Elvis Costello - A Love Letter in 16 Songs

David on a few favorites from an artist we love

My first favorite musical artist was the O’Jays, whose 45s I wore out in their early seventies’ heyday. At the beginning of high school, though, I switched my radio from Top 40 to album rock—in the Kansas City market, that meant moving from WHB 710 AM to midwestern AOR behemoth KYYS FM, or KY102. This was an all-too common transition for white boys of my generation, one I now understand as both beneficial and deleterious to my developing tastes. At least KY was more adventurous than many similar outlets around the country. In 1978 and ’79, the station began regularly programming some new wave—the Cars, Talking Heads, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson, Bram Tchaikovsky, the Records, like that—alongside Boston and Kansas, REO and ELO, the Stones and Seger and Styx. I liked all of it, and now I also liked “Alison” and “Watching the Detectives” from My Aim Is True, “Pump It Up” and “The Beat” off This Year’s Model, and “Accidents Will Happen” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” from Armed Forces. Costello’s music represented a new world to me, and I was curious but non-committal. But once—and just once, I think, in the middle of the night—I heard KY play “Green Shirt” and my head exploded. That minueting moog at the jump, the itchy sequencer pulse, drum fills like punctuation, that nervous but knowing singer. I didn’t know what Elvis was going on about exactly: Why is the shirt green? WTF is a quisling clinic? Who did put these fingerprints on my imagination? What I knew for sure was that I’d never heard anything like this—and that I had to get the album.

Almost instantly, Elvis Costello became my new favorite artist. When I went to pick up Armed Forces at Walmart, I saw him for the first time too, looking like a big impossibly cool dork on the cover to This Year’s Model: I was smitten! And the sound of his early records! While he’s played with many fantastic bands and musicians through the decades, I still crush hardest on Elvis’ work when it’s the Attractions’ poppy, punky new wave.  

As Costello turned 70 last month, and as I feel I owe him several solids, I thought I’d share some of my EC favorites. I am going to limit myself to the music he’s released after his classic period—which to my mind means everything after Imperial Bedroom, which almost—but not quite—lines up with his post-Attractions era. So much has been written about those first seven albums, and his fans know those records so intimately, my picks from that part of his catalog would most likely be pretty predictable. (You like “Motel Matches” and “Five Gears in Reverse,” “Clubland” and “Town Cryer” and “Oliver’s Army”? So do I!) For the record, I land like this on Costello’s heady initial run, from least-great to greatest-great: Get Happy, My Aim Is True, This Year’s Model, Trust, Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom. In my gradebook, each of those earns some sort of “A.”

Only Almost Blue, Costello’s country day trip from 1981, was a significant step down from those early albums, a couple of grade levels anyway, though I must also stress that for me and so many others, Almost Blue was both his weakest early effort and his most consequential. The cow-punk, alternative country and Americana scenes all owe it a debt, not to mention mainstream country’s “great credibility scare” moment in the mid-eighties.

As it turned out, Elvis’ reign atop my personal hit parade was short lived, but he only had himself to blame for that. I’d grown up in a country music household, but: That was my dad’s music; country was uncool; rock was the thing; and I was college-bound. Another common story, sadly. I am both embarrassed and grateful to acknowledge that Elvis Costello helped me think it was okay to like country music again. His George Jones covers on Almost Blue, along with his namedropping Jones into interviews, duetting with Jones, and writing the liner notes to the 1984 reissue of George Jones Salutes Hank Williams pushed me in a country direction and my new favorite artist became... George Jones. All these decades later, George remains my main man. But Elvis continued to push me to check out new sounds and to revisit old sounds with fresh ears. I’m guessing chances are decent he’s done that a time or two for your own omnivorous tastes.

So, limiting myself only to his post-classic era, here are 16 of my Elvis Costello favorites. (16? Why 16? Well… Why not?) I know there’s so much missing here: alternative versions, tribute album contributions, genre experiments, and B-sides galore. Several later Costello albums aren’t accounted for here at all, particularly many recent efforts from this century which I’ve enjoyed even if they haven’t produced any cuts for my personal pantheon, at least not yet. These cuts below, though? These I love. Let me count the ways.

