Elvis Costello is back with another new song, “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”. The track comes one month after he returned with “No Flag”, his first new music since releasing his 2018 album Look Now.
Sounding like early ’90s Costello with some Tom Waits thrown in, “Hetty O’Hara Confidential” tells “the tale of a tattler who outlives her time.” In particular, it’s the story of an exploitive gossip columnist who gets her comeuppance when she “named the wrong man in the story she broke.” Her audience turns on her, but in ways that perhaps make them no better than she is. There’s something very modern in this story about people with “an unfortunate character trait/ The irresistible impulse to assassinate” and what happens when “now everyone has a megaphone.”
Take a listen to “Hetty O’Hara Confidential” below via its accompanying lyric video.
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Like “No Flag”, the new song was recorded during a three-day session at Suomenlinnan Studio, a 20-minute ferry ride out of downtown Helsinki. Costello describes the results as “The Helsinki Sound,” and there’s more of it coming: he’s already announced an August 14th release for his next single. Stay tuned.
