"The Juliet Letters" : is this the Elvis Costello's best album or not?

A confounding, undervalued hook-up with The Brodsky Quartet

This is no more my stab at ‘classical music’ than it is the Brodsky Quartet’s first rock and roll album, declared Elvis Costello in the (extensive) sleevenotes of the original release (Jan 19, 1993) of The Juliet Letters. A measure of defensiveness was understandable. As Costello had learned the hard way, over 13 previous albums of restless reinvention and innovation, and the often bewildered and/or outraged response to same, rock fans - for all their rebel posturing - are often extremely conservative and possessive people.

The suspicions engendered by The Juliet Letters were mostly to the effect that Costello was being deliberately and obtusely whimsical and/or insane and vainglorious and/or was making a clumsy and faintly pitiable attempt to be taken seriously. The last of these was convincingly debunked by Costello himself in the (even more extensive) sleevenotes of the 2006 reissue of The Juliet Letters (“Clearly, anyone who made such a statement had little or no knowledge of critical hyperbole that can rain down on even the slightest talent before the bloom goes off the romance in pop music. I had found myself being taken too seriously and over-analysed from the very outset of my recording career.”) The other accusations were rather more a reflection on those making them than the object of them: imagination and ambition seem strange insults to level at any artist, or indeed anyone.

The more prosaic truth of the gestation of The Juliet Letters was that Costello had chanced across a newspaper article about a Veronese professor who had taken to replying to the correspondence the city apparently received addressed to Juliet Capulet. Costello, not unreasonably, was intrigued by the idea of what people might be writing to a fictional or at any rate long-dead character, and what one could possibly say in reply. At around the same time, he was entranced by The Brodsky Quartet’s performances of Shostakovich’s string quartets at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and over the next few years became a regular at their concerts - unaware, as he tells it, that the Brodskys had also been to see him play more than once. They began discussing working together in 1991, and The Juliet Letters was premiered in London and Darlington in the summer of 1992, after which the album was recorded, live in the studio.

The Juliet Letters is a punctiliously equal collaboration: Costello contributes to the music, the Brodskys to the words. For all that, The Juliet Letters, like few other Costello albums before or since - North is perhaps the only comparison - is dominated by Costello’s singing voice. This is understandable - he’d cut that unmistakeable serrated whine to be heard against vastly more clamorous backing. And it’s mostly no problem at all, at least for listeners who have acquired what remains a divisive taste. His impersonation of a vindictive grandmother plotting disinheritance on “I Almost Had A Weakness” owes much to such previous sanctimoniously enraged outbursts as “Blue Chair” and “How To Be Dumb”; “This Sad Burlesque” is a descendant of such beard-era baroque triumphs as “All Grown Up” and “God’s Comic”, and his ominous muttering of “For Other Eyes” recalls “Pills & Soap” (a Brodskyfied version of which would form part of the encore at live performances of The Juliet Letters). 

But the worst and best moments of The Juliet Letters are those at which Costello tries to find new voices for this new context. On “Swine”, he affects a nasal, declamatory bark to suit a screed of deranged ranting (“You’re a swine and I'm saying that's an insult to the pig”), but sounds perhaps too convincingly like a ragged- trousered itinerant barking at traffic outside an off-licence. On a few other tracks, especially “Romeo’s Seance” and “The First To Leave”, Costello could perhaps have afforded to rein in his sometimes hyperactively tremulous vibrato just a little.

But when he properly hits it, he’s magnificent. The creeping, obsessive “Taking My Life In Your Hands”, the glorious showstopper that heralded the intermission in live performances of The Juliet Letters, builds slowly and sumptuously to a crescendo that Costello surely has no hope of reaching, until he does, at which he suddenly resembles some seething, vindictive cousin of Bobby Hatfield (a compliment, in these circumstances).

The Brodsky Quartet are predictably extraordinary throughout, as capable of the stately and restrained as they are of the playful and poppy. It says much about the seamlessness of Costello’s association with The Brodsky Quartet that it barely seemed remarkable when they did pop up on a couple of his subsequent albums, playing on a track each of All This Useless Beauty and North, or when Costello appeared on their Mood Swings.

No Elvis Costello album has been so witheringly pre-judged as The Juliet Letters. It may be for that reason that it rarely features among lists of his best works. Indeed, it must be that, because there’s not a lot wrong with the songs.