The Top 20 Elvis Costello Songs of All Time

4. “American Without Tears”

If you’re looking for some sort of demarcation line in the career of Elvis Costello, 1985’s King Of America would have to be it. Up to that point, his songs were primarily written for the pop or rock idioms and intended for the Attractions to deliver the material. (Notice that I said “primarily,” because E.C. has always had an adventurous and questing musical spirit; he just didn’t indulge it as often in the early days.) And although the complexity and cleverness of his lyrics were always first-rate, the presence of the band acted as a filter between Costello and his audience, so that even songs that were actually deeply confessional in tone never seemed to reveal too much about their author.

By contrast, King Of America was filled with material that was much more in the singer-songwriter vein than anything that Elvis had written in the past, so much so that the Attractions couldn’t quite put the material across (which is why they only ended up playing on one song on the album.) Instead, Costello filled out the recording roster with session superstars who were “cast” depending on the nature of the song. It also meant that, even though many of the songs featured diverse characters and intricate stories, the album seemed to reveal the man behind the songs much more intimately. (Not for nothing did Costello use his given name of Declan MacManus prominently in the credits.)

“American Without Tears” was emblematic of this new approach. Costello could have rearranged it in a way to fit the Attractions, I suppose, but he realized that the song called for something more restrained and tender. The music ambles along, supports the lyrics, and finds its heart in the wistful accordion part played by Jo-El Sonnier.

Meanwhile, the lyrics take a similarly subtle path; instead of grabbing your attention, they sort of sneak up on you. The bulk of the song deals with an encounter that Costello had with a pair of British GI brides while on tour. Indeed, “American Without Tears” could have worked just on that level, so expertly does Elvis capture the conflicting emotions of these women, from the heady romance of their initial interludes with U.S. soldiers during World War II to their homesickness once they arrived on foreign shores. The refrain (“Now we don’t speak any English/Just American without tears”) suggests that, even though they spoke the language, these women were just as lost as if they had never understood a word.

The song deepens when the narrator lets on that he sees elements of his own predicament in these stories. After all, his residence in a cold, lonely hotel room is what forces him to seek human contact in the first place. In the final lines, he breaks off from the main story to put the focus on his own troubles: “Now I’m in America and I’m running from you/Like my grandfather before me walked the streets of New York/And I think of all the women I pretend mean more than you/When I open my mouth and I can’t seem to talk.”

After the final refrain, Costello mimics Sonnier’s accordion riff with some wordless scatting, in the process deftly embodying the restlessness of the narrator, and it’s one of the most poignant moments in his recording career. King Of America certainly changed everything, and “American Without Tears” is the undeniable high point of that career turning point.

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