Elvis Costello, 'King of America'

The Pleasures of the Record Review.

I have a biweekly Zoom meeting with a handful of elder statesmen of the daily newspaper pop music critic beat. For an hour, we talk new music, old music, hear of each other's lives. They are from newspapers and current and past residencies in New York (that's me), Texas (Austin, of course, but also Houston and San Antonio), Chicago and Iowa, Portland (the one in "Portlandia"), Seattle, the greater Baltimore area, and Nebraska: the state, not the Springsteen album.

Our most recent conversation included a report from the recent Rolling Stones concert in Seattle, and what it was like to pay so much money for it after getting reviewers tickets free for so many years. We all grew up in the heyday (from roughly the early 1970s to the later 1990s) of the daily newspaper staff writer jobs covering the pop music beat. Some leaned more jazz, others more country, or R&B, or regional when that was possible, but basically, we all had to write multiple times a week, sometimes on overnight deadlines…