Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett might seem like portraits in courage, for anyone who has followed their individual and collective musical trail-blazing, but at the moment, they’re studies in Coward-ice. They portray their long-time alter-egos, Henry and Howard Coward, in the new scripted Audible Original series “The True Story of the Coward Brothers,” which premieres this week — as does the digital streaming version of a 20-track New West soundtrack album, “The Coward Brothers.”
The Costello-scripted, Christopher Guest-directed, three-part audio series and its accompanying album are arriving right on the heels of an expansive boxed set that includes a substantial portion of the 40 years of collaborations between Costello and Burnett. The six-CD “King of America and Other Realms” includes a remastered version of the masterpiece that is 1986’s “King of America,” along with B-sides, outtakes, live tracks and selections from the projects that Burnett has produced for his “brother” in the nearly four decades since. It’s indispensible.
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As opposed to implausible, one of many words that might be used to describe the somewhat satirical “True Story of the Coward Brothers.” In an expansive conversation with Variety, Costello was joined by Burnett to talk about the new collaborations as well as what brought them together in the mid-‘80s, in the service of creating a kind of European-inflected Americana that has been wildly influential on leagues of other artists who’ve taken similarly acoustic-leaning turns in the years since.
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The Audible Original series can be streamed here, and the New West album streamed here or purchased here. (Meanwhile, watch this space for a separate interview, in character, with Henry and Howard Coward themselves.)
Tell us about writing the script for the Coward Brothers audio project, Elvis, and then doing the 20-song album to accompany that. What went into both of those, and what did Christopher Guest bring to it in his role as director?
Elvis Costello: Well, first of all, how long ago was that, Henry, that we’d considered a cartoon of this?
T Bone Burnett: That had to be 10 or 15 years ago, 20, 25, I don’t know.
Costello: When did you do “Drawn and Recorded” [an animated series Burnett narrated in 2016]? I think it had to be after that…
Burnett: I’ve come unstuck in time completely.
Costello: I feel much better for that. Anyway, I think that idea of telling it as a story came up then. And then I guess it was the gift of time that we suddenly had (during the pandemic). And I was fortunate in that I didn’t feel frightened or paralyzed by that interlude where we couldn’t travel, other than not being able to respond to alarms with family members or friends who were unwell. I didn’t feel confined creatively, because I’d discovered a way to record confidently with my cohorts. But I found the draft (from the idea of doing the Coward Brothers’ story in animated form), and I thought maybe I should try and write this. And I genuinely found that writing this story directly into Final Draft clarified my intentions of how to tell it and made it easier to see the proportions of the story and the characters.
What I didn’t see until we got into the studio — and I think Henry may have a comment on this — was how I had made my part incredibly easy and his part was actually much more intricate. And that’s where Christopher Guest really stepped in. When Christopher agreed to be our director, I felt confident that we would not be allowed to fall short of a credible delivery of the lines. I knew the lines worked on the page, but it’s a different thing: Are we going to sound OK saying them? Because we can only be Henry and Howard as best we can. We have no technique as actors, the way actors can turn on colors.
Burnett: You actually do have technique. I mean, Elvis started playing Howard in a whole other dialect, a whole other voice; it was a character immediately. And I didn’t know how to respond to that. Chris and I worked quite a bit on who my character was. Your character emerged fully blown. If you’ll forgive me for saying so. [Laughs.] I think we went through the whole script one time before I actually could do it. And then we did it all.
Costello: And then it was very funny how Chris would keep you to account, the minute you drifted even a little bit. You had a very specific Fort Worth accent, and if you drifted even five miles down the road, he would stop you. That’s how acute his ear is for dialect.
Burnett: You know, Chris knows literally hundreds of English dialects. He can do south Birmingham, north Birmingham… it’s extraordinary.
Costello: If we’d been more conscious, we would have had cameras rolling. Although of course it would’ve completely inhibited the process, because the only thing that was more fun than doing this with Chris was Chris’s diversions into other dialects in order to explain why we weren’t doing it right. But Chris was very generous. And I did realize that I had written a version of Martin and Lewis in which Henry was Dean and I was Jerry. Because I’m the over-excitable guy that’s always creating chaos. And as Rhea Seehorn gets to say in this, her character, Phyliss Dandy, describes Henry as “taciturn” at one point, and she has to look it up.
