Creativity Quote by Elvis Costello

Costello is doing something more interesting than standard promo talk here: he’s mapping sincerity as a career event, not a personality trait. The double emphasis - “very, very honest,” “most honest” - signals a musician trying to pin down a slippery concept for an audience trained to distrust it. “Honest” becomes a technical term, like a production choice or an arrangement: a way of making a record that refuses the usual cushioning of irony, craft, or persona.

The context matters. He’s not talking about a scrappy indie release; he’s pointing to Deutsche Grammophon, a label that reads as prestige, tradition, and a certain kind of seriousness. That name-drop works like a frame around the album: you’re meant to hear “North” as closer to art song than rock record, closer to composition than confession. Subtextually, he’s arguing that the industry’s markers of legitimacy can align with emotional risk rather than sanitize it.

“Similar experience happened last year” also hints at a pattern: honesty arriving in waves, often after an artist has earned enough cultural capital to be quiet. Late-career candor is its own genre - less about raw diary-spilling than about stripping away the clever defenses that made earlier work sparkle. Costello’s long been a master of bite and mask; calling this his “most honest” record quietly admits how much of his celebrated voice was armor.

The intent, then, isn’t just to sell “North.” It’s to recalibrate how listeners hear him: not as the guy with the sharp lines, but as someone willing to let the line break and still call it songwriting.