Content
Originally this album was to be released under Costello's actual name Declan MacManus, having grown tired of the Elvis Costello pseudonym. Record label pressures, however, won the day and it was released as an Elvis Costello record.
Mighty Like a Rose continues in the vein of Costello's previous album Spike from 1989, although with Mitchell Froom taking over the producer's chair from T-Bone Burnett. This time, the tracks were recorded in one location, Ocean Way in Hollywood, with orchestral and vocal overdubs taking place at Westside Studios in London. Two more songs from his collaboration with Paul McCartney appear, "Playboy to a Man" and a song selected as a single, "So Like Candy."
Costello refers to this as an angry record, recorded in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The opening track, "The Other Side of Summer" was designed as a Beach Boys pastiche after their style in the early 1970s. The track "Invasion Hit Parade" features a trumpet solo by Costello's father, Ross MacManus. The album also features a song written by his wife at the time, Cait O'Riordan, "Broken." The album is dedicated to her.
The lead single, "The Other Side of Summer", peaked at No. 43 on the UK Singles Chart. Although it missed the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, it reached No. 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and No. 40 on the Album Rock Tracks chart. The second single, "So Like Candy", did not chart in either nation.
Read more about this topic: Mighty Like A Rose
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to be content with the wives of others.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)