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Serious music usually doesn't pay.

Elvis Costello

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Elvis Costello
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: August 25
Composer
Guitarist
Record Producer
Singer-Songwriter
London
England
Declan Patrick MacManus
Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus
Declan MacManus
Music
Usually
Pay
Serious
Doesn

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It's a petty thing, but I wouldn't join the Scouts when I was a kid, 'cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I'm just not a royalist. I think it's idiotic, a hereditary principle.
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You've got a chemistry class I want a piece of your mind You don't know what you started when you mixed it up with mine.
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When you work with new people, I think that it throws all of the matters into relief, because you have to explain yourself every time. It's like crossing a new border. They want to see your documents.
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They say you better listen to the voice of reason But they don't give you any choice 'cause they think that it's treason. So you had better do as you are told. You better listen to the radio.
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You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.
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Some people can't physically hear things. A kid that listens to Metallica or something can't hear that, because he's filled himself up with this stuff, he physically can't hear a banjo or a harp or something.
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Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing. And you start talking yourself out of the bold melody and start wanting to arrange it in another key or something. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.
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And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.
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Those days she was just a beautiful girl, now she's framed and hung up.
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Certain songs have been written years apart, but they have a natural continuity to my mind.
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Music is more like water than a rhinoceros. It doesn't charge madly down one path. It runs away in every direction.
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I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing. Because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.
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The cost of living in sin would make a poor man out of Paul Getty.
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