Elvis Costello re-imagines new wave classic, in Spanish
The concept of “Spanish Model” is as intriguing as its billing by Elvis Costello & the Attractions is at least somewhat misleading. That seems par for the course for an album as playful — and playfully subversive — as “Spanish Model.”
The 16-song album repurposes Costello and the long-defunct Attractions’ 1978 debut release, the new wave-era rock classic “This Year’s Model,” along with several other numbers recorded during the same period.
All the original instrumental tracks have been remixed and all of Costello’s lead vocals have been removed. His singing is replaced with new vocals — all performed in Spanish — by Juanes, Luis Fonsi, Oscar-winner Jorge Drexler, Menudo alum Draco Rosa, Jesse & Joy and other artists from across the Latin-music world.
They hail from Argentina, Spain, the United States and seven other countries in between. Nearly all of them were born years, or even decades, after “This Year’s Model” was released. But no matter.
Because all of the guest artists profess to be big fans of Costello, 66. His status as a true musical renaissance man with an unusually broad creative range has placed him in a category all his own, as befits an artist whose previous recording partners range from Burt Bacharach, Loretta Lynn and Paul McCartney to the Roots, Tony Bennett and Allen Toussaint.
All of “Spanish Model’s” guest artists jumped at the invitation from Costello and producer Sebastian
Krys — a 16-time Grammy and Latin Grammy Award-winner — to be on the album. Some of the guests were not remotely familiar with the original 43-year-old album.
Each worked directly with Krys and Costello, who gave them carte blanche to interpret these songs any way they wanted, with just one caveat. They had to sing over guitarist Costello and the Attractions’ ferocious original instrumental backing tracks.
Whether the resulting album earns him and his former band a new coterie of fans in Latin America, or here, remains to be determined. If not, it won’t be for a lack of effort, including a six-part film documentary on the making of “Spanish Model” that debuted on YouTube.
Nearly all of the album’s guest artists have solid track records. The lesserknown performers, such as former Texas band Girl in a Coma singer Nina
Diaz, 33, and Chilean solo artist Cami, 25, are accomplished vocalists.
Having Cami do “This Year’s Girl” — whose acidic lyrics skewer vapid young women — provides an unexpected and compelling twist. So does her decision to retitle the song “La Chica De Hoy” (“Today’s Girl”) and to make its subject more simpatico and multidimensional than in the Costello original.
The similarly unkind to women “Little Triggers” is performed here as “Detonantes” by La Santa Cecilia band vocal powerhouse Marisol “La Marisoul” Hernandez.
Her impassioned delivery and pinpoint dynamic control elevate the song in a way its creator surely could not have previously imagined. And by seizing control of the song and inverting its sexual politics through the sheer power of her performance, Hernandez sets off a whole new batch of triggers.
To ensure the lyrics from “This Year’s Model” were adapted into Spanish as accurately as possible, Krys brought in such veteran songwriters as Ximena Munoz, Elsten Torres, Luis Mitre, Andie Sandoval and Mercedes Mígel “Vega” Carpio to hone Costello’s famously crafty wordplay.
Ultimately, “Spanish Model” will sound foreign and familiar to non-Spanish and Spanish speakers alike. It could also prove strangely appealing to anyone who was put off by Costello’s sneering, sometimes proudly abrasive vocals when “This Year’s Model” came out in 1978.
Then again, part of the charm of Costello’s early work was how gleefully he embraced the “angry young man” persona that was used to market him and such kindred spirits as Graham Parker and the Clash’s Joe Strummer.
Some of those feelings sound pretty much the same in Spanish. Others sound markedly different, especially when sung by women artists who reject and subvert the sometimes bitter sexual jealousy of lyrics Costello wrote when he was 23.