Exploring Music and Popular Song
by Steve Wacker
March 3, 2002

I always appreciate the opportunity to gain new insights into songs, even when such “insights” have been in plain sight the whole time. (Never a duh moment–that’s my motto.) A few months ago I wrote about a song that didn’t make much sense to me until I learned that the German writer Bertolt Brecht wrote it in the late 1930s. And a year or so ago I achieved a similar lightbulb-above-the-head moment of clarity about a song I had admired and puzzled over ever since I first heard it almost twenty years ago.

When Elvis Costello first emerged on the scene in the late 1970s I was astonishingly ignorant of his work, but it was impossible to remain ignorant of such a talent for long. By the early 1980s I had gained a deep appreciation for Costello’s wordplay and sardonic wit. While I don’t care for everything he’s done, I still admire his way with words and the way he defies convention as he skips from genre to genre.

“Shipbuilding,” a ballad from Costello’s 1983 album Punch the Clock, made me wonder not what he was writing about–I could figure that out–but about the germ of inspiration for the song. And I continued wondering about it for years until I posed the question to a number of friends and heard an explanation that made me slap my forehead and say, “Of course!” Well, not really. But it did make sense.

“Shipbuilding” first appealed to me because of the brooding, beautifully recorded sound of the piano that opens the song. A descending arpeggio of dark notes in a minor key casts the song in deep shadow, but the darkness recedes a bit as the music takes a couple of steps up out of the swirling Hammond organ whirlpool of sound to set the stage for the lyric:

Is it worth it
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
and a bicycle on the boy’s birthday
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
by the women and children
Soon we’ll be shipbuilding

The song provides ample evidence of Costello’s desire to be a crooner (a foreshadowing of his recent work with Burt Bacharach, perhaps?) and his ability to write lyrics that softly illuminate the subject matter. An orchestral string section is added to the mix in the second verse, a not uncommon practice in pop balladry, and the uniqueness of the song’s structure and the ambiguity of its lyrics combine very effectively with the strings to make the song more emotionally mysterious:

Well I ask you
The boy said, “Dad, they’re going to take me to task
but I’ll be back by Christmas”
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
Somebody said that someone got filled in
for saying that people get killed in
the result of this shipbuilding

So, what do we know from the first two verses? The song is set in a region that’s down on its luck, one in which items like “a new winter coat for the wife” are hard to come by–like industrial cities in England in the early 1980s. But there’s a “rumour” that the local shipyard will soon have work, although it sounds dangerous; the workers will be “diving for dear life when we could be diving for pearls”–an interesting twist of a line, one that begins in the gray desperation of an industrial seaport but ends up shimmering like a stolen ray of sunlight.

We’re then treated to a beautiful heartfelt solo by none other than the magnificent jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. (I read somewhere years later that Baker’s contribution to “Shipbuilding” was his very last recorded work, a fact that makes me appreciate the song even more.)

After the solo we hear again about the rumour, only this time the talk of people getting killed is more subtle; we hear about “telegrams” and “notifying the next of kin,” which adds a chilling note to the already somber mood of the song.

Costello delivers one last subtle punch when he croons:

Once again
It’s all we’re skilled in
We will be shipbuilding

This is a pretty good trick, rhyming “skilled in” with “shipbuilding” while communicating that futile feeling of being doomed to repeat the same things over and over in order to make a living, like some kind of modern-day Sisyphus.

After hearing another reference to diving for pearls there’s a second wistful-sounding trumpet solo, only this time it’s augmented by the subtly effective use of a tape delay unit that allows Baker to sound like a chorus of trumpets instead of just one. And the song’s ending makes use of an eerie-sounding harmonic string glissando effect that I believe was pioneered by Igor Stravinsky in the opening section of his score for “The Firebird” ballet in 1910.

My longstanding question was about the specific inspiration for the song. Yes, there were certainly plenty of British communities in the early 1980s that the song could have been about, but what was the seed? Why does it read like it does?

Posing the question to friends provoked a few shrugs mixed in with an interesting comment or two about the lyrics that had escaped me. But the lightbulb didn’t go off until a friend’s wife mentioned that she had once heard Costello interviewed about the song, and that it was written from the perspective of workers in British shipbuilding seaports during the buildup to England’s war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982–an event that then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher seized (as most politicians would) in order to use the cacophony of nationalistic fervor to drown out the groaning sounds of a crumbling economy.

“Shipbuilding” is a magnificent song, not only for the subtly powerful message of its lyric but also for it’s incredible musicianship. Personally, I haven’t found much of Costello’s recent work to be as interesting. But I will always seek the opportunity to listen to what he’s up to, and will return to this song and a few choice others whenever I feel the need to hear the work of a master pop craftsman.

 

“Shipbuilding” written by Elvis Costello and Clive Langer, © 1982 Plangent Visions Music Inc. (ASCAP) and Warner Bros. Music Ltd. (ASCAP).