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. It's a modulation of a sort, but whereas many writers throw key changes into songs to audibly ratchet them up, and in the process raise the key of the whole song, Costello somehow sneaks a modulation past our ears, so that Orbison sings the song's second chorus a full fourth higher than the first—all without changing the root key of the verse. It's a master class in songcraft.

Over a faintly martial tattoo in 12/8, the opening sets the scene at a rather grim, chilly carnival:

Next, a standard move up a half step melodically to an F, and harmonically a notch up to the minor ii, Dm:

The chorus that follows, starting in G, has a lovely, Orbisonian ascent and expanse to it:

The second verse—in which our narrator is left dangling in a Ferris wheel carriage by the operator, who's busy romancing the narrator's girl—is the same, but with one crucial difference: Instead of flopping down to an A note on the fourth measure, the melody walks up to the next highest A:

And it lingers on that note for a totally different harmony than before—or rather, the same chord progression supporting the same melody line, just a full fifth higher, in A-minor:

Rather than lead into the chorus, though, the verse breaks off, as if ravaged by the moment of loss described in the lyric, and a string part takes over:

This sounds a bit like an Orbison ending, a la the finale of "Running Scared" ("You turned around and walked away with me"). But whether we know it or not, the stage has been set for an even bigger climax. That passionate interlude was necessary to return to the home key of C, where the final verse begins. But then it repeats the higher Am-E7 variation...and leads into a grand final chorus starting in C rather than G, as before:

We end the song on a higher plane, in the key of F—a fairly uncommon move for any song, and an ironic ascent for a song about a jealous lover lamenting his being dumped from an apparent height. It's an absurdly dramatic image, and it's hard to imagine a better musical setting for it, or a more ideal showcase for Orbison's tragic tenor.

The chorus lyrics are a bit strange, though: Who are "the comedians" our narrator regrets being around rather than his "absent friends"? Oddly, the entire chorus is lifted from an earlier version of the song, which appeared on Costello's most-maligned studio album (not entirely justly, imo), Goodbye Cruel World. The earlier "Comedians" is a not unpleasant curiosity, musically ambitious (as far as I know, it may be Costello's only song with a 5/4 vamp) and lyrically abstruse. The chorus lyrics are admittedly evocative, though, and they fit the resentment of the new carousel scenario well enough in spirit, even as they scramble the setting (it's suddenly dawn and he's surrounded by jokers? okay). Tellingly, it doesn't use the upward-modulation trick.

Clearly this material was meant for more exalted ends, and it didn't take too long to find them; Goodbye Cruel World came out in 1984, Orbison's swan song, Mystery Girl, in 1989. Like the Ferris wheel operator he laments in the song, Costello was in full control of the levers here, and he turned them just right to get the needed lift.