McCartney, Costello and the album that never was


              FILE - In this  Oct. 22, 2015, file photo, Paul McCartney performs at First Niagara Center, in Buffalo, N.Y. Goldenvoice announced Tuesday, May 3, 2016, that the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and the Who will perform during a three-day concert at the desert grounds where the annual Coachella music festival is held. (AP Photo/Gary Wiepert, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 22, 2015, file photo, Paul McCartney performs at First Niagara Center, in Buffalo, N.Y. Goldenvoice announced Tuesday, May 3, 2016, that the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and the Who will perform during a three-day concert at the desert grounds where the annual Coachella music festival is held. (AP Photo/Gary Wiepert, File)

NEW YORK - Paul McCartney's "Flowers in the Dirt" box is as much an archeology project as a reissue, in which listeners can discover the bones of a landmark album that could have been made but wasn't.

Two of the reissue's three audio discs are devoted to McCartney's songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello in 1987 and 1988, which produced some 15 songs. Listening to the work, some of it first made available this week, it's hard not to wonder why they didn't make a duet album like Costello later did with Burt Bacharach.

Instead, they decided not to alter their original plan.

The mythical disc could have started with "My Brave Face" and "Veronica," two of each man's biggest hits of the 1980s. And that was only the beginning.

"Looking back, you could say that," McCartney said. "If we'd just done a few more of these demos, we could have made a crazy album. But we didn't. That was as far as we got."

McCartney initiated the partnership at the suggestion of his manager. The former Beatle was looking for varied sounds, styles and producers as he began work on a new album.

McCartney and Costello worked for a few weeks in a room above McCartney's studio in Sussex, England, where they'd write a song a day and immediately go downstairs to record it, sitting with acoustic guitars and singing together.

McCartney worked with Costello as he did with John Lennon, two men with acoustic guitars sitting across from one another. With McCartney left-handed, it felt to him like looking into a mirror.

In this week's reissue, one disc contains nine of those 15 songs, recorded the day they were written. Another disc features the same songs produced by the two men later with a band added, primarily sung by McCartney since it was his album, after all.

The songs they wrote were dispersed between the two men, or left on the shelf. Four were included on "Flowers in the Dirt," including the stately "That Day Is Done" and the call-and-response "You Want Her Too." Costello later recorded "So Like Candy" and "Pads, Paws & Claws." Some demos creeped out through the years.

Costello, for his part, doesn't look back with regret at the album that never was. He points to McCartney's reissue.

"You could say, 'this is it,'" he said. "There's a whole disc of me and Paul singing together. What can you say about that?"

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