elvis costello
Elvis Costello Playing 10-Night Residency in New York in February
Elvis Costello has never been shy about testing out new and interesting concepts with his recordings and live shows, and he’s got another trick up his sleeve early next year. The artist will stage 100 songs and More, a 10-night residency at New York’s Gramercy Theatre from Feb. 9-22, with the first five encompassing solo performances and the final five featuring Costello with pianist Steve Nieve. Costello plays to perform different themed set lists each night without repeating any of the 10 pre-selected songs from each show. The rest of the nightly repertoire will be chosen and played impromptu. Costello has even penned a rhyme for the occasion: For 10 nights at the Gramercy TheatreI’ll name 10 songs to set the sceneI’ll play those 10 and then 10 moreShake off the old routine Each night wi...
The 50 Best Albums of 1982
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as Usual, began its commercial stranglehold in the U.S. Only one record on our list, Fleetwood Mac‘s chart-targeted Tusk follow-up, Mirage, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. (Doesn’t it seem weird, looking back, that Prince‘s 1999 peaked at No. 9?) Lots of fascinating shit was happening in 1982, and you didn’t always find it on the radio. On our list, we included everything from early hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash) to horror-punk (Misfits) to lo-fi synth-pop (Solid Space). Revisit...
Elvis Costello Resurrects Short-Lived 1970s Band for New EP
Elvis Costello has re-teamed with old friend Allan Mayes to record for the first time music they once performed back in the early 1970s in the band Rusty. The six-track EP Rusty: The Resurrection of Rust will be released by Capitol on streaming platforms on June 10, with a CD release following on July 1. Costello says Rusty is “the record we would have cut when we were 18, if anyone had let us.” As the story goes, a 17-year-old Costello, at the time going by a variation of his birth name as D.P. MacManus, became a member of Mayes’ band Rusty on Jan. 1, 1972 and spent the next year playing modestly attended gigs in and around Liverpool. However, Rusty never recorded the material that made up its stage repertoire, including a couple of original tunes, until now. The six songs on the upcoming...
Every Elvis Costello Album, Ranked
Since debuting as the hyperliterate, bespectacled nerd prince of the new wave era on 1977’s My Aim Is True, British singer/songwriter Declan MacManus has worn many musical guises, but always under his gaudy stage name Elvis Costello. Over half of his albums have been with the core backing trio of pianist Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas, and bassist Bruce Thomas as The Attractions, or later as The Imposters with Davey Faragher on bass. But Costello’s omnivorous discography has also included a series of albums of rootsy Americana with producer T Bone Burnett, and collaborative projects with The Brodsky Quartet, Burt Bacharach, and even The Roots. At 67 years old, Elvis Costello is still writing songs at a steady clip, and this month he released The Boy Named If, a lively concept album with ...
The Beat of a Different Drummer: 10 Albums Where a New Drummer Put a Spring in the Band’s Step
The drummer is the job in a rock band with the highest turnover rate — a cliché lampooned memorably in This is Spinal Tap. And if it takes a few albums for a group’s definitive lineup to click into place, the drummer is often the final piece of the puzzle to arrive. But it’s often that change behind the drum set that makes a good band great, thanks to the addition of faster, louder, or more complex rhythms. Sometimes a versatile percussionist can even expand the band’s sonic palette and contribute to the songwriting. Here are 10 albums where the arrival of a new drummer marked an important transitional moment in an artist’s catalog. Nirvana – Nevermind (Dave Grohl) [embedded content][embedded content] Nirvana let go of early drummer Chad Channing in 1990 before they had a permanent replace...
Hear Elvis Costello & the Imposters’ Organ-Thumping New Song ‘Magnificent Hurt’
Elvis Costello and The Imposters announced their upcoming new album, The Boy Named If, and released the first single, “Magnificent Hurt.” The Boy Named If marks Costello’s sixth release since October 2020, and will arrive in January, 2022. “The full title of this record is The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories),” Costello said. “‘IF,’ is a nickname for your imaginary friend; your secret self, the one who knows everything you deny, the one you blame for the shattered crockery and the hearts you break, even your own. You can hear more about this ‘Boy’ in a song of the same name.” [embedded content][embedded content] The 13-track record is produced by Sebastian Krys and Costello. It is available for pre-order on vinyl, CD, cassette, and digitally, along with future r...
