When most artists from the new wave and punk eras faded away, Elvis Costello soldiered on and met new challenges, critics and non-believers be damned. Starting in 1977, he secured his place in music history with the acclaimed My Aim Is True and the singles "Alison" and "Watching The Detectives." From there, Elvis built a career highlighted by its daring, drive and diversity. In 1981, in between recording the classic albums with the Attractions Trust and Imperial Bedroom, Elvis fashioned Almost Blue, an album of country covers that connected the dots between Hank Williams and Gram Parsons. It was a cool country record at a time when country was definitely not cool. On 1986's King Of America, Elvis revisited the Nashville sound, mixing a few covers with some of his finest originals, aided by future O Brother, Where Art Thou? producer T-Bone Burnett and legends like James Burton, who played guitar with the original king, Elvis Presley. The blistering, cathartic Blood And Chocolate followed the same year. "A smashed-up room, a squashed box of chocolates, some broken glass and a little blood smeared on the wall," he wrote about the album. "Those were just a few images I had in mind." In 1993 he took his riskiest journey, creating The Juliet Letters, a dramatic collaboration with classical ensemble the Brodsky Quartet, only to follow it up with 1994's Brutal Youth, an aggressive record that more than lived up to its title. Painted From Memory, a 1998 high-profile alliance with plush pop patriarch Burt Bacharach, revitalized both artists' careers, even if a few of Elvis's longtime fans began fearing he'd never rock again.

In recent months, Costello has continued to follow disparate interests, penning a 200-page orchestral score for an Italian dance company, collaborating with rapper Q-Tip and crafting a new tune with his wife, ex-Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan, for the veteran soul singer Solomon Burke. The major headlines for Elvis in 2002, however, will be in regards to his brilliant new album, When I Was Cruel(Island-IDJMG). It's an ambitious work of raw emotion and primal rhythm that began with just Elvis, a guitar and a beat box. Surrounded by new bassist Davey Faragher (Cracker) and Attractions veterans Pete Thomas (drums) and Steve Nieve (keyboards), Elvis has unleashed his boldest, if not best, record in nearly a decade.

Elvis did few interviews early in his career, and the ones he did often left a bad taste in his mouth. He's been much more extroverted of late; in fact, he's downright chatty and charming. He still has little patience (and with good reason) for the lazy journalist serving up the same old questions. So on this occasion, he's pleased that we've decided to forego a sort of "career autopsy" interview and that CMJ mixed in a few questions submitted by its pool of college stations. "I like that very much," he says. "Let's go!" Whatever you say, Elvis.

The main thing that our audience wanted to know was, after 25 years of making records, how important is college radio to you?
Isn't that presumably where all the smart people are? Isn't that the point of it? Why anybody would not want to maintain a relationship with it is beyond me, really. Some people see it as a sort of starting-place "constituency" that you then add to your "fan base" - all those marketing speak words that I don't really care for. To my mind there's very little free-form radio left in America. And college radio would surely be the last place specifically aimed at people who are the least prejudiced and the most determined in what they listen to, and the least swayed by extra-musical things like advertising. In the main, most of the people that I speak to when I've been to college stations, I mean they're interested in music. Which heaven knows seems to be what it was about to begin with, but it seems to have gotten lost along the way. The whole formatting thing is a very negative development. Consider when Elvis Presley started in the early part of rock 'n' roll - here's a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi playing a mixture of music that he had in his head, but the mixture was pretty rich, wasn't it? It was an Ike Turner record and a Bill Monroe record and a Dean Martin record. That sort of combination would be almost impossible to achieve now by formatted radio. The only two ways you could do it is to have very rich parents [laughs] and go to record shops and buy randomly, and the other would be to listen to college radio. Of course there is the 'Net, but that's a different question.

I promise I haven't posted MP3s of your new album online.
Right, there's this whole "music should be free" issue. Well, you don't do your job for free, do you? If you make a chair and somebody comes 'round and takes a chair out of your workshop, you call the police. But also, we've got to take advantage of all these new ways to listen. All these things about the future of music being really gloomy - I don't buy it. The economic future of certain vested interests is gloomy. And you know what, they've been asking for it for so long, if they get their asses kicked, too bad. Music as an entity is nothing to do with that, they're just bits of plastic. You have to go and see bands and you have to support the people playing in your town and not just the groovy young band. Go check out someone like Solomon Burke, a guy who's still at the top of his voice.