When we heard the character voices… Harry (Shearer) was the only one of the other voices that I knew personally, and he’s just so absolutely perfect in the balance between authority and pomposity. I’ll take credit for giving him the appropriately ridiculous language, in the way television news tries to decode pop culture. You know, the shorthand: “It was the age of popsicles…”
But the thing is that the story is not entirely frivolous. I hope that people will accept that it starts like satire and develops into something I think more heartfelt. It is about genuine kinship, and the mystery of the Cowards that I’m not about to reveal. Just as Alfred Hitchcock would have forbidden you to enter the theater five minutes into “Psycho,” I’m not gonna tell you the ending. But it develops somewhere different than it begins. And I think that, if you’re gonna be given the license to write an hour and a half of this kind of entertainment, whatever you would call it… this type of “wireless address,” as I’ve agreed to call it with the Audible people who didn’t want me to use the phrase “radio play”… I said, “Can we settle on wireless address?” And I hate the P-word so passionately. …
Burnett: You know, all of the language dreamed up by technologists lands harshly on the ear, I feel.
Costello: Like when we first dealt with music software, supposedly — boy, was that the wrong name for it…
You did just address the overarching question we might have, about whether people should approach this as comedy or satire about the history of music and the music business and the people in it, or whether it’s more of a personal story that happens to be comedic. The same question might apply to the 20-song soundtrack, which seems like a mixture. People might be expecting comedic songs, and they get some of those, but certainly not the whole thing is in that vein. So it seems like with both the script and the soundtrack, you were trying to touch on things that were comedic and things that were not comedic.
Costello: I think that’s right. I’m pleased (with) the record company, which are often keen to put out the thing that sounds most like what you’re known for. It’s not always the best idea with something new to follow that logic, and that’s something I’ve dealt with through all of my dealings with what you still call the industry.
Burnett: I think that’s right (about the variety of tones and styles in the soundtrack). You know, the soundtrack was recorded over 40 years (in fiction, if not reality). It’s a travelogue of the Coward Brothers, so there’s not a consistent tone. Some of them are demos, some of them are studio recordings. It’s an anthology, really.
Costello: Yeah, it’s an anthology. And some of it was (in real life) recorded in the presidential suite of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, and some of it was recorded in a highly equipped studio, and then we found ways to make it sound dreadful. But dreadful in the best sense of the word! Of course we were fortunate to have Lord Guest-Coward also join us on occasion on guitar and vocals. So there was a third Coward in the room. In fact, if you check the credits, you’ll find several other Cowards feature in the supporting roles. And then we’ve got a cast of really great name musicians in addition to those more mysterious presences. You’ve got Dennis Crouch, no finer bass player. Who else is playing…?
Burnett: Colin Linden (a noted guitarist who frequently turns up on Burnett productions) plays a little bit.
Costello: Beautiful player… And I find the record company very sympathetic in having chosen “Always” (as a single), because it’s a song in which I think the real-life Henry suddenly was visited by this thread of melody, for which I’m very grateful — the thread of melody that’s produced “The Other Side” (Burnett’s solo album released earlier this year) and has produced the beautiful songs on Ringo’s record (Ringo Starr’s “Look Up,” a country album due out in January). So “Always” isn’t the first time that that’s been accessed.
In the language of the Cowards’ legend are these references to all sorts of music. It’s not just one kind of music. But to me, what I find touching about the existence of “Always” and “World Serious” and, in a different way, the song that’s at the very end of the record, “Clown Around Town” — these are pure form songs. And they connect backwards to the “King of America” form of song, or for that matter, things like “River of Love” and “Shake Yourself Loose” from the Dot record (Burnett’s classic “T Bone Burnett” album from 1986, released on the Dot label). They have that same clarity of language musically, whatever the intentions, whatever the different context here.
