best post-'80s Elvis Costello album

I thought Crenshaw demonstrated he could write excellent lead lines from the beginning?

I would've wanted Crenshaw as a sessioneer in the '80s and '90s.

I guess maybe he was always good. But also had the impression that he got better with age.

I tend to agree but I gave up long before that. Are you saying you like The Delivery Man or is it the one before that, whatever that is?

I guess the last one I really enjoyed all the way through was All This Useless Beauty. Am a big, sentimental fan of Spike, Mighty Like A Rose and Juliet Letters because they're the first EC albums I listened (and also I think they're pretty good).

I don't like the songs on When I Was Cruel, but it's (at the very least) a distinctive-sounding record compared to what came after it, which to me all sound like boring reduxes of Blood and Chocolate

Since then I've enjoyed his interviews more than his music

A late favourite as a counterpoint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oJzEhR3Obw

(Although late = still 26 years old)

That Marotta story is funny.

Generally I am a longtime EC stan, but I agree that his guitar playing is... um. Sometimes it's exactly what's needed. Sometimes it's inoffensive. And then sometimes it just doesn't need to be there at all!

I mean, the dude can can call in James muthaflippin Burton. Or Charlie Sexton. Or Marc Ribot. Or various people called "T-Bone."

I don't think he's ever claimed to be a virtuoso, just a highly idiosyncratic practitioner. And in a live setting, I can understand why playing guitar himself allows him to connect with and shape the song in a way that he couldn't if he were just in front of a band singing.

I don't think he is a bad player (the guitar work on TYM rules!) just that he consistently defaults to this toneless, strumming-old-man-with-an-overdrive-pedal sound

marshall has def. done some woodshedding over the years.

I don't think I ever disliked EC's guitar playing...or rather, if I did, I didn't like the overall record anyway, so his guitar playing never stood out as being the thing that sunk a record. I always liked the nickname "Little Hands of Concrete"...

I still not convinced that this album is much better than solid, but "Paint the Red Rose Blue" sure is pretty.

I'd agree it's solid.

New album seems promising, thanks yall. I haven't really kept up with him since the 80s, but remember thinking he'd had some kind of emotional breakthrough, rather than just singing lessons (although maybe those too), to put across those songs so well, on Painted From Memory---mind you, I thought it would have sounded even better if they'd presented the whole thing to Dionne Warwick, for lead or solo vocals--but still. Maybe it was that he'd loved Bacharach so long, even covering him on Stiffs Live, and the chance to write with him, the challenge of it too, made a breakthrough baby. Also mind you, I haven't heard it since 2000 at the latest, don't know what I'd think now. But my friend had the edition with a bonus disc collection, EC performing some of those songs here and there, also very nice indeed.
Local jazz station still occasionally plays tracks from the xp Frisell version:
...The Sweetest Punch...consists of jazz arrangements of the Painted From Memory songs done by Frisell and his studio group. It features vocals by Costello on two songs, and by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on two songs, one of which ... The Sweetest Punch, was made concurrently by jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, released in 1999 on another Universal label, Decca Records. It consists of jazz arrangements of the Painted From Memory songs done by Frisell and his studio group. It features vocals by Costello on two songs, and by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on two songs, one of which is a duet employing both.

Fuck, sorry!