For Elvis Costello's 70th Birthday, HIs 70 Greatest Songs, Ranked
In his autobiography, Elvis Costello wrote that the popular idea of him early on as an angry man was just a trick of physiology. He wrote: “It seems that the space between my two front teeth, which made Jane Birkin, Ray Davies, and Jerry Lewis so appealing, has had the effect of making half of what I say sound like a provocation or an insult.”
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It’s a funny self-observation, but let’s be real — as a writer as well as a singer, Costello gave the world a little help with that perception. He has been a provocateur, in all the best senses, and when he doled out insults, as he did in a significant part of his early catalog, especially, he had the thoughtfulness behind it to make it feel like the young man or woman (or world) that was on the receiving end seem like they deserved it. There was a sense of anger in his songs that felt gratifying, because he had serious observations about how society and relationships went wrong, and a playful wit to go with the wrath. Even in singing mostly relationship songs, he felt like a kind of protest singer. What we hear now about the “culture of grievance” feels wrong in politics, but it was great for rock ‘n’ roll at the time.
Eventually, of course, Costello revealed multi-faceted personas that included such once-unthinkable exercises as actual requited-love songs — and a greater ability to span and traverse genres than anyone else in known music history, including partial or whole albums dipping into country, jazz, neo-classical, soul and Tin Pan Alley-type settings. There has been no one more innately talented as a songwriter, with his reach never exceeding his grasp when it comes to making all these forms fit his sensibilities.
Costello turns 70 on Aug. 25, and for the occasion, we’ve come up with a ranking of his 70 best songs. If you find your favorites missing, I can only tell you that I seriously considered at least 50 more. (He does have 33 albums out, give or take a collaborative effort or side project or two.) We’ve also included videos for each track, sometimes going with a live performance instead of the studio original just for fun. Read along and consider a man who’s been this year’s model of breadth and brilliance for close to 50 of those years now.
70. Waiting for the End of the World
On his debut album, 1977’s “My Aim Is True,” Costello summoned the apocalypse — “Dear lord, I sincerely hope you’re coming, ’cause you really started something” — yet the lyrics make it clear this imagining is happening while the author takes a commuter train ride. In his world, even mundanity leads to Revelations. That first album was recorded just before he enlisted the Attractions as his backing band, but it became a fiery highlight of their set after he did (as seen in the video above), and it continues to show up occasionally in his 21st-century shows with the Imposters.
69. Next Time Round
Costello has never been more melodramatic than when he predicts here that the end of a relationship will actually kill him: “You used to take the breath out of me / Now I think you’ll be the death of me… / You’ll be someone else’s baby / But I’ll be underground.” The song isn’t really cause to call the National Suicide Hotline, though. As a lively finale to the emotionally intense yet sometimes mirth-riddled “Blood and Chocolate” album, this closer is good, cathartic fun more than it is a true “goodbye, cruel world” note.
68. Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)
Marc Ribot’s clangy guitar sound was never put to better use — not even on the Tom Waits records he played on — than here on Costello’s mid-period ode to, once again, waiting for the end of the world. The singer’s complaints include a presumed broadside against recently sacked Attractions bass player Bruce Thomas, who’d recently published a roman à clef novel about his experiences in the band (“Wake up, zombie, write yourself another book,” Costello taunts). There’s also what seems to be a random swipe at Sting (“Better make like a fly if you don’t want to die / Look out, there goes Gordon!”). Of course, Costello would later become pals with Sting, as he turned into one of rock’s great statesmen instead of one of its angry boys. But we do love him when he’s aggravated.
67. Night Rally
Fascism is one of Costello’s pet subjects, and it was a subject he addressed at greater length, as a metaphor or the real thing, in songs like “Goon Squad” and “Green Shirt” just a bit later on the album “Armed Forces.” But in this closer to the European edition of “This Year’s Model,” he first laid down a nightmare vision of a populist far right gone sinister, leading up to an abrupt cold finish that was meant to leave listeners a little thrown off. It’s arguably more relevant now than it was then, on both sides of the Atlantic.
66. Deep Dark Truthful Mirror
This is one of those very occasional Costello songs that goes from a clearly emotional and relatable start into something more impressionistic, even psychedelic. (To the extent that a song that includes the Bible’s shortest verse, “Jesus wept,” can read as psychedelia.) But with a fantastic horn chart, it remains one of Costello’s most soulful songs throughout, even when he’s tripping out. Think of it as: Van Morrison meets Dr. John, and they take acid together while staging an earnest intervention