I think by the time you get to “Clown Around Town,” we are not dealing entirely in a comic realm anymore. You can draw whatever conclusion from that lyric you want, you know? I stood alone on the stage in Dublin about a month ago and sang that song, and it was as true to life as it was to the fantasy version of this story. It was just a song that I was proud to have written. And I could sing it as myself, I could sing it as Howard Coward, I could sing it as a number of people.
The Audible program has quite a voice cast.
Burnett: I do want to call special attention (in the Audible program) to Rhea Seehorn, who did such an amazing job as Phyliss Stanley.
Costello: She’s a knockout. I don’t think you could ask for a finer cast of people to inhabit these characters.
Burnett: Stephen Root killed it. And Edward Hibbard…
Costello: Yes, who plays Lord Arthur Coward. In English (dialect), he would be only “half a Coward” because it’d be “Arthur Coward” [turning those two phrases into unlikely homonyms, through a British accent].
It’s very strange to say that, because if you start to talk in this odd language that playwrights have to use when they imagine the voices, it can sound slightly crazy. But this is just the first published work I’ve written (in script form). It’s not the first thing I’ve ever written, not by a long way. So it’s interesting to calculate the distance between your imagining of the way it would be said, and the actuality. Just as when you write a song and somebody else sings it, sometimes that interpretation will surprise you. Occasionally it’ll horrify you, but most of the time you’re just glad that somebody’s given it a go and had confidence in it, you know?
Can you talk about the actual genesis of the Coward Brothers, and how that started with the single you two put out in the mid-‘80s under that name, “The People’s Limousine,” and then got revived for this Audible series and soundtrack 40 years later? With an entire history of shared work in between that is excerpted in the new “King of America and Other Realms” boxed set.
The people at Audible and the people at New West Records are really collaborating — probably more than we do — in doing (the audio series and soundtrack). One thing cannot entirely live without the other…
Because people may not have a memory of the Coward Brothers’ first appearance. Which was indeed our first “comeback tour” back in ‘84, where we were briefly reconciled (as the fictional brothes) and played a number of dates in Europe and Japan and even a few in North America. I was on a tour at that time where I trying to rescue songs from that I had left in the spin dryer a little bit too long. [He’s referring to the 1984 solo-acoustic tour, which had Burnett as an opening act, that followed the release of Elvis Costello & the Attractions’ “Goodbye Cruel World,” which he once referred to as “our worst album.”] I was sort of taking them down to their essential form, which was the way you usually write them with one instrument, and finding that it was much easier to feel what I had first intended with even some of the songs which were already quite well-known with my audience.
And upon meeting T Bone Burnett, I discovered that he was actually my brother, Henry Coward. And from then on, we had used this tale to explain why we would get together in the midst of my show and start singing songs by Harlan Howard or Bobby Charles or Scott McKenzie. And people were tremendously patient with this, because obviously they still longed to hear my then-recent hit “Party Party.” [Costello is kidding.] They were all clamoring for that one; I just refused to play it. Then we just pressed right on playing (the cover songs) “Baby’s in Black” and “I’m Ragged but I’m Right.” And we had a lot of fun spinning this tale … Even then I suspected that Howard believed it more than Henry. And yet Henry had even more capacity to invent greater and greater, more complicated lies with which to swindle me out of my inheritance. But this was a way of entertaining the patrons of Geneva, who were just thrilled to see us turn up as the Coward Brothers. I think their joy was unconfined. What was it Orson Welles said about Switzerland? It was true, whatever it was he said. [Costello is referring to Welles’ lines in “The Third Man”: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”] Oh, but it proved not to be the case. They were not full of brotherly love that night. They were actually trying to kill us.
But we had some very interesting adventures, and it did lead to the recording of “The People’s Limousine,” which we wrote together. And it led to one Henry wrote alone, called “Euromad” [on Burnett’s album “The Talking Animals”], which is an account, really, of that first Coward adventure in some ways, from one side of the stage to the other.
And in turn, to be more serious for a moment, I think that alliance that was struck allowed us to talk (about forging an artist-producer relationship), because of this recognition that I’d had that the songs that I had most recently recorded were not best-served by the way we’d gone about recording them. I think that was no fault of the producers. That was my fault, in not sticking with the initial, less manicured way of presenting the feelings in those songs. And then during the tour, I started to include the songs that became “King of America.” I looked back into the archive and found some setlists, and one day there were none of the songs from “King of America,” and then, five shows later, there were six or seven of those songs. I don’t recall if I had already written them and hadn’t yet had the nerve to sing them, or I was working on them as we traveled. But it led to that recording and that way of recording in an unadorned way that is a model for the way you have recorded.
