In 1987, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney began a songwriting collaboration that produced Flowers in the Dirt — the McCartney album that many critics consider his strongest post-Beatles work and that represented a creative reinvigoration that the preceding decade of McCartney’s solo career had not consistently demonstrated.
The collaboration was professional in its origin — two songwriters working together — and personal in its development, producing a relationship between two British musicians of different generations that has been publicly warm and privately complex in ways that both men have addressed in interviews across the following thirty-five years without ever fully describing the specific conversation that defined it.
The conversation happened early in the collaboration — in the period when they were establishing what working together was going to mean, what each of them was bringing to the sessions, and what each was capable of that the other needed. Costello has said the conversation was the most significant professional discussion of his career.
McCartney has said it changed what he understood about his own songwriting. Both have declined to describe it in specific detail.
What can be reconstructed from the partial accounts each has given is that the conversation involved McCartney’s relationship to the Beatles legacy — the specific weight of it, the way it functioned in his professional life as both an asset and an obstacle, the particular challenge of being someone whose greatest work was made in his twenties and who has spent the following fifty years operating in its shadow.
Costello, who was not part of that legacy and who brought to the collaboration the specific clarity of someone with nothing invested in its mythology, apparently said something about it that McCartney had not heard before in the specific way it was said.
McCartney has described the effect of the collaboration on his subsequent songwriting in terms that suggest Costello introduced him to a way of working — a standard of lyric precision, a willingness to leave the comfortable melodic instinct alone and interrogate whether it was serving the song — that his post-Beatles work had not consistently applied.
Flowers in the Dirt contains writing of a quality that McCartney’s 1980s albums had not produced, and the people who have examined the writing credits and the recording session documentation have attributed the difference to what happened in the room with Costello.
Costello, for his part, has said the collaboration taught him something about melody — that McCartney’s instinct for the memorable phrase, the hook that arrived so naturally it seemed inevitable, was something he understood intellectually and had not previously experienced from the inside. He has said working with McCartney changed the way he heard his own songs.
Both men have continued to describe the experience positively across three decades. Both have been asked repeatedly to describe the conversation. Both have declined in terms that are polite and consistent. The polite consistency is itself information — two men who have given thousands of interviews and who do not generally avoid questions are choosing, together and separately, to leave this one alone.
The songs they wrote together are available. My Brave Face, You Want Her Too, Don’t Be Careless Love — recordings that demonstrate what the collaboration produced in the most direct possible way. What it cost each of them to produce it, and what was said in the room that made it possible, stays in the room.