RFBX: ‘It’s Genius, I Swear’ Special – Spectrals on Elvis Costello’s ‘My Aim Is True’
By: Spectrals
It's dead hard for me to pinpoint exactly when this record became my "all time favourite", because my dad's had it in his cars since I was little, and it's his favourite too, for that reason alone, I think there's a kind of familiarity there that you just can't beat, a kind of songwriting that on some level has stuck with me. That's not to say that this record is some sort of rose tinted nostalgia trip, I've got a lot of those, but this is a bit more than that - to this day I don't go more a couple of days without playing it.
For the longest time, I was wrapped up in hardcore and punk, I won't lie, I was into a lot of rubbish bands, a few gems here and there, but mostly bad bands, I've grown into a lot of older stuff my parents like that I didn't have a lot of time for when I was a "teenager" and it's really this that informs what I've been doing lately, I think My Aim Is True is the record that opened me up, got me wanting to get into old soul and rock n' roll, he points to these sorts of music on this record a lot, but it's never pastiche or revivalism.
To think that I could've so easily pretended not to like this is really weird for me now, but I’m so glad that at some point I got into it so much that it was allowed "out of the car"(only on the condition that if it came back scratched, I was dead). When I'm thinking about how I'm going to sing and what I'm going to try and say, this is the record that I think about. For a start, I think Elvis is on some other level in terms of his wordplay, I'm really into pulling apart little phrases that people don't really think twice about saying, then putting a different slant on them, double meanings and all that, he's incredibly subtle in the way handles this which is why it works so well for me, I don't think it ever feels like he's wasting a line, it's almost like he's trying to trick you into thinking these songs haven’t had a lot of thought gone into them, which is quite a feat with songs as ace as this!
I've come to really treasure is how bitter this record is. It isn't in a "fuck you" cartoon punk way, there's just a sort of casual disgust throughout that I think is missing from a lot of stuff around now. Today I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is my favourite line from the record; "Why do you have to say that there's always someone who can do it better than I can? But don't you think that I know that walking on the water won't make me a miracle man?" and my favourite bit of music is the ripping guitar "solo" on ‘I'm Not Angry’, but really, I can't imagine a time in my life when I won't want to have this record around, or even a time when me and my Dad won't have it on in his car.
Elvis Costello - Alison by musicfromthebook
Artists in this article: Elvis Costello, Spectrals