The Coward Brothers
The Coward Brothers
NEW WEST

The 1985 release of the Elvis Costello/T Bone Burnett single “The People’s Limousine” under the nom-de-plume The Coward Brothers—as well as their subsequent work together on the former’s King of America album that same year—was just the start of T Bone’s spare, countryish recreation of Costello as an artist who utilized the American dream and the American plains as starkly and cinematically as did John Ford. Starting all that brutal beauty and arch Americana was the goofy fiction of brothers Howard (Costello) and Henry (Burnett) on a final tour that was nearly as fictitious. It was a long inside joke that never went away—something musical-mockumentary-like that you might expect from the man who helped create This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind.

Genius comic director/writer/actor Christopher Guest is behind the Cowards’ new Audible radio play The True Story of The Coward Brothers, which features Burnett, Costello, Harry Shearer (one third of the Tap and A Mighty Wind’s Folksmen), and Guest himself, with a script by “Howard Coward.” He also takes part in The Coward Brothers’ newly released debut self-titled album under the pseudo-pseudonym “Christopher Guest-Coward.” While this new collection of Coward songs doesn’t come across as quite so brotherly, harmonious, or comically co-joined as their initial single or live events, this old inside joke between friends, luckily, still has legs. Playfulness is the name of the game here, no matter what its unreliable narrators are telling us.

Yes, “(I Don’t Want Your) Lyndon Johnson” and “My Baby Just Whistles (Here Come the Missiles)” sound like the silly songs that T Bone penned for a set of less-fictional C Brothers (the Coens, with his work on the GRAMMY-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack), while the baseball-themed “World Serious” and gloomy “The Devil’s Wife” could’ve come from Burnett’s dystopian solo albums. After that, the show is all Costello’s; from the clever word play of “Early Shirley” and its ribald take on early rock ’n’ roll tropes to the snarky “Yesteryear Is Near” with its cheery British Music Hall lilt, through to the surprisingly sexy likes of “My Baby Just Squeals (You Heel),” “Tipsy Woman,” and “My Baby Just Purrs (You’re Mine, Not Hers),” the selection of Costello-only penned tracks play as if pre-ordained for Elvis’ B-sides in the era when his A-sides were newly formidable.

Poke around The Coward Brothers’ debut a little further and you’ll find that Mrs. Costello (Diana Krall) plays piano as a Coward, that “Smoke-Ring Angel” is co-credited to Costello and Guest, and that—as a whole—the Cowards’ album works apart from its Audible cohort, if you’re not expecting its play to be as heavy as Costello’s own new staged theater piece, A Face in the Crowd, or his teaming with T Bone to be as dynamic or crucial as King of America. That would be too much to ask of anyone.

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