“Party Party” (& The Attractions) (from Party Party: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1982)

After Imperial Bedroom, an album I’ve been known to call my favorite ever, I was determined to buy pretty much anything I found with Costello’s name on it. And that included this soundtrack album to a movie I’d never even heard of, let alone seen. A little bit music hall, a little bit ska, “Party Party” felt just right to me after Bedroom’s ornamented heaviness. “We’re gonna drink enough tonight to drown the average army” was an inviting opening salvo; rhyming “Pablo Picasso” with “Michaelangelo” and “Stravinsky” with “Da Vinci” was goofy fun for goofy fun’s sake; and the Royal Guard Horns provided a bouncy, boisterous hook while also paving the way for Costello’s use of the TKO Horns dead ahead. In a recommended tour through EC’s career, Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello, Graeme Thomson dismisses “Party Party” as “dreadfully jaunty,” which I’m guessing echoes Costello’s own judgement: Elvis was diligently curating his own catalog before that was a thing, but as far as I can tell, this is one one-off he’s never reissued. Then again, he seemed to be having a swell time with the number during this December 1982 TV performance, just as my friends did when my housemates and I hosted our own party-parties in college. In any event, it’s worth noting that there’s “jaunty” and then there’s “Elvis Costello jaunty” and that “Party Party” ends with a suicide attempt. I still haven’t seen the movie.

“Let Them All Talk” (& The Attractions) (from “Extended 12” Remix” single, 1983)

Back in the day Trust was probably Costello’s most unfairly underrated album, but I’m glad to note that it’s been critically upgraded this century. These days I’d guess his most underrated effort is Punch the Clock. Since I bought the album as soon as it came out, I bought this single in order to hear the “The Flirting Kind” on the flip but was most delighted by the “extended” A-Side and all the changes it worked on the version that kicked off the album (The 12” sleeve is pictured above along with a few of my other in-the-day purchases.) The remix opens with party and conversation (the Temptations “I Can’t Get Next to You” is the specific reference, I think), adds an echoey, acapella Elvis voicing the title, then edits in the old-school DJ trick of repeating lines, then cutting them in half and repeating them again to heighten dancefloor tension. Later, thanks to the same trick, we get Elvis instructing us to “Listen to the sad songs that the radio plays” three times instead of only once. Today, this sort of effect would be deemed corny as hell, but at the time it was thrilling and cutting edge, proof (at least to me) that Costello and producer Clive Langer were paying attention to, say, Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker. Bonus: That’s future Soul II Soul star Caron Wheeler joining halfway through on backing vocals.

“Inch by Inch” (& The Attractions) (from Goodbye Cruel World, 1984)

Goodbye Cruel World has aged a bit better than I predicted at the time, but it was the first Costello album I struggled even to get through, a take I felt bad about for years (What am I missing?) until I learned that EC didn’t dig it either: “Congratulations! You’ve just purchased our worst album” is how he starts his liners to the album’s 1995 Rykodisc reissue. Then as now, the keeper for me is “Inch by Inch.” It’s a straightforward number (at least by Costello standards) about getting dumped, and the Attractions, aided by Gary Barnacle on noir sax, give it a slinky, low-key menace. “Write my name in heaven in invisible ink / I just woke up from dreaming, I think” is bitter heartsick poetry. “You made me love you when you thought that you were smart / Don’t try to stop me when you told me to start” may be a threat.  

“Baby, It’s You” (& Nick Lowe) (from “The Only Flame in Town” 12”, 1984)

Another 12” single I bought for the B-side. I already knew Costello was a big fan of the Bacharach/David songbook. A key early fuck-genre moment for me was hearing Costello introduce “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” on the theoretically punk-adjacent Live Stiffs set, with: “This song was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.” Here, Costello’s former producer and labelmate Nick Lowe tackles the first verse with real tenderness, and it is lovely. Elvis takes the lead the rest of the way, and his take always reminds me what a great ballad singer he is. Especially on more conventional pop-rock ballads like this one, the slower pace and fewer words (at least in contrast to his own songwriting) leaves him room to highlight vocal texture and tone and dynamics like a horn player, traits that come off a little blurrier and noisier on the faster ones. That’s not an improvement necessarily but it’s a difference that works for him, and for me. On “It’s true,” he’s a woodwind. On “Can’t help myself,” he’s a knife. There’ve been several amazing recordings of this Bacharach/David song, but this one’s my favorite.

