The last song Elvis Costello wants to hear when he dies: “I love it so”
Every music fan has surely thought, even in passing, about what song might play at their funeral at one time or another.
That decision is, however, rather more complicated when you have presided over a discography quite as expansive and all-encompassing as Elvis Costello, whose record collection and personal output have spanned the entire spectrum of musical expression.
Even when Costello first emerged onto the airwaves, embracing his angry young man persona during the age of punk rock rebellion, his output was always far more sonically diverse than any of his Stiff Records peers. He was, after all, indebted to his adolescent obsessions with the worlds of folk, jazz, and even country music – though he was rather particular about which aspects of country he embraced and which he lamented.
Anybody who has ever had the briefest of skims through the discography of the thick-rimmed songwriter will be all too aware of just how expansive his output has been over the course of his illustrious career. It is not overly surprising, then, that his record collection is equally extraordinary – a fact which was laid bare in 2000, when the list of 500 essential albums he compiled for Vanity Fair incorporated everybody from Abba to Johann Sebastian Bach.
Inevitably, though, that colossal collection means that choosing one song to sum up the entire life of Elvis Costello is something of an impossibility.
Whereas some people simply choose their favourite song – no matter how thematically inappropriate – to play at their funeral, Costello is somebody who would much rather choose something semi-autobiographical, which has provided solace to him throughout his existence.
During a 2020 chat with The Quietus, Costello revealed what that song should be, selecting Fats Waller as having performed his ideal funeral song. “Although this song is to be found on a supposedly definitive collection, it is not as well known as other Fats Waller songs that have slipped into common and even careless language,” he started. “I would be content if the song, ‘Keeping Out Of Mischief Now’ was playing when they carry me out.”
“I’ll just have to decide whether it should be to Waller’s original or the Louis Armstrong version from Louis Plays Fats,” the songwriter added. Both versions certainly have their merits, but it was the jazz pianist who originally composed the track, and it was seemingly that version that first struck a chord with the jazz tendencies of Mr Costello.
You don’t have to search very far, in fact, to hear the enduring influence of that 1932 composition on Elvis Costello’s own work. “I love it so much that I had the trumpet player, Mickael Gaschë, quote the theme for the opening refrain of the title track of my new album, Hey Clockface, while I sang a few lines of ‘How Can You Face Me?’ to bring the performance to a close,” he explained.
Selecting a funeral song is no easy task, and there is certainly a chance that Costello’s ideal choice changed the moment that Fats Waller’s track left his lips. Nevertheless, those revolutionary piano keys would certainly conjure up a fitting epitaph for a songwriter who has always played the game entirely by his own rules and has never been afraid to stray away from the mainstream in order to embrace something distinctly more experimental.