You know, you were already moving yourself in a gradual direction away from more embellishment into the way in which the singer is at the center of the picture and the story is paramount, and the instrumentalists have to all be aware that their job is to support that emotional contrast with the melody, maybe, in their inventions. But that was really the strength of “King of America.” And it was the strength of what I always called the Dot record, which I think was recorded just after that, because I remember I was still around and saw some of the sessions; that in some ways was an even greater distillation of the same idea.
In the first stages of making “King of America,” you attempted to record the material with the Attractions and found it wasn’t working. And then suddenly, because of hooking up with T Bone, you had this enormous freedom to cast from scratch, with legendary musicians from James Burton to Ray Brown.
Burnett: I remember we did it all on a plane, on a long flight either to or from Japan. Is this right, Elvis?
Costello: To Japan. I knew the songs at this point, and so we just imagined who would be great on them, first of all, musicians that knew how to play songs rather than play bits or parts. All the greatest musicians play the lyric, really; they play the story, so they’re scoring the lyric. So he was suggesting all people that knew how to do that — with the exception of James Burton, who’s just completely out of his mind and plays everything like a crazy man. Most of the people we were talking about are people that appeared on records that I loved. Even in the case of James, I wasn’t so much thrilled that I had a guitar player who’d played with Elvis Presley, or even Ricky Nelson, so much as he was the guitar player on (Gram Parsons’) “The Return of the Grievous Angel” and had been in the Hot Band (with Emmylou Harris). You know, that was in some ways closer to my heart and closer to the songs that I was writing. Many of them took the form of country songs, even if I don’t come from that tradition, and they took the form of the heartbreak ballad.
And you could point to several examples of James’ playing being the counterpoint to the vocal melody. And just a couple of weeks ago, I got to be part of the team of people who sang and performed for him when he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Just on the basis of his having played on “Working Man Blues” by Merle Haggard, it’s amazing that he wasn’t already in there. But I’m glad they waited until now so I could be part of it, if only to be a witness to it. Because it included me singing a Ricky Nelson song I probably never would’ve chosen for myself, but it was fun to sing, and he was delighted, clearly. Emmylou and Rodney Crowell and Vince Gill came out and did “Till I Gain Control Again,” with Vince playing the most beautiful solo that was completely in James’ language without being an imitation. And Keith Richard played “I Can’t Dance”… It seemed unbelievable that it was 40 years since I met James.
So it’s amazing to look at the scope of this, and “King of America” in some ways leads to the Cowards, but it also leads to the other realms that are represented in the rest of this (boxed set)… including a live record in which many of the musicians who played on “King of America” played in London in a concert in ’87, in probably as wild a guitar-playing show as you’ll ever hear from James. And then I’ve tried to make an anthology annotated at some length — with a 35-page essay I wrote — of why these places (in America) that I went to record in the subsequent 20 or 30 years have been so important. Like an actor on location, you just like being to inhabit the character, like Howard Coward.
Even from the very beginning of our friendship, we’ve had opportunities to work sometimes in the company of incredible people, many of whom I was introduced to for the first time by T Bone. Not just the musicians on “King of America,” but he also introduced me to Kris Kristofferson, to Willie Dixon. We were all slightly alarmed witnesses to my introduction to Jerry Lee (Lewis), a story I try to relay that story in the essay so that it’s not all sentimentality. There were moments of surprise. I feel the Cowards have been lurking in the background throughout a lot of the work that we did after “King of America.” Periodically we would get together again, more in the spirit of the Cowards than in our independent personalities, the way we scheme things.
The sheer scale of “Spike” is, I think, very Cowardly… I mean, it would be an unprecedented idea now, to say that we were going to record in five cities; nobody would give you the money to do that. Not with the scope of songs that are recorded with no promise of any hits. And, by the way, having a hit by accident (with “Veronica”), and with subject matter that’s very rarely heard in the hit parade [being about his grandmother and her dementia]. You know, at that stage, you could have it both ways.
