Almost blue
It's almost touching, it will almost do
There is part of me that's always true
Always
These lines are from an Elvis Costello song that will always be forever to me. He is glancing at an unhappy couple, and is unflinching in his judgment, even as he is saturated with romance. It is a ruined romance, but he keeps going back. Imperial Bedroom was just seven albums in. (Elizabeth Nelson of The Paranoid Style recently called it Brideshead 61 Revisited.) Side two starts by announcing, “Don’t get smart or sarcastic,” even as he is extravagantly both.
“Almost Blue” is the announcement of an ending. Why? We don’t really know; it was close, but not close enough. It’s ennui, bitterness, and someone or no one’s fault. Maybe Cupid’s arrow merely grazed. Perhaps someone met someone else who was just a bit more. Being blue is all over songs. You could be tangled up in it, you could be bothered blue, under a blue moon. Are you blue? Hey, Blue, here is a song for you.
But “Almost Blue” drops the mic, and the mic stays uneasily your hand. Someone’s eyes are red from crying—red and blue: complementary colors--because someone else’s melancholy is not quite there. I’m not heartbroken. I have a heart shaped bruise.
I had the pleasurable and somewhat anxious experience with talking for a couple of hours with the author of this song (among hundreds of others, many of them masterpieces) for New York Magazine. Since I was 14, he has been my inner id of indignation, so it was really uncanny to see him on my screen in a Zoom chat on my front porch. I had sent him a copy of Reckless Daughter, my Joni Mitchell biography, but he had already read it, and was very effusive in his praise, almost as if he was recommending the book to me. We talked for over two hours, but there were many things that went unsaid. That is, I would try to say them, and he would keep talking. The word for this among mortals is “interrupting,” but I didn’t feel that way at all. It was an honor.
But there was one thing that wasn’t said amidst all the things that were, and that was how Chet Baker made a subtle and no doubt unconscious change to “Almost Blue,” really opening the wound on an already devastating song. Its descending A minor pattern and elegantly crestfallen lyrics could have been a classic from half a century before its 1982 release. It could have been sung by Billie or Sarah or Frank. It could have been the centerpiece of a classic musical. Usually, it’s a compliment to be ahead of your time, but in this case it’s the opposite.
When Elvis was recording Punch the Clock, the album that followed Imperial Bedroom with “Almost Blue,” he went to see Chet during his six night stand at the Covent Garden Canteen in 1983. Elvis introduced himself and asked him if he could come in the studio to record on “Shipbuilding.” Chet, who had no idea who he was, asked if he could be paid in cash, and Elvis knew why and did not judge. When Chet nailed the session quickly and was ready to be paid, Elvis handed him “Almost Blue.” He said it was inspired by his recording of “The Thrill is Gone.” They played together a few years later, but nothing about “Almost Blue” came up. On May 13, 1988, Chet fell out of a hotel window in Amsterdam—his biographer James Gavin thought it was suicide—and Bruce Weber used footage he had been shooting of Chet for a posthumous documentary, Let’s Get Lost, with all the beauty and decay that was his life, which looked better in black and white. The opening scene is Chet asking an audience to quiet down, “because it’s that kind of tune, you know.” That tune is “Almost Blue.” Elvis didn’t know he was performing it until he saw the film, when Chet was gone.
That song was written by a 27-year-old prodigy who was in love with Chet’s record and wanted to emulate it while also creating something inimitably his. But the Chet version has layers of ennui that could most optimally be delivered by someone who kept aging into the material, like Billie Holiday or Lester Young at the end. Did he have regrets? Let’s Get Lost shows us many reasons for them, but whether he felt them or not, they certainly haunted him in performance. Chet Baker was not a songwriter, even if interpretation is a kind of songwriting, just as improvisation is a kind of composition. And yet he, surely intentionally, eliminated a word of “Almost Blue” that made it Almost Bluer.
Here is Elvis’s version:
Almost blue
It's almost touching it will almost do
There is part of me that's always true
Always
Chet’s version eliminates one word:
Almost Blue
Almost touching it will almost do [emphasis mine]
The Elvis version is beautifully passive aggressive, like a true Englishman who wears his emotion in cutting remarks, especially this one. But Chet is telling you to do something. Almost touch something. It will almost do. It could be flesh, it could be sexual, it could be a needle. It could be someone who gets off on a little pain. Or it could be instructions to a lover: touch me a little to get me off a lot. Tease me. Cut me. Somewhere in the middle, or both.
“How wrong can I be before I am right?” “I’ve been talking to the wall, and it’s been answering me.” “I would have waited all my life/ Just to make love out of something other than spite.” The imperial bedroom is filled with contradictions. The gradations between pleasure and pain, love and hate, intimacy and getting ghosted—these songs go there, and they do not let up. I told Elvis that someone possibly improved his lyric, and he was sure it was true, but then he didn’t want to talk about it. It must have been painful—whatever led up to the song, Chet inspiring it, and then dying before Elvis could hear what he did with it. Elvis is all about the thing you don’t get over. He knows this world is killing you. All he wants is to fall into your human hands. Chet fell into something else, and he never made it back. I waited all my life for just a little death. Don’t we all? Especially in French? But be careful. Some grievances still linger. We fight so frail, making love tooth and nail. Some wounds never heal. Almost touching it will almost do.
A few years ago, I picked up a used vinyl copy of the Let’s Get Lost soundtrack and Almost Blue is the finale on the B side. It’s a hell of a mic drop moment to leave the world.
I do like the lyric better as "almost touching". Interesting how the ommision of "it's" changes the flow of the sentence a bit and adds a different layer of meaning, different tone and imagery even. Every word has its value. That was a perceptive observation.
Almost Blue, Down in the Blue Chair - Did Elvis Costello write any other songs specifically structured around the word blue ?