Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
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The perfect gift for music lovers and Elvis Costello fans, telling the story behind Elvis Costello’s legendary career and his iconic, beloved songs.
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink provides readers with a master’s catalogue of a lifetime of great music. Costello reveals the process behind writing and recording legendary albums like My Aim Is True, This Year’s Model, Armed Forces, Almost Blue, Imperial Bedroom, and King of America. He tells the detailed stories, experiences, and emotions behind such beloved songs as “Alison”, “Accidents Will Happen”, “Watching the Detectives”, “Oliver’s Army”, “Welcome to the Working Week”, “Radio Radio”, “Shipbuilding”, and “Veronica”, the last of which is one of a number of songs revealed to connect to the lives of the previous generations of his family.
Costello chronicles his musical apprenticeship, a child’s view of his father Ross MacManus’ career on radio and in the dance hall; his own initial, almost comical steps in folk clubs and cellar dive before his first sessions for Stiff Records, the formation of the Attractions, and his frenetic and ultimately notorious third US tour. He takes listeners behind the scenes of Top of the Pops and Saturday Night Live, and his own show, Spectacle, on which he hosted artists such as Lou Reed, Elton John, Levon Helm, Jesse Winchester, Bruce Springsteen, and President Bill Clinton.
The idiosyncratic memoir of a singular man, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is destined to be a classic.
Customers say
Customers find the book interesting, worthwhile, and compelling. They praise the writing style as excellent, rich, and witty. Readers also appreciate the candor and honesty. However, some feel the narrative is not chronological and the stories become scattered.
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8 reviews for Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
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Julian G Halliday –
A supremely rich work, not to be dismissed even if you havenât enjoyed Costello
I am reading Elvis Costelloâs âUnfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink.âI acquired it a while back and was saving it; holiday on Sanibel, in the peace and quiet of the lanai looking out over the gulf with pelicans and terns hovering then plunging to lunch seems an ideal setting.This book is what I expected but also not that. Its three modes became clear to me only gradually.The first and most obvious is, so to speak, a background narrative â the life story of Declan McManus (or MacManus, depending on where in England Elvisâ father, a band singer, was living at the time). And that is pretty interesting; music and then girls, and all kinds of detail about life in England during the late fifties and early sixties which sounded both deeply familiar and oddly alien (my own experiences were far more rural).But next one finds, and one might have hoped to find, a sort of catalogue raisonnée of all his songs, from the beginning â albeit in allusive, rather poetic terms. But these are the terms in which I became fond of Costello in the first place â his humour with language. And unsurprisingly I find it here in the book as well; he writesâOne night in 1985, I was drinking Gibsons with T Bone Burnett in a Sunset Boulevard hotel, which was known locally as âThe La Mondrian.â It was obviously the very, very definite article.âThatâs the sort of thing that reaches me, directly and with a stab of pleasure.The third phase of the book, which took longer to resolve itself to me, with my rather spotty and shallow musical knowledge, is that it is an education in the musical formation of one of the very best of the rock-punk-wave musicians to come out of Britain. I began to realize that Elvis, in listing the names of songs Iâd heard but didnât know enough about, or songs I had not heard but which were sung early by people I did know about, or songs Iâd never heard of sung by people Iâd never heard of, was setting a trail of breadcrumbs and inviting me to follow it and to learn by listening, where I can, to the reference.For instance:âAll you could do was stand back in wonder, wondering when life would ever start.âThis was not true of Peter Green. Though he was a guitar player of soul and nuance far beyond both that of his flashier contemporaries and certainly my novice abilities, the humanity of his singing was modest and intimate in a way that felt like he was among us, not above us. His rendition of âNeed Your Love So Bad,â with its superb short opening solo that was the only guitar break I ever aspired to memorize, was my first acquaintance with the orchestrated blues of Little Willie John, an idiom most gloriously explored by Bobby âBlueâ Bland.âAnd thus I found, and listened to, that song; and the text and song became thereby richer and my ignorance infinitesimally less deep.So Iâm liking this book.
