02.25.2021
THE SNEAKY LIFTOFF OF “THE COMEDIANS”
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I keep discovering new things in a catalogue as vast and varied as Elvis Costello’s (not least because he keeps adding to it). But I was knocked out by something I just stumbled on a few days ago: the trick he used to not only create a brilliant showcase for Roy Orbison’s voice, but to train a klieg light on it.
I’m talking about the letter-perfect song he gave the great Sun Records crooner, “The Comedians,” which is easily on par with any of Orbison’s other rock-operatic boleros: “Running Scared,” “In Dreams,” “Crying.” But where many of those classics reach the patented Orbison vocal liftoff by simply climbing higher and higher within their respective melodic forms—the first two in long lines that soar ever, ever upward, the latter by notching its choruses up into a dreamy falsetto (or, in another’s hands, not)—Costello does something bolder, indeed something I don’t know that I’ve noticed in any other song.