Elvis Costello wanted to shake things up for his newly released 31st studio set, titled, Hey Clockface. Costello shed light on the album's somewhat odd recording process, telling Vulture.com, “It was a really joyful experience to make the record, because I was in Helsinki, Finland. I wanted to literally go somewhere I’d never been and start to make a rock n' roll record without a blueprint. Make everything on the record a drum, and my voice is a drum, drum machine is a drum, the organ is a drum, the guitar is a drum. There’s no bass until the chorus, so everything in the first minute and a half, two minutes of the record is a drum.”
Costello spoke about one of the album's standout tune, titled, “No Flag,” revealing after all these years — he's still finding inspiration, even in the darkest days: “The song was written before the turn of the year, and it’s something I’d been thinking on for a while. Just the idea that there are days when other circumstances than the ones we are living through now get you to the edge, like, on the precipice — whatever that precipice is. Where it’s. . . nothing satisfies you. No philosophical idea, no theological idea, no allegiance. None of it is consoling.”
We recently caught up with Elvis Costello and he explained how he approaches recording his music: “With records, people often go in and they're, like, working on a project for a long time. For us, it's about preparing very well before you go in, and actually, doing the recording in a really short order of time. When the red light is on, the emotion is there (and) you try to get the best performance. You can correct things, but we don't need a lot of takes to get it right. We need to prepare to make sure we have the clearest idea of what we're trying to do and we are traditional in that sense.”
