The British guitarist and singer Elvis Costello talked in an interview with Rockonteurs podcast (Transcribed by Ultimate Classic Rock) about his 1986 album “King of America”, which was influenced by Folk, Country and Americana. Most of the songs talked about his personal experiences in a way that it was more accessible to the listeners. To explain the importance of that, he compared Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift, saying it is something that both of them do.
Elvis Costello compares Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift
“All I was doing was reciting things that were happening to me. I know that can be interesting to hear. But it doesn’t necessarily engage the listener because they don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“(It) is something that marks out a lot of the Blood on the Tracks songs by Bob Dylan, where one minute they seem to be very raw emotion. The next minute they’re clearly invention. And that keeps you guessing.”
“I’m not just trying to say this to be down with the kids, but it’s also what makes Taylor Swift speak to people. She understands the necessity of taking personal experience, but expressing it in a way that’s (relatable). There’s lots of other examples of that, she’s just the most successful one that you could cite. But that’s why she’s able to sustain communication with her audience in quite that way,” Elvis Costello said.
It was not the first time that Costello praised Swift, he already said that “I think we’ll all be working for her eventually”. Active in the music business since 1970, Costello already released 33 studio albums, the most recent one being “A Boy Named If”, released in 2022.
Taylor Swift
Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, Taylor Swift is one of the best-selling artists of all time. She sold an estimated amount of more than 200 million records sold worldwide. Until 2024 she released 11 studio albums, 4 live albums and 4 re-recorded albums.
She is currently the solo artist with the most weeks at number one on the United States Billboard 200 chart and also the first billionaire to have music as the main source of income. In 2023 she was the most streamed artist in Spotify, with 26.1 billion streams.
Certainly there is no artist like her nowadays, who can generate this amount of ticket and record sales everywhere in the world.