Your career has taken a lot of left turns. What's the incentive for college radio to follow you?
It's a self-defeating position if you're not prepared to at least give new adventures a whirl, whether they're by me or by anybody else. Just limiting your thinking to something defined as rock - something that's become in many cases quite a conservative type of music - would seem to be the opposite of the freedom offered by college radio's comparative freedom from the formatting nightmare. I'm aware that some of the records I've made are not going to appeal to everybody in the world, but I did them because I cared about them and I tried to do them wholeheartedly. There's no way in any way that I'm defensive about any record I've made - regardless of the feeling that you get from the rock media who think "you shouldn't be doing that." But that's just some people writing in a magazine. It's not real life.

So what would you encourage stations to play?
I don't think it's for anybody to tell anybody what to do, but the bolder the better. The broader, the better. Don't get locked into "if it's indie it must be good." A lot of these indie labels are just inefficient corporations in the making. Some of them are real sincere and some of them are not. And there are a few music-minded people at the major corporations, but obviously there are fewer because the corporations have gotten much bigger - including the ones that control radio. They're much more ruthless and driven by the corporate financial agenda. But there are still some people with flair who are willing to take a chance now and again. The fact that that is happening requires some people [at radio] where the public has one of their first opportunities to hear music, which is really great if there are people there that are prepared to remain bold.

The motivations behind your our own bold moves, albums with string quartets and Burt Bacharach, certainly weren't to sell a ton of records, were they?
If you simply want to make a lot of money, that isn't very hard. You just patronize as many people as you possibly can with a gesture that is absolutely ingratiating. And there's nothing ingratiating about those records [laughs]. They're not made to be difficult, but they're made to have their own architecture and their own road map. If you find your way into them and enjoy them, then there are some rewards. If you don't, well, I'm sorry if we wasted your time, but it's not the worst thing in the world to hear something different.

Do you know Woody Allen's Stardust Memories?
I love it. It's one of my favorites.

There's the scene where the aliens say to Woody "We like your films, especially the early, funny ones." You've weathered similar comments. You know, we like Elvis's albums, especially his early rock ones.
That's the thing I don't understand. I never had much time for the tag "rock." When "rock" dispensed with the "roll" a while back, it took all the swing and all the sexiness out of it and it became big and self-important. I think two or three times since then, rock 'n' roll bands have had a go at putting at least the immediacy back into it, if not the sexiness. Punk didn't have an awful lot of the swing and sway of early rock 'n' roll - it wasn't even about those things - but it did get the immediacy thing so you got the instant feeling of it.

Rock or not, I think this new album will go a long way to solidifying respect from a younger crowd, the way Neil Young or Tom Waits began resonating with a new audience in the '90s. Is that a role you welcome?
Being the groovy older guy? [laughs] Lou Reed had it for a couple of years when he did New York. It gets handed on. I don't think its something I can aspire to. Tom Waits is a better example of a writer that has his own style and approach to music. Neil is somebody to look to as an artist who goes away from the fundamental sound of his writing and tries these other things and then comes roaring back with Ragged Glory. I love that record. But mostly, I like his least commercial records [laughs]. I like Time Fades Away and my favorite record of all is probably On The Beach, which you can't even get. It's a very raw record, beautiful.

When I Was Cruelstarted with a guitar and a drum machine. You toyed with a beat box on your first solo tour of the U.S.; how has that relationship progressed?
The big difference now is that the devices are a lot more fun to work with and a lot less laborious. You don't get lost in them. There were certain ways that they were inflexible and now you can bend them to your will more. I suppose that lesson has been learned not so much from listening to rock 'n' roll records that employed these devices but by having an ear out for some notions that you can catch in dance music and hip-hop and R&B. I'm not talking about the playa or gangsta areas of rap, but the more experimental and poetic element of rap - a producer like El-P that does Cannibal Ox's records. That's the most interesting, most creative sound collage that you could imagine all in the service of these amazing poetic flights. If you listen and catch ideas about the order of sound from that and you think about the order of sound that exists in an orchestra, whether it be a jazz orchestra or a classical orchestra, there are lessons to be learned from all of these examples. I mean, to just go into a room with four guys and play that same Oasis beat that's dominated pop for the last 10 years... that's not a bad beat for one or two songs, but not for every song.

