Tulips Mistaken For Lillies

Elvis Costello “New Amsterdam”

In the New Pornographers song “Myriad Harbour,” Dan Bejar wanders around Manhattan while on a tour stop with the band. He takes in the sights, visits some shops, gets a feel for the energy of the city. In the third verse, after a clerk asks him if he needs any help, he finally says what’s really been on his mind: “All I ever wanted help with was YOU!” It doesn’t matter where he is or what he’s doing. He’s going to be distracted by someone who won’t get out of his head; this unfinished business that won’t let him be in the moment.

“New Amsterdam” is essentially the same song, but 27 years earlier, and written by someone a little less reluctant to say what’s on his mind. Elvis Costello sings about feeling lost in Manhattan, wandering around a place where he appreciates but doesn’t seem to like very much. Everything he sees seems to rhyme with something from back in England, and he can’t shake the feeling the place belongs to someone else – specifically, this woman he’s hung up on. Those feelings are complicated. He’s fixated on her enough to declare a desire to “have the possession of everything she touches,” but he’s also trying to break free from her influence. He doesn’t know what he wants, so he stumbles around the city, on a quest for nothing in particular. He’s nowhere at all in the biggest somewhere on earth.

Costello, always a consummate craftsman, is at a career peak on “New Amsterdam.” The construction is impeccable, but the presentation is casual – the melody is so smooth and easygoing that the tightness of the writing is barely apparent. This is one of the all-time best examples of Costello’s gift for writing flawless bridges which build upon the core melody and elaborate on lyrical themes before flowing gracefully back into the verse structure. In this case, it’s a digression that ends in an epiphany: “Though I look right at home I still feel like an exile.”

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