Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Elvis Costello is coming to ACL Live at the Moody Theater in December to fundraise for the Musician Treatment Foundation, the Austin and NYC based nonprofit that provides surgery and medical care for musicians experiencing issues with their hands, shoulders, and elbows.
The King of America & Other Realms show is produced by midas-touch musician T Bone Burnett and counts Austin’s Charlie Sexton, who has been playing guitar in Costello’s band for the last year, as its musical director. The benefit concert, happening December 2, also features performances from Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal plus longtime Austin-resident Allan Mayes, who co-helmed the folk rock band Rusty with a teenage Costello (then known as D.P. MacManus) in the early Seventies. Rusty reunited this summer for an astonishingly overdue debut album The Resurrection of Rust. There are more performers to be announced, including one that has headlined the downtown venue by themselves.
The show is oriented around material from Costello’s 1986 return-to-roots album King of America, which Burnett produced. In a statement today, he expounded on the record and this occasion to revisit it:
“King Of America” was my first full-length collaboration with T Bone Burnett, who produced and cast the record. It was the first album that I made after “My Aim Is True” that was not entirely performed with the Attractions. The songs I had written invited a very different instrumental approach. T Bone took a fountain pen and wrote a cast list for an album that made my head spin, proposing and then booking players who had accompanied Elvis Presley, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Bob Dylan.
In 37 years since we made that record my world has opened ever more to playing and singing with a wide variety of musicians, yet the songs from “King Of America” remain close to my heart, written as they were from my understanding of American country-soul balladry and the narrative songs tradition found on my other albums that T Bone has produced; “Spike”, “Secret Profane & Sugarcane” and “National Ransom.”
It feels like time and the right occasion to fling the door open and revisit these tunes and others written from the same curiosities, inviting some friends and newer voices to enjoy “King Of America & Other Realms.”
Costello and his wife, singer and jazz pianist Diana Krall, are on the Board of Directors for the Musician Treatment Foundation, which was founded five years ago by Dr. Alton Barron, an Austin-based orthopedic surgeon who also works in New York City. MTF, with a mission simply stated as “Keep the music playing,” provides free or significantly reduced care for musicians suffering upper extremity ailments. Over a half decade, the foundation has helped hundreds of professional musicians with care that would total nearly $2 million.
|