Elvis Costello
had been writing songs and performing them in public long before he became the most gifted Angry Young Man of the New Wave Class of 1977 with his debut album
My Aim Is True
. While plenty of punk and new wave acts espoused a Year Zero attitude about rock & roll,
Costello
obviously had a strong working knowledge of pop songwriting past and present, though it wouldn't be until he made 1981's
Trust
and 1982's
Imperial Bedroom
that he was willing to reveal just how firmly rooted he was in pop classicism. Years later,
and
Burt Bacharach
teamed up to write "God Give Me Strength" for
Allison Anders
' 1996 film
Grace of My Heart
, a pairing that seemed like an amusing mismatch only to people who hadn't paid much attention to
's career since 1979's
Armed Forces
. The song was a brilliant evocation of
Bacharach
's sweetly melancholic tunes of the '60s, with lyrics from
that were thoughtful, mature, and fully worthy of the gravity and craft of
's melody. "God Give Me Strength" was good enough that
chose to write and record an album together, and 1998's
Painted from Memory
was a master class in pop songwriting for grown-ups, informed by
's salad days without betraying the least bit of nostalgia, and featuring some of the finest, most well-considered vocals
ever committed to tape.
extended the collaboration to pen a number of songs for a projected Broadway musical (conceived by, of all people,
Chuck Lorre
, the sitcom titan behind Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory), and
The Songs of Bacharach & Costello
is a box set that combines a remastered version of
with 16 performances of songs either written for the uncompleted musical Taken from Life or adapted from tunes on the album. The Taken from Life material is splendid and should please any fans of the collaborators, though the performances by
Cassandra Wilson
,
Jenni Muldaur
Audra Mae
, and others point out how specifically these songs seem to fit
's voice, and that they were crafted to suit a narrative that was never fully resolved. Rounding out the set is a collection of live performances of the
/
numbers and a final disc of
singing
Hal David
classics on-stage. The sizable majority of this has been previously released, but the material here has been packaged and presented with consummate care, and
penned a fascinating 10,000-word essay on his work with
for this release. As fate would have it,
arrived less than a month after
died on February 9, 2023 at the age of 94. This collection wasn't intended to be a memorial, yet the deep dive into one of his last major collaborations pays worthy homage to his skill and dedication to craft, and every moment testifies to
's towering respect for the great man. ~ Mark Deming