The Loretta Lynn and Elvis Costello Collaboration That Brought Them ‘Full Circle,’ “Everything It Takes”

For his 2009 album Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, Elvis Costello wanted to connect with Loretta Lynn to co-write the roots and bluegrass-bent “I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came.” Produced by T Bone Burnett, and filled with more Americana, and country-driven tracks, the album peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 for Costello. 

“We sat down in the studio to write a song,” recalled Lynn of her first meeting with Costello while writing “I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came.” She added, “I had a piece of paper and a pencil, and he had a computer. So we looked at one another like, ‘What’s going to come out of this?’

Lynn continued, “He was laughing about it, but I didn’t think it was funny because that’s the way I write all my songs. When I write a song, I don’t want to be on a computer.”

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‘Full Circle’

In 2016, the pair teamed up again for a duet on “Everything It Takes,” written by Lynn and Todd Snider, and released on her 43rd album Full Circle. Lynn called the song a “woman song—something more for a woman.”

[RELATED: The Song The Made Loretta Lynn Cry and One She Barely Performed Live]

The lyrics follow the story of a woman noticing another woman looking at her man and a warning to her lover—She’s got everything it takes / To take everything you’ve got.

I love you more than she ever will
But the only way she can get a man is steal
I don’t know if I should tell you this or not
She’s got everything it takes to take everything you’ve got

And when she takes you she’s taken everything that I’ve got, too
She’s had a million old flames so to her you’re nothing new
She’s cold as ice but you still think she’s hot
She’s got everything it takes to take everything you’ve got

She turned you on and then you turned on me
I’m more of a woman than she’ll ever be
To me, she ain’t nothing but to her, that’s a lot
She’s got everything it takes to take everything you’ve got

“I wrote ‘Everything It Takes’ real fast,” said Lynn. “I probably wrote it in 30 minutes. Sometimes I can write a song real fast, and sometimes it’ll take me two, or three days. And I get so aggravated that I’ll probably lay it down and go back to it later. But that song came easy. I’ll come up with the title first and, when I come up with the title, I always know I got a good title.”

Lynn said the first time she heard Costello sing again since working on “I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came” years earlier was when she heard him on “Everything It Takes.”

“The first time I heard Elvis sing since that day was on the record,” said Lynn. “I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t even there when we did it but we did a good job.”

Photo: David McClister