Songwriters always have to be ready when inspiration strikes, because that’s one fickle, unpredictable creature. These days, it’s somewhat easy for anyone with a little technology on hand (such as a smartphone) to immediately record for posterity any sudden ideas.
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But when Elvis Costello came up with the idea for his 1977 classic “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” he didn’t have that luxury. Luckily, he made sure to keep the song, which he wrote during a short train ride, in his head long enough to memorize it. And it would eventually become one of the most iconic songs in his illustrious career.
Calling All “Angels”
Before he became one of the leading lights of his generation of songwriters and performers, Elvis Costello was working as a computer operator. Yes, in the mid-’70s when computers were still a nascent technology, you could work at a company just operating one. But Costello had bigger plans tied to his musical ambitions, and he was busily writing songs at every chance he planned to record for his first album.
One fateful day in 1976, he decided to take a train from London to visit his mother, who lived in Liverpool. Most of the train ride went quietly, until he received a bolt of inspiration in the time it took to go from the penultimate to the last stop, a span of only about 10 minutes. The refrain, The angels wanna wear my red shoes, simply popped into his head, which was odd because he didn’t own a pair of red shoes. He wrote the rest of the song from there.
As mentioned above, he had no way of getting this idea down on tape from where he was. Once the train stopped, he took a cab to his mother’s home and simply concentrated hard on remembering every word and melodic twist. Finally, he arrived at his mother’s home, where he picked up a guitar. He played the chords and sang the words until they were committed to memory.
When it came time to record his debut album My Aim is True, Costello chose “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” as one of the tracks. That was a pre-Attractions album, as Costello was backed by members of an American band called Clover on the chiming recording of the song. Nick Lowe, who would become a legendary artist in his own right, produced the album.
Behind the Lyrics of “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”
Even before he was recording his songs, Costello already possessed an uncanny knack for lines and couplets that were witty and filled with inventive wordplay, but also harbored deeper, relatable meanings. For example, “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” contains this winning opening couplet: Oh, I used to be disgusted / But now I try to be amused. It suggests the narrator is becoming more mature, but only begrudgingly.
Costello suggests his celestial visitors had an ulterior motive for making his acquaintance: But since their wings have got rusted / You know, the angels wanna wear my red shoes. His reward for complying: Oh, I won’t get any older. Considering he was nowhere near the famous artist he would be at the time he was writing the song, it’s almost as if Costello had a flash of second sight about the kinds of compromises he might have to make to get there.
The verses in the song tell a tale of romantic misadventure, which would become a Costello hallmark on his early albums. Only on “Red Shoes,” he goes about it with a kind of gallows humor instead of the angst and anger that would characterize many of his other songs from that time.
Our love got fractured in the echo and sway, Costello sings, coining a nifty phrase for all the noise and tumult that can confuse a relationship. In the second verse, he once again uses humor as a way of covering up his heartache: I said, “I’m so happy I could die” / She said, “Drop dead,” then left with another guy.
But this guy at least has the consolation of knowing his footwear is going to buy his way into immortality, where those romantic slights will be forgotten. “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” is a marvel of a pop song, all the more marvelous because Elvis Costello wrote it in barely any more time than it takes to sing it.
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Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images
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