(Credit: Alamy)
Sat 6 December 2025 10:00, UK
Having come of age during the 1960s, Elvis Costello joined the musical world in time for the punk boom of the 1970s, and then, having been through the excitement of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the 2000s were leaving something to be desired.
In particular, the 2010s seemed to be lacking for him as Costello wasn’t much of a fan of the modern indie boom, nor was he into the cookie-cutter pop of the radio. Having witnessed legends in their prime and been there as history was being made, album by album, finding himself in what he saw as a dead zone must have been exhausting.
It’s not that good stuff didn’t come out at the start of the decade, obviously, with the Arctic Monkeys storming the rock world in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Costello, by that point, had already settled into a nice friendship and state of mutual admiration with the band. Still, he’s also a fan of Nick Cave, which surprisingly, only happened in 2013 when the latter released Push the Sky Away.
However, Costello’s issue was that he didn’t feel particularly challenged by music, or feel like anyone was truly pushing it to new, exciting or even interestingly difficult places, until 2020 hit. “I heard more original music in the first five or six songs of this extraordinary record than I had in the last five or six years,” he said, talking about the experience of hearing Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters for the first time.
When Apple released the album, delivering new music for the first time in eight years, many felt the same. Right as the Covid pandemic and its lockdown was beginning to mess with our minds and the isolation was kicking in, her work felt perfectly timed, giving people something to really sink their teeth into. There was really no better moment for an album from the artist, as her work has always been rich and thick with layers that demand to be unpacked over time.
Costello has been a long-running fan, recalling an experience of standing beside her to witness firsthand her power as she took on one of his songs, ‘I Want You’, which she “rendered with the intensity of the most desperate Shakespearean soliloquy”.
However, on this latest album, he was astounded all over again, recounting in his review, “There is such imagination, humour and passion in songs like, ‘I Want You To Love Me’, ‘Shameika’ and ‘Under The Table’, so if I suggest these qualities are ‘in balance’ it is the kind of fearless, improvised seesaw of art and craft, like a raw plank dropped on a log on a woodland clearing.”
His words are kind of jumbled, and his meaning there slightly unclear, lost in an inarticulate battle with the album’s complexity, but really, that’s exactly how the record feels for him, as it was one that truly baffled him, leaving him almost unable to understand how Apple had even crafted such a thing.
“The constant surprise of the arrangements and the proximity of the singer to feeling means that I have absolutely no idea how this all came into being, and I like it better that way,” he said, resolving to merely enjoy the album rather than try to understand it, to surrender to the stories and feelings involved as opposed to getting too analytical.
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