In the press release, you joke about taking great pains to ensure that you didn't make an album that you had previously recorded. Still, the rawness of new songs like "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's A Doll Revolution)" and "Dissolve" recalls the immediacy of Blood And Chocolate, which is certainly not a bad thing.
Well the immediacy of it is very much burnt onto the tape, but in terms of things that are happening in the rhythm, there's no comparison whatsoever. There was a deliberate effort to put a lot more into the bottom end and a lot more interest into the rhythm. The main thing that's really different with these songs is the way they were written. Most songs are written with words and music in a race, but in the case of these new songs, it was rhythm first every time. The words were written with no harmony, just words and melody appearing together. And on a song like "Tart" there are no chords at all in the verses.

I can almost hear that song working on Painted From Memory.
That's interesting. I can hear the possibility of different orchestrations for a few of these songs. A song like "In The Darkest Place" [from Painted From Memory] is definitely of the same stuff as "Tart" and then "My Dark Life" [a 1995 collaboration with Brian Eno] is also of the same stuff. "My Dark Life" is in some ways a precursor of some of the music on this record, in that dub record kind of way that Eno works - recording a ton of stuff and then the artist goes out of the room and Eno hits 'erase' and erases half the record [laughs].

Speaking of dub, I see that this album is produced by your alter-ego "the Imposter."
This whole Imposter identity developed out of me producing the Specials in 1979. I had written a song called "The Imposter" and I decided that I was going to be the Imposter because it sounded like a reggae alias - you know how Lee Perry is the Upsetter - I was going to be the Imposter. I did use that name for "Pills And Soap" [from 1983's Punch The Clock], which was a song I wrote after I heard the first hip-hop records. I thought that's a brilliant idea, that's using rhythmic music like a bulletin board. And that music is of the same stuff as [Bob Dylan's] "Subterranean Homesick Blues," that chanting, non-melodic one-chord music. So I've gone back to that idea. I don't have too many bits of technique - I can't play the piano or guitar in any real way.

Can you play the drum machines and samplers well? I'm guessing you didn't spend a lot of time fussing over the manuals.
The one I use the most, I found that I could get inside and flip it to play certain beats with the wrong kit sounds and they sounded a lot more interesting. The one I got the other day in France is my new favorite toy. It's an Arabic one. Look out when we get that going! It plays Arabic patterns and Arabic tunings so you can play quarter-tones, so heaven knows what'll come out of that one.

How did Pete Thomas feel about the competition?
Pete had been quite resistant to drum machines in the past, but this time he took it as a liberty to play more interesting stuff - taking those accents and giving it another sound that's got even more weight and grit to it. That's how you make a record that's inherently rhythmically compelling. That's how I ended up playing better guitar as well, because I wasn't thinking about holding rhythm down all the time. It'd be like "Here's a little motif here," and "I must put that in" and "Now I can do something dramatic here." You start thinking in a much more angular and much more spacious way. There are a lot more holes in it, which is good, to let stuff through.

Finally, do you let other people touch the radio dial when you're driving?
You've got to be quick. I've got very fast reflexes. You know we have to thank the famous actress Hedy Lamarr and her husband for the scanning radio dial? Did you know that? They invented it. You see this is for college, I like to the keep the education thing going. So even if you forget to load your music in the car you can spin the dial and might end up somewhere you weren't expecting. Sometimes you need to give five minutes on somewhere you're not expecting to be. I used to like the old AM band, getting the really local stations, those little glimpses of local community and local acts rather than all that very homogenized stuff, which is the thing college radio must resist. You've got to keep your own accent and your own view and then listen outside of what you think you know. It's keeping those two thoughts in your head at the same time. Defend yourself against the imposed agenda from without, but at the same time, don't close the door on new ideas. That's the lesson that it can teach. It's really got a great role to play.

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