eMusic Review 0
By the early '90s, Elvis Costello was growing restless with rock, and Juliet was waiting with a safety net: a news item about people writing letters addressed to Juliet Capulet inspired this cycle of epistolary songs, written (both lyrics and music) and performed in collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet. It was his first big step toward positioning himself as a genre-defying musical polymath, and some of the results are splendid: "The Birds Will Still Be Singing" is one of his deepest plaints, and "This Offer Is Unrepeatable" is a witty, barbed novelty song. Costello learned to read and write musical notation in the course of the project, and it extended his songwriting in important ways (it's hard to imagine Painted from Memory having happened without it, for instance). Still, most of Costello's best songs have ended up transformed for the other contexts in which he's performed them; these are pretty much strictly voice-and-string-quartet compositions.
