1999 · Album
The Sweetest Punch
Recorded 1999 · Nonesuch · Context: Companion album to Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's Painted from Memory (1998)
Frisell's Instrumental Answer to Painted from Memory
Frisell strips away vocals and reshapes Costello and Bacharach's songs into something altogether his own.
The Sweetest Punch arrived quietly in 1999, positioned as a companion piece to Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's Painted from Memory rather than a statement of its own. It never became a centerpiece of Frisell's catalog, and most listeners who know his work skip over it in favor of his more celebrated trio records or his film scoring. That's a mistake, though not because the album is underrated so much as it requires a specific kind of attention — you have to care about both Costello's songwriting and Frisell's approach to arrangement to hear what he's doing.
The core idea is straightforward: take Costello and Bacharach's songs, strip away the vocals, and let Frisell reshape them through his own harmonic vocabulary and guitar sensibility. What emerges is neither a straight cover nor a deconstruction. Frisell treats these melodies as raw material for instrumental exploration, often slowing them down, finding spaces between the notes that the original recordings didn't emphasize. The result sits somewhere between homage and reinvention — respectful but not reverent. It's the sound of one accomplished musician genuinely engaging with another's work rather than performing a service.
This works best when you already know the source material. If you come to Frisell's version cold, without the vocal melodies anchoring your ear, some of these pieces can drift. But if you've heard Painted from Memory, you'll notice how Frisell finds new angles on familiar harmonic shapes. It's not essential Frisell and not his most adventurous work, but it's a solid document of one artist's conversation with another's songbook.
Who's playing
Viktor Kraussbass
Bill Frisellguitar
Billy Drewesalto saxophone
Ron Milestrumpet
Curtis Fowlkestrombone
Brian Bladedrums, percussion
Don Byronclarinet
Where next?
More by Bill Frisell
All 33 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
