ABSTRACT
When Elvis Costello released “All This Useless Beauty,” the title song of his 1996 album, the song went right past me; I didn’t really hear it. It wasn’t until Costello put the song out again, in a live version recorded in May 1997, when he was doing dates around the country accompanied only by his pianist, and then in a version he’d asked the band Lush to record, that I really began to hear the song. I was hearing it-particularly the Lush version-as the theme song for this book, or the antitheme song, because in this song, stars do stand still. Time stops.