“The People’s Limousine” (The Coward Brothers) (7” single, 1985)

Costello became friendly with T-Bone Burnett on a solo tour of America after the release of Goodbye Cruel World where T-Bone was his opening act. Eventually they invented a persona for themselves, The Coward Brothers, Henry and Howard, siblings who sounded a bit like the Everly Brothers and who fought like Phil and Don too. They’d sing a couple country classics midway the set each night. One of those covers, a gorgeous duet version of Leon Payne’s “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” became the B-side to the Cowards’ lone single, “People’s Limousine.” The story is kind of a cold war espionage caper though that premise seems mainly an excuse for making jokes like “flirting anew with Chico Marx and perverted Engels” and for riding that marvelously oxymoronic title. What I truly love about this one, though, is its rhythmic drive and acoustic power chords, its tickling electric lick, and those switchblade close harmonies, all plotting an Americana revolution.

“I’ll Wear It Proudly” (The Costello Show) (from King of America, 1986)

The T Bone-produced King of America is my favorite EC album without the Attractions (well, save “Suit of Lights”), and “I’ll Wear It Proudly,” a randy, unabashed mash note to future wife Cait O’Riordan, is its centerpiece highlight, cut with studio lineup the Confederates. What a record: Jerry Scheff’s bass tiptoeing up top, Jim Keltner’s kick-and-snare heartbeat during the heart-swollen choruses, Mitchell Froom’s shimmering organ, and Elvis’ full-throated performance. “I finally found someone to turn me upside down and nail my feet up where my head should be.”

“Blue Chair” (& the Attractions) (from Blood & Chocolate, 1986)

The “Blue Chair” single he later cut with the Confederates is great fun, and I’m eager to hear the earlier “Red Bus Demo” of the song when 6-CD box King of America & Other Realms is released in November. But this version with the Attractions on Blood & Chocolate has become one of my favorite records, period. I’ve seen folks read the song fancifully, as if Elvis were only imagining the man who’s beaten him out for the woman he loves. But I like to think he’s singing to his actual friend, sharing a drink and taking his turn commiserating about romantic loss just as the guy’s done for him before. They’re like Jules and Jim, both in love with Catherine, but with sincere concern and cosmopolitan comradery instead of madness and tragedy. Steve Nieve’s keyboard is the engine that powers the thing, the escalating, role-reversal chorus is a delight of craft and fun, and the bridge is a marvel: “You say that your love lasts forever but you know the night is just hours,” he advises his lucky-for-the-moment friend, but “just ours” works too. The boo-hoo-hooing Elvis does next makes me laugh and tear up both.

“Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” (& the Attractions) (from Spike, 1989)

The opening line, “One day you’re going to have to face the deep, dark truthful mirror,” is just what all scorned lovers say, but the following “And it’s going to tell you things I still love you too much to say” lets him have his bile and spit it too. From there, as Chris Willman noted recently in his much longer birthday list of Costello cuts, the song moves “into something more impressionistic, even psychedelic,” what with its references to Persian cats, dead monkey hands, and turtle-tear drinking butterflies. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Allan Toussaint on piano, keep Elvis’ trippy visions grounded in the New Orleans blues.

“So Like Candy” (from Mighty Like a Rose, 1991)

Elvis and cowriter Paul McCartney cleverly playing around with the Candy/candy simile gets most of the attention when folks talk about “So Like Candy.” But what keeps me coming back to this Costello all timer is the Confederates’ arrangement, playing from bittersweet desolation to hopeless rage and back again, and Elvis’ conflicted interpretation. In the chef’s-kiss final verse, the simile all but fades entirely and we get the big reveal: He loves Candy because she’s as archly clever as Declan MacManus.

“I Threw It All Away” (from Kojak Variety, 1995)

Costello has typically been such a strong interpreter of other’s songs—his takes on Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise,” and Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” are just a few standouts—that a roots-leaning collection of covers from him should have been a ringer. Yet Kojak Variety was a depressingly indifferent affair. His reading of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline number “I Threw It All Away,” however, has always drawn me back. Keyboardist Larry Knechtel plays it like a dirge, and Elvis, sounding like he’s attending his own funeral, leans into the melody, picks his spots to snarl at his fatal foolishness, and begs us all to change before it’s too late. Regrets only.

