Only one Elvis Costello
IN September 2022 I got an email from Elvis Costello. Technically it was from elviscostello.com, a fan subscription list, with news of shows planned for February 2023, but I felt it was sent only with me in mind. Costello was to play 10 nights at the intimate Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan, promising not to repeat a single song in the entire run. This meant at least 200 different songs, perhaps a third of his entire catalogue, stretching back almost 50 years. As far as I knew, no one — not Dylan, not Springsteen, not Schubert — had ever tried a similar thing before.
I’ve followed Costello for his entire recording life, since I was 17 and he was 23, and no other artist has had such a deep or sustained impact on me, or introduced me to such a wide range of music. He was that dreaded thing, a writer’s writer, and beyond his fierce literacy I admired his refusal to stand still (one album was break-up pop, the next Stax, the next country, and we were still only in 1981). Most artists locate their strength (if they’re lucky) and stick to it, but few keep finding new gears for such a long period; David Hockney and David Bowie are the only English comparisons to hand.
Costello has made more than 30 studio albums, and there are very good things on all of them. Of late, his output with The Imposters has unleashed a new urgency, a conscious counter to convention and mediocrity. Equally remarkable is how much of his earliest work retains its icy, witty punch, and little embarrassment. I still think the lines “I don’t know if you’ve been loving somebody/ I only know it isn’t mine” rank among the finest in any song.
So I felt compelled to be in Manhattan for those 10 dates, and entertained hopes of talking to him after every show about the songs he’d just played and his life in general. Costello said he was up for it, but needed to conserve his voice. So we settled on daily emails.
It was a simple routine. Most mornings after a show I would send him a few questions and he would respond at length a few hours later. “Going off-topic is probably my speciality in conversation but I will attempt coherence,” he wrote in his first reply. His emails, like his shows, were vulnerable and considerate, and as wide-ranging as his songbook. What follows is about a quarter of what he
