“No one is operating on her level”: the musician Elvis Costello said no one else could beat

Most musicians remember the first time they fell in love with music. For Elvis Costello, it was always a safe space he could fall into, no matter what chaos occurred in his personal life. While his music draws from many influences, the moment he discovered one musician in particular, he realized the standard for pure excellence was far higher than he first anticipated.

Growing up, Costello became endeared to music as many others did. For instance, his exposure to his mother’s tastes and his father’s knack for playing the sounds himself gave him insight into how to connect to them on an emotional level, laying the groundwork for what he would later explore in his own work. Early on, he knew what excellence sounded like, and it emerged from the same groups that defined modern rock.

While some of these included some of the best vocalists in music history, like Frank Sinatra, another was the one band that changed the landscape forever—The Beatles. As he once explained to Vanity Fair: “My first sensory experiences of music beyond real infancy and my mother playing Sinatra over and over again is my father learning songs in the front room, and the one that registered happened to be ‘Please Please Me’.”

However, all of these seminal influences came to him almost organically, piecing together the broader puzzle that would later guide him into the warm embrace of a certain Joni Mitchell. The moment that Costello became endeared to Mitchell was incidentally the moment he realized the parameters of musical excellence in a way none other had ever come close to. “She’s a fairly unprecedented songwriter,” he once said.

Mitchell has been stuck in Costello’s mind ever since first receiving a copy of one of her records from his father before a moment’s endearment turned into a career-long fixation. The connection makes complete sense, especially considering the musician’s affinity for songwriters who can blend complex wordplay with ambiguous emotions and experiences, of which Mitchell is undeniably a master.

According to Costello, her eclecticism also draws you in with a discography “that doesn’t have something to interest you.” As a result, all her records are moments in time and glimpses into a soul that seems to have lived it all while maintaining the impressive ability to channel it into art. Rather than repeating the same actions, she releases music like a mirror to her journal without losing immediate accessibility.

This, among many other reasons, is what made Costello regard her as one of the best musicians of all time, whose artistry effortlessly floats above everybody else’s. As he put it for Pitchfork: “Even though she was really singing about quite a rarefied society here—I would guess kind of a Hollywood life in songs like ‘Same Situation’—she could make it accessible. No one is remotely operating on her level.”

Another reason Costello likely fell in love with Mitchell’s work is that she possesses the one ability most musicians fight to achieve their entire careers—self-assuredness. While Mitchell would likely claim many of her songs come from a place of uncertainty, it’s her boldness to charge forth with daring sounds and concepts that make her stand out, guiding the industry when it seems at a loss about what to do next.