“The Other End of the Telescope” (& the Attractions) (from All This Useless Beauty, 1996)

This Aimee Mann cowrite first surfaced as a strong (and somewhat different lyrically) ‘Til Tuesday miniature in 1988, with Elvis himself on hand with a bit of call-and-response. For me, though, this version of the song off All This Useless Beauty looms large. It stands for me (alongside “Complicated Shadows”) as the last great Attractions cut, and Costello’s lead is a dynamic highlight of his catalog. He’s spying another classic conceit here, but like most of his best work, the record works musically and emotionally even if you whiff on the wordplay. The anguish he loads into each iteration of “I know it don’t make a difference to you, but oh it so made a difference to me.” The way he beseeches and admits to possessing a “cast iron heart” even as he still mopes about heartbroken. When he tenderly tells his former lover “I don’t want to hurt you now, but I think you’re shrinking,” it’s only the first clause I believe.

“Toledo” (with Burt Bacharach) (from Painted from Memory, 1998)

“Toledo,” perhaps the most obviously signature Bacharach-sounding cut on Painted from Memory, was primarily (per Thomson, anyway) an instance of Costello himself loading up the song with Bacharachisms. So maybe EC used that rhythmic choral repetition of “You hear her voice: ‘How could you do that?’” to launch the French horn, and maybe he wanted his “do people living in Toledo” to echo Bacharach and David’s “the way to San Jose.” For sure, though, Elvis is the one tamping down his guilt, putting some distance between his Toledo tryst and the woman he hurt, by blathering on about “that Spanish citadel.”

“45” (from When I Was Cruel, 2002)

Written in 1999, on his 45^th birthday, the song begins in 1945, at the end of WWII, then recounts the 45 rpm records his folks played when he was born, the first one he bought for himself, and the “stack of shellac and vinyl” he had to divvy up after a breakup, with a couple big opportunities and career lulls noted for good measure. So, sure, “45” is one of Costello’s cleverest conceits—the cleverest touch of all being the way the Imposters play this musical retrospect in a style that nods to the itchy energy of early Attractions.

“The River in Reverse” (& Allen Toussaint) (from The River in Reverse, 2006)

“The River in Reverse” is one of my favorite late-era Costello songs, but also an atypical one, what with all its exact rhymes and with his usual conceits and puns traded in for straight up metaphors about Hurricane Katrina and governmental malfeasance. (He couldn’t resist that “Every man a crawling kingsnake,” but I’m glad he couldn’t.) The Imposters’ groove plays a beleaguered second line, New Orleans brass luminaries sound an alarm that morphs into taps. “There must be something better than this…”

“Harry Worth” (and the Imposters) (from Momofuku, 2008)

The Imposters’ sophisticated cha-cha-cha backs a jaded but decidedly humanist Elvis here as he recounts meeting the newlywed Worths on their honeymoon. When he next encounters them, “though [only] a year had passed… Somehow they didn't seem young.” Five years on, Harry and wife just drink and snipe and drink some more. Elvis keeps wanting to tell them to snap out of it, that life is short, that it isn’t far from their current tears to the mirth they once knew. But he bites his tongue. Probably because he’s been there and is mostly counseling himself. His title and his hook sure seem to side, for no reason we’re shown, with the husband: “She’ll never know just what Harry was worth.”  

“Stick Our Your TONGUE” (from Wise Up Ghost, 2013)

Costello and Questlove have said that this repurposing of “Pills & Soap” off Punch the Clock, plus a verse borrowed from “Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)” from Mighty Like the Rose, was the track that kicked off Elvis’ album-length collab with the Roots. Those original sources had described or anticipated contemporary apocalypses with no idea of what the Obama years would hold—and, in “Stick Our Your TONGUE,” Elvis’ lyrics feel even more distressingly prescient as do the Roots’ dysfunctional “Family Affair”-bass and drum. As they round us up and worse, “What would you say, what would you do,” a still experimenting Elvis demanded to know, his voice choked. Stick out your tongue and take your poison? Another bitter pill from Elvis Costello…

Want more Love Letters? David wrote one to Maria McKee and Charles has penned mash notes to Nick Lowe, The Roots, Nanci Griffith, Ronnie Lane, and Swamp Dogg!

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