Sammy Kohn

Choose a house.

Iggy Pop is going to too far! He almost took his pants off at Coachella 2026 week two!

I could, and often do, talk about Elvis Costello’s skills as a songwriter for hours. He’s my favourite lyricist. It’s the edge, the venom dripping from each phrase, coupled with the dexterous wordplay and rapier wit. But one of my favourite Costello moments isn’t a lyric at all. It’s a pause. A half second pause, easily missed. But once you hear it, once you understand what it’s doing, that empty space says more than most writers could manage in a verse. In ‘The Element Within Her’, “la” is everywhere. It comes and goes like a riff, sung over and over so many times that you stop hearing it as a word at all. It becomes melodic filler, something to prop the song up. It’s a meaningless refrain, or so it seems. There’s one moment, just one, where a single “La” is followed by the faintest pause. It’s minuscule, but it’s enough. That one syllable detaches itself from the rest and attaches itself to the lyric. Now, it’s no longer refrain. It has become speech. You can hear it if you listen closely. The lyrics confirm it: But back in the bedroom With her electric heater He says, “Are you cold?” She says, “No, but you are, la” La la la la, la la la la Now this “La” belongs to her, the woman in the room, stuck with this icy-cold character, her electric heater doing what it can. In that single syllable, the song reveals its world. This isn’t just a bedroom, but a bedroom in Liverpool. Not just a voice, but a Scouse voice. This use of “La” gives the moment a lived-in specificity that wasn’t there before. “La” is a Liverpool term of address, something like “mate” or “pal,” but softer, shaped by the rhythms of Scouse speech. They use it a lot. There’s even a band named after it. Costello’s connection to the city runs deep through his family. Yet he is a Londoner. His time living in Liverpool was brief, from about age 16 to 19. Then he returns to London. So that tiny pause, that fraction of a second that splits countless “la”s marks this moment as a specific memory. A set time and place in his life. What’s remarkable is how little he does to underline it. It’s almost for his own amusement. It’s there to be found, but he does less than zero to point it out. If you don’t know “la,” you’ll miss it entirely. Even if you do, you might only half-notice it, something that flickers past without quite settling. The liner notes make it clearer, but the song itself flies past it. And once you do hear it, once you recognise how deliberate that single “La” is, it opens up another possibility. That it came first. That all the other “la”s repeated to the point of meaninglessness, aren’t just there to carry the melody, but to bury this one. To disguise it. To let it pass unnoticed unless you’re paying attention. That’s a songwriter playing games with his own material. And that’s what I love about this moment. Here’s a lyricist celebrated for his words, for packing lines with imagery, with bite, with complexity. But here, he goes beyond words entirely. He’s using breath. With a flickering pause, he’s turning something so simple into character and context. Not through what’s said, but through the slightest space around it. That’s the level we’re dealing with. I don’t know anyone else who could take something as throwaway as “La”, fill a song with it countless times, and yet by pausing for half a second, make one of them unlock hidden secrets. Man, he’s good.