Now there is no record business. So if there are recordings at all, they are just literally, to make records of the music that you’ve written. There’s no ambition for them being attached to an advert for underwear. There isn’t any objective except making music happen, and that’s quite liberating, once you realize that you’re not gonna get paid for doing this anymore, and you’re not gonna be sent around the world to answer stupid questions. You can have a conversation as hopefully we’re having, where we’re saying at least some things that matter to us. Whether they’re true or made up, at least we’re actually meaning to be here. We’re not making guest appearances on shows that have nothing to do with what we do. You know, we’re making appearances on shows where we can have fun talking about the thing that we’re proud to speak about.
The new boxed set has three discs devoted to King of America or its B-sides or demos or the live concert, and then three discs that are themed around subsequent albums that you feel have some relation to it. Were you ever thinking of just a straight “King of America” boxed set, or from the start, was it, let’s throw a lot of related things in and connect them?
Costello: I was never thinking of that (a strictly “King”-centered set), because I think that every new presentation should be the beginning of a conversation about music.
There is the accusation that this (boxed set) is somehow elitist, or extravagant. It is extravagant. You know why is it? Because I’m a professional writer. I’ve been a professional writer longer than I’ve been a musician, you know? So I get paid for doing what I do. I wrote a 35 page essay, and the price of of getting to read that is buying that box for which you get six records of free music with it! Think of it that way, then it won’t hurt so much. In any case, every single note of this music is available one way or another, either legally or illegally, and has been for a long time. So I’m going to make no apology about the form that I present it in as a conversation piece for you. And if you want to know what I’m thinking about the value of all of this experience, I’m not saying this in any embittered way — I’m saying this in a joyful way. I’m tremendously proud of the work that T Bone and I have done both as ourselves and as Henry and Howard Coward.
I think that there are times when the Cowards have come into the side of the picture, creating mischief… You know, there is the work you’ve done with the Coens… In the big, big film (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”), I had no place. I would’ve been no use in that film because that was drawing on the heart of genuinely American music. On the other hand, being in the Dude’s headphones in “The Big Lebowski” is a perfect place for my almost inaudible song. You can hear “My Mood Swings” in “The Big Lebowski” about as clearly as you can hear my songs on American radio. But this is not because of the quality of the music. And the other things that we did always led somewhere, like writing “The Scarlet Tide” (their Oscar-nominated song from “Cold Mountain”). It’s a beautiful thing that people have taken that song up and sung it. It’s been sung by choirs. Joan Baez has recorded it. There is no really no higher praise, if you write a ballad, than that Joan should sing it from the heart on one of her last records.
We weren’t working in live performance style on “Spike.” When we returned to that, I had already had the experience of going to Mississippi with the Imposters [to record “The Delivery Man”], and of recording with Allen Toussaint in New Orleans and in Hollywood… All of these things were carried into the records that T Bone and I made at the turn of 2008, 2010… When we went back to the acoustic form of recording in 2008, a bunch of things happened simultaneously. We made that “Secret, Profane and Sugarcane” record. Do you remember when “Sulfur to Sugarcane” came?
Burnett: It was actually written for Sean Penn, for “All the King’s Men,” originally.
Costello: That’s right. It’s kind of a precursor of the “Face in the Crowd” songs, in a way [the musical stage drama with a Costello score that just opened in London]. Did we use it in the film?
Burnett: I don’t think so. There is a version of Sean singing it. Let me see if I can dig that up.
Costello: Then there was the suggestion that “The Crooked Line” could be the end titles song of “Walk the Line.” That was when I realized that things had gone horribly wrong and the Cowards could be the only people responsible for such a notion, because it was purely a piece of studio placement. I think we wrote a really good song — “The Crooked Line” is a really heartfelt song — but the idea of it being on the end of a film about Johnny Cash is only because you couldn’t nominate a song by Johnny Cash, so it had to be a new song… Well, you see what I mean about how the Cowards have entered the picture now and again. There’s a lot of mischief in all of this work.
