The Private Canon: The Ghost of "Alison"

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That Elvis Costello's career coincided with punk was in retrospect just that—a coincidence. In much the same way Dylan, a rock 'n' roll kid from the jump, happened to ride in on the folk train, only to hijack and derail it into parts unknown, Declan MacManus was a songwriter's songwriter in the mold of John Prine or Randy Newman who happened to release his first album the same year as The Clash and Never Mind the Bollocks. That's how he got his stunt-y stage name (a gag made even more morbidly fortuitous by the death of the original Elvis the same year), and it's also what gave his first few records an inarguably nervy frisson, a thwarted-geek-revenge energy that had its own rock cred.

But he was at heart a songsmith, the brainy showbiz kid of a popular band leader, who would have been more at home on Tin Pan Alley or in the Brill Building than at CBGB. And as is often pointed out, the house band for My Aim Is True was Clover, a pub country band that would later become Huey Lewis's News, and the Attractions—the crack studio team he lucked into for the first leg of his career—were plenty competent at sounding raw and ragged, but also just plain competent. That pop proficiency came in handy when he and that band truly hit their stride with the one-two punch of genre-defying pop masterworks, Trust and Imperial Bedroom. And when you survey the span of Elvis Costello's four-decade-plus career and see classical chamber music, country, Americana, soul, Irish folk, blues, quasi-hip-hop, and lush Big Band pop alongside the well-known three-chord bangers, it's clear (to me, at least) that this restless variety isn't a case of late-career boredom, of a rocker on a tangent or a diversion from his "main" career; this musical panoply is his career. Put another way: Rock is just one of his flavors, the girl he happened to bring to the dance but not the one he married.

You can hear the timeless sensibility of a writer who had listened to Bacharach and would one day work with him in "Imagination (Is a Powerful Deceiver)," a throwback white-soul number that first came to my attention on the expanded Rykodisc release of My Aim Is True. It sounds a bit like a rough draft of his classic crypto-murder ballad "Alison." (He confirms the association in this later live rendition.) The backing band is Flip City (a slew of diverting demos by them, including "Imagination," are here).

The images are more abstract and diffuse than on "Alison," as is the slightly wandering verse structure. But the song's real hooks for me are, as they are in Lily Allen's "Smile," a few chords that burn and blur and stick in the ear. The song's opening guitar chord is—surprise!—a major sixth (sorry, Sondheim), and there's a beautiful use of the same G6 chord as a kind of quivering suspension in the vocal, on "whispers in the hall" (at :20), and a later use of it in passing ("come around to call" is a D6).

The verse also has a great left-field chord, a Bb (under "creeping cross the floor," at :35), which is roughly analogous to the VII in "Alison" (the D under "take off your party dress"), though in "Imagination" it's got a dissonant flat-5 suspension going on ("floor" is sung on an E♮- D over the Bb chord). It really hangs there.

The chorus, also a sort of ghost of "Alison," is even better. It starts on a D6, then wrings real tenderness out of the G-major seventh on "powerful." The same phrase reharmonized gives us a F#-minor-sus4 on "Try to believe her," and then the sudden, revelatory appearance of the VII, a C chord, for an extra lift. 

Later, the repeated "I'll go out of my mind if I'm losing your touch" anticipates the pithier, more evocative "My aim is true" refrain, and again it touches that tender GMaj7 spot.

This wouldn't be the last time he would use jazzy chords like this, thank God, but at this early juncture they should have been a telltale sign that Elvis Costello's punk dispensation was hardly inevitable. "Imagination" represents not so much a road not taken as an early map for later explorations.