Elvis Costello is one of the most prolific singer-songwriters whose career has made remarkable changes in music materials. His experience in the music realm has been great as Elvis has won Grammy Awards more than once. Elvis Costello has been an icon since the start of his career in pub rock, since then, he has been adjusting to a different wave of music like British Punk.
Costello has been a person to look up to, but he himself believes he isn’t really a major player in the game. Costello himself had his set of favorite icons. And guess what, he was a fan of the greatest rock band of all time, The Beatles. He also revealed his favorite track and talked in depth about his love for them and the song.
Elvis said, “It might seem a little obvious, but I would pick ‘For No One’. Rubber Soul was the first album I remember thinking, ‘This is something about a world I don’t know.’ Up until then, all the Beatles songs had seemed very happy. Then there were darker things, more grown up things on Rubber Soul. Paul’s songs tended to remain quite joyful, but Lennon’s songs like ‘Girl’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ had grown dark. Then Revolver comes out. That’s still my favorite of all Beatles records. It has both things. It has incredible choruses, but wild, innovative stuff.” He also added,
“You think about the moments that contradict everything we know. ‘For No One’ is everything that’s great about Paul McCartney in one song — except for the fact that it isn’t a rock ’n’ roll song, which he can do great. But it’s a really beautiful melody. He’s like a fantastic movie actor who doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t over-dramatize. The way he sings, so the slightest hint of emotion in the timbre of his voice — I know this is going to sound weird, but I hear it sounding like records from the ’20s and ’30s almost. There’s no vibrato. There’s some timbre, and I suppose the word people would use is ‘wistful.”
Elvis also talked about the lyrics of the song. He said, “To me, it’s his best lyric, not that there aren’t many others after that and before. It’s the one where, I think, you could make a case for how unique a lyricist he is. It’s not a song anyone else has written. Not even remotely like a song I can think of. And not really many since, the way it’s laid out. And yet, aside from all that, the telling of the story is like that of a playwright.”
In the end, he said, “The beauty of the McCartney tune is you could just sing along and it not occur to you, but the minute it does occur to you, it’s inescapable.”
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