Todd Kay –
All Grown Up
The memoir turns out to be rather like the musical career. It’s long, it’s diffuse, it’s unpredictable, it sprints forward and doubles back, sometimes it’s frustrating, sometimes it hits you between the eyes with poetry and insight, but absolutely nothing in it is done carelessly. Some parts of it will mean more to you than others, and the parts that may be your highlights may not be mine. What makes it a success is that when it was over, I felt I understood the author better.I came to realize that his career as a recording artist and a famous performer, if it must be broken up into periods, should be understood not in terms of record labels or decades but *wives*: the childhood sweetheart, whom he hurt and lost by behaving as young pop stars are wont to do; then a fellow musician who was troubled, cruel, and depressive, with whom he stayed for 18 years, perhaps for self-punitive reasons; and finally another musician, a stable, emotionally healthy partner with whom he has made a new family, and who has supported him through terrible losses. It occurred to me that while there is much good Costello music in all of these periods of his personal life, his music and his public persona have reflected his times.But they have also reflected his influences, and he rightly considers himself lucky. The son of a musician father (of whom he writes with great love), he was not himself blessed with a great singing voice or remarkable ability on any instrument. But he had a way with words and with tunes, and he applied himself as a performer, and many of his idols became peers and collaborators. His intense dedication has earned him a place as a musical eminence grise. Costello’s musical curiosity is wide and sincere, and when he writes of attending performances that opened new worlds to him and inspired him in other directions, the words do not feel empty. Critical charges of dilettantism seem unwarranted, small.I saw a mostly solo show in 2014 at which I had no idea what was going to come tumbling out next. I heard on that night Costello songs I never expected to hear live, and others I had had no doubt I would hear. Over more than two and a half hours, he played everything from 1977 to “I just wrote this last week and it isn’t finished” — 25 songs he had written or co-written, with four covers in the bargain. It is a marvelous body of work, one I expect will be treated well by posterity. The memoir, which he claims to have written in part so that his sons can have a full account when he is gone, has the same bravura freewheeling quality and the same grace as that show I saw. Reportedly without aid of ghostwriter, he has come up with some beautiful passages, such as this one: “For everything I thought I knew about America, you could say the opposite was the truth. It was the most wanton place and the most prohibitive, both seductive and prim. For every brash sales pitch and disposable thrill there were decency, and strange, deep traditions that European clichés often overlooked.”This is an autobiography to be read patiently from cover to cover and then to be dipped into again, one’s own favorite parts savored like cherished album tracks.
Paul Stafford –
An erudite trip down a musical memory lane
As a pleasure reader, Elvis’s self -penned memoir is a total blast. Full of funny stories, poignant memories, insightful reflections, tasteful dishes and generally good writing. The man proves himself as a terrific writer as well as one of the great songwriters of our time.As a student of music, the mans knowledge and erudition is amazing! His recall of lyrics, styles, influence, names and dates can’t be faked. Maybe he had researchers help him with some details (Churchill did!) but I learned a lot about the history of pop, country and jazz from this book.As a songwriter, reading this book and its insider details we out how songs were written and what their lyrics signified was deep inspiration. Not to mention the poetry that comes through on every page.I’ve always loved Elvis’s songs and musicianship. His records are great and he’s a brilliant showman. Now I know that he is also a sneaky genius Dylan confidant who the very best (McCartney, Bacharach, Lynn, Toussant) have sought out to play and write with. No one with a passing interest in modern music should miss this brilliant memoir!
Jeremy Anderson –
Great service, product as advertised!
Tariki –
I was one of those who only knew of “Oliver’s Army”. This book obviously contains a whole lot more! Very engrossing. Elvis takes no prisoners with his writing – or with his lyrics – but his love of the works of so many others, and their influence upon him, is obvious. I loved the book, which contains many excerpts from his lyrics as they touch upon his life. It jumps about as far as the times are concerned, but this is the style of Elvis Costello. Stream of consciousness stuff. Very entertaining.
Amazon Customer –
Excellent trip 🙂
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Marco Barbosa –
Tão obliquamente revelador quanto as canções de antanho, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink não é uma autobiografia convencional. Hábil com as palavras desde sempre, Costello dispensa a ordem cronológica e segue guiado pela memória afetiva, alternando causos pitorescos, encontros fortuitos com Ãdolos travados no decorrer dos anos e lembranças de infância â retornando, aqui e ali, à narrativa principal sobre sua carreira, iniciada em 1969.Leia minha resenha completa aqui: http://www.fubap.org/telhadodevidro/2015/10/30/elvis-costello-e-suas-memorias-nao-tentem-ler-sua-mente/