30 Overlooked 1991 Albums Turning 30 This Year
1991 was a transformative year for rock music, a time when alternative rock and heavy metal entered a new era of commercial dominance. Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden ushered in the explosion of Seattle grunge alongside blockbuster albums by Metallica, R.E.M. and Red Hot Chili Peppers, to say nothing of influential indie classics by My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and Slint, or SPIN’s album of the year, Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque. But while 1991’s hits set the agenda for alternative rock for the rest of the decade, the year was brimming over with fascinating career footnotes and debuts from other promising new bands. In England, the music press was excitedly hyping up genres like shoegaze, baggy, and whatever “grebo” was, while American indie bands like fIREHOSE, the Meat Puppe...
The 50 Best Live Albums of the 1970s
The concert industry exploded in the 1970s, and the live album, a stopgap project once reserved for only the biggest artists, became a compulsory ritual and a pivotal moment for many artists. Live albums captured legendarily loud bands like The Who and The Ramones in their natural element. Once obscure regional acts like Bob Seger, KISS and Cheap Trick exploded into the mainstream with live albums. The Band, The Stooges, and Velvet Underground put their final gigs on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young (as his ongoing archive series shows), and Jackson Browne recorded entire sets of new songs onstage. The Grateful Dead released several official live albums (and continue to do so) that only made fans want to bootleg shows on their own more. With the 50th anniversary of a landmark live album, Th...
The Reissue Section: Winter 2021
While it’s been a challenge for bands to collaborate in person over the last year, archival releases have been booming. And over the course of this first quarter, lots of goodies have dropped. Here are some of the most worthy entries in the reissue world. Black SabbathVol. 4 Deluxe Edition (Rhino)Heaven and Hell Deluxe Edition (Rhino)Mob Rules Deluxe Edition (Rhino) What we have here are three essential Black Sabbath albums from two distinctly different periods in the band’s timeline. 1972’s Vol. 4 is renowned mostly for the hedonism and drug use that went down during the album’s creation in Los Angeles. But nearly 50 years later, it stands as the creative pinnacle of the Ozzy era. By bringing the production duties in-house, the original lineup of Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bi...
Iggy Pop Covers Elvis Costello’s “No Flag” in French
Punk Renaissance man Iggy Pop has shared a French rendition of Elvis Costello’s “No Flag,” a single from Costello’s Hey Clockface album. The en Français cover is accompanied by an animated music video hand-drawn by Arlo McFurlow and Eamon Singer. The legendary musicians, who first met in 1977, recently reminisced via Zoom about the past, present and future for Rolling Stone. Costello mentioned that “No Flag” was one of the first songs recorded for his album, which dropped on Oct. 30: “It shared one word and one letter with a famous song of yours [“No Fun”],” he said, “but nobody spotted where it was drawing from, because nobody expects me to take a cue from you.” Pop recalls the first time he heard Costello: “When I heard your music, I felt like you were the only thing comi...
Elvis Costello Curates The Complete Armed Forces Set of Landmark 1979 LP
Personally curated by Elvis Costello, The Complete Armed Forces set is the definitive statement 1979 album, featuring classics including “Accidents Will Happen,” “Green Shirt,” “Oliver’s Army” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding.” The deluxe edition vinyl box set is a thorough excavation of Costello’s vault from his early days, offering a complete view of what went into making the album, its creation, and the success that followed for him and the Attractions. It will consist of nine vinyls (three 12-inch LPs, three 10-inch LPs and three 7-inch singles), including a 2020 remaster of the album along with B-sides, alternate versions and outtakes, demos, and a slew of live recordings – including 23 unreleased live tracks taken from three “espec...
Elvis Costello Shares New Jazzy Cut ‘Hey Clockface’/’How Can You Face Me Now?’
We’ve heard a lot from Elvis Costello in the last month, but nothing as playful as his latest track “Hey Clockface/How Can You Feel Me,” which is out now. The new single — which is the title track for his upcoming album arriving next month — follows releases “Phonographic Memory” and “We Are All Cowards Now,” both of which dropped in August. It sounds jazzier than anything like the former singles, but that’s just the way Costello does it. It was recorded in Paris back in February — right before everything went south — alongside jazz ensemble Le Quintette Saint Germain. Throughout, you can hear the group’s friendly clarinet-playing and some scatty percussion to round it all out. Hey Clockface will be Costello’s first album since 2016’s Look Now and will be released on Oct. 30 via ...
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