What I'm saying Elvis is that your music isn't the Holy Grail. I never said I was injecting anything moral into my music. I just do the thing the way I feel I should do it. I know the weaknesses in my music and that's what I have to live with. All the time I'm fighting a battle against myself to escape mediocrity and to do better.
All creative people are like that.
But the difference between myself and the vast majority of songwriters is that I'm not content with a sloppy phrase when a better one will do. As the duel of words continued, it dawned on me that the reason that Costello on record may be a bit hard to swallow is that the very nature of his music is so concise and to the point that we are literally shocked by this intrusion into our realm of excess. I like to think of my music as being of the moment. Throughout the history of popular music, the best of it has been that way. Once an inventive style stops and decides it wants to set itself up as a culture, I think it begins to get boring.