boy Named If”.
That album had been recorded over “electrical wire” in late 2020 from
our respective lairs and cupboards under the stairs but now we were in
Memphis on pretext of rehearsing for our first full tour ever since the
world ended in March 2020. Now we were three days from opening on the
Soundstage at Graceland but what better way to prepare than playing some
of your favourite songs while negotiating with the trickier angles in
our new tunes.
In the summer of 2021, we’d invited Charlie Sexton to join us on the
guitar when we were unable to obtain Steve Nieve’s “Letters Of Transit”
from France to play a couple of shows and liked the outcome so much that
we all agreed to proceed as a quintet.
We set up with stage monitors, a plan that Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve
would have recognized from the “Blood & Chocolate” sessions only without
all the sulking and sniping.
Now, Pete Thomas once vaulted over a fence to retrieve a brick from the
demolition site of the original Stax Studios building. He told any
musicians with a faltering groove in his own basement studio – Bonaparte
Rooms East – “That brick has heard, “(Sittin’ On) the Dock Of The Bay”.
We celebrated our return to the city by Pete and Davey Faragher putting
a little Memphis magnificence into “Everyday I Write The Book” with
Steve leading us on the Hammond and Charlie filling in around my voice,
one of a number of repertoire songs that we re-arranged for the tour.
The album, “The Boy Named If”, set out to be an antidote to our mutual
isolation. Now with my co-producer Sebastian Krys and his assistant
Daniel Galindo in the Memphis Magnetic booth and our road crew tight to
the walls of the studio or in the hallway outside, we put on the red
light and began finding our way around these new numbers in the same
room and at the same time, and shaking off a little dust by tearing
through songs like Nick Lowe’s 1976 Dutch release, “Truth Drug”.
Having played our first appearance of 2022 at JazzFest in New Orleans
before celebrating the opening of the Bob Dylan Centre in Tulsa and even
working up an encore of “Like A Rolling Stone” in the dressing room of
“Cain’s Ballroom”, we had now returned to Memphis Magnetic to rehearse
for upcoming U.K. and European dates and while we let The Imposters and
Charlie loose on the “Hey Clockface” numbers that I’d recorded alone in
Helsinki but would now earn their place in the coming shows before
lighting “Indoor Fireworks” with a different match and finding a minor
mood in “Brilliant Mistake” and filed them away for a future collection
called, “King Of America & Other Realms”.
It seems we remained in a freewheeling mood as we cut, “Out Of Time”,
the Jagger/Richards tune that I first learned from Chris Farlowe’s
Immediate Records release, to which I later added, tambourine, maracas,
a second piano and a few other tricks and diversions, after all, we were
in a recording studio.
We certainly got the sense of where a tune like, “What If I Can’t Give
You Anything But Love?” might be headed from night to night, when
Charlie opened up on his guitar solo.
In the evening I returned to my room at the Peabody Hotel and over the
next three nights, I heard seven new songs ringing ‘round the walls but
that’s a tale for another day…
At the October 2021 sessions, we’d crashed out of “Penelope Halfpenny”
into The Byrds, “So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star”, now we did
something similar, as Paul McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It” emerged from
“The Boy Named If” title song. At the end of the final session, we
turned off the monitors entirely and recorded a hushed birthday card
serenade of “Here, There & Everywhere”.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, chelmico had been working
away on a complete re-model and re-fit of “Magnificent Hurt”. Over the
last few years we’ve presented some of my songs in other languages on
the album “Spanish Model” and the French language E.P. “La Face de
Pendule à Coucou” but this track is something of an entirely different
stripe.
One of the gifts of the recent interlude from the traveling life has
been the time gathered around the family jukebox, a stack of vinyl or
the comic book world of film entertainment.
While, his brother and mother were elsewhere working on their own
schemes, my son Frank and I worked our way through the entire anime
series, “Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!”, an ingenious look at every
aspect of animation from storyboarding to the final cut, through the
eyes and escapades of three young Japanese students. Each episode kicks
off with the chelmico track, “Easy Breezy”, a cool flow of verses and
rhymes over a beatbox and some slide guitar.
A couple of calls later and I found myself on a video conference to
Tokyo with Mamiko and Rachel and was delighted that they agreed to work
up their own version of “Magnificent Hurt”. My only directions were,
“You can do anything you want. Cut it up. Turn it round. Wipe it out.
Say anything you want. You can’t be wrong”.
As you will hear, the song is now an entirely different story in both
words and music, re-harmonizing my interjections between their verses
and it is this new Japanese model of the song that closes the storybook
on, “The Boy Named If (Alive At Memphis Magnetic)”.