So you take her to the pictures, trying to become a fixture. Inch by inch trying to reach her, all the way through the second feature. Worrying about… - Elvis Costello

I didn’t know anything then about odd-metered bars of music, but as Burt told me years later, you don’t count those beats, you just feel them and the tension that they create.

It was a tale of doubt and betrayal, one familiar from so many country songs, but the reason these stories turn up so many times is that, for all our vanities, there are not so many ways to be a fool, or, as I wrote once, “Man uses words to dress up his vile instincts.” Anytime I strayed into an attractive but opaque image, Loretta pulled me back to the story. If the harmony became unsettling, she wanted a plain chord to serve as an anchor to your feelings. If I didn’t know it already, I found it was just as hard to write a song using simple tools as it was to turn the fancy tricks that I’d long since put away. So, we finished the song and I went back downtown to debut the number on my favorite stage in the world, the Ryman Auditorium, where I was opening for Bob Dylan that night.

I think records started getting better again because everyone was dropping that tedious pose that there was no past. You could hear that The Clash were raiding their record collections for anything that they could turn into new songs.