Elvis Costello's Everyday I Write the Book

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Elvis Costello's Everyday I Write the Book

Robert Christgau said it was a song "you like so much you think you understand [it]". Elvis - no, not the other one - himself said it "was a bad Smokey Robinson song". Later, "I don't care much for the record".

They're more-or-less right: lyrically it's a dumb song. "Don't tell me you don't know what love is, / when you're old enough to know better, / when you find strange hands in your sweater"? "When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote"? We remember that Christgau called Costello's songs "precious lyrically, vocally, and musically, and gnomic for no reason at all - in short, pretentious." Ouch.

But...that's what makes Costello great. That's what makes "Everyday I Write the Book", in spite of Costello's indifference, a great song. People are precious. That doesn't make our lives any less sad.

By the way, the Smokey Robinson comparison is just straight-up weird. This is no "Tracks of My Tears", and none of Costello's songs can even be equated. What makes Elvis interesting is the constant compromise between his pop sensibilities and his natural longing for poetry. Pop is elegance and balance, quiet in its strength and flawless in execution as Greek statues; poetry is the language of dirt, it requires filth. Taking Costello's native homeland, the writings of Shelley and Shakespeare, no matter how lofty and reaching their words are, struggle with agony, fear and loathing. Pop must smooth these uncertainties out; it opts to hide subtlety, revealing themselves only after depthful analysis. Morrissey, hilariously, is closer to The Supremes for these traits. Looking at "Tracks of My Tears", there is one meaningful progression in the song: the track of the singer's tears. No other narrative fits. Both anecdotes, Robinson at a party, Robinson with a new girl, revolve around this theme. The idea is so stripped to the bone that the remaining detail comes from arrangement and the vocal delivery, a great one, at that. Costello likes words. His verses are long and meandering. He also likes melody. He chose to have both. Good on him, but I still say he's more akin a Leonard Cohen than anything. It doesn't matter how much genetics his songs have to radio-ready songs.

I think "Everyday I Write the Book" is just about perfect, lyrically. It's a very funny song. It begins with that memorable line: "Don't tell me you don't know, what love is," Elvis placing a long pause between "know" and "what" almost as if he is hesitant to say the word. Geek as he is, he might actually not know what love is - I mean, who does? Then, the admonishment: "when you're old enough to know, better". This pause conveys bitterness, a reminder that the idea of love is tainted by our conception of adulthood, a common Elvis refrain in his earlier years.

Then the corny line: "I'm a man with a mission in, two or three editions." After lambasting his lover or himself on not knowing the rules of love, he proceeds with the massively outsized ego of his character, who endeavors to put all of romantic life into the schmaltzy language of soaps. Great set-up.

The refrain: "I'm giving you a longing look, / everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book." There are three ways to read this. One is that the character, in his quest to "write a book", is looking longingly at his partner because he is thinking how he will depict her character on paper. The other is that he is legitimately looking longingly at her with sadness, hoping to break out of the stupidities of their current relationship which have begun to resemble a poorly-written romance. The Greek chorus helps this interpretation a lot, almost elevating the song, from a man's singular ramblings, to fantasy. The third interpretation combines the prior two: there's legitimate sadness, and legitimate resentment arising from that sadness. Thus the lyrics are sung vengefully, as if the book will show the world of the cruelties of the relationship. I like all three interpretations.

I put "write a book" in quotation marks because, despite the punny language, we're not sure if the protagonist is writing a physical book or is writing one in his head, as much as we keep a journal in ours as we maneuver day-to-day life. As much as we can say a book is fiction, we do in fact live through the sentences of our writing before we put them down into paper - the words carry some meaning to us, which is why we are writing them down. It's insignificant whether there is an actual book at play. What is important is that the singer is recounting the gulf in a relationship, and he uses the framing of a book to show the audience his feigned indifference to it all.

Chapter one, we didn't really get along;
chapter two, I think I fell in love with you;
you said you'd stand by me in the middle of chapter three,
but you were up to your old tricks in chapters four, five and six.

These are Bible-style lyrics, reducing the entire world to these two characters. Of course, a real-life romance is not set on stages so small; that's part of the wounded ego and fantasy of this character. In its own way, through its appeal to fiction i.e. by assuming that there are parts that people in a relationship can play, should play and will play, the character is absolving himself of guilt for the deterioration, even as he makes his last snipe in the concluding line.

Let's skip the third verse - and that great lyric, "the way you walk, / the way you talk and try to kiss me and laugh, / in four or five paragraphs" - and focus on the fourth verse, which takes advantage of the silence after the third repetition of the chorus. "Don't tell me you don't know, the difference / between a lover and a fighter." Again, more hidden resentment and defensiveness from the character, but it's also a repetition of the earlier "don't tell me you don't know, what love is"; where this question is a vast, philosophical question, the "difference between a lover and a fighter" is not, and shows that he himself has no idea what he is talking about. I do like to think Costello was aware of his own pretentiousness.

Then, the final stroke of brilliance:

Even in a perfect world,
where everyone was equal
I'd still own the film rights and be
working on the sequel.

It's a fitting punchline for the song, which had been escalating this guy's pettiness throughout. After this last verse, our Greek chorus end in ecstasy: "I'm giving you a longing look, every day I write the book!", elevating the narrator's ego to the highest heights as if heaven himself will reward him for chronicling his pain.

I think that's why Elvis finds the song middling: its lyrics, on their own, are not impenetrable. It relies on the narrative to achieve its effect. I suppose, he is more interested in how a song makes you feel rather than think. But the writer of "This Year's Model" is most assuredly a stiff and, even worse, a nerd, though the best attribute of nerds is their sense of play. In my view, a song is simply good, and we shouldn't nitpick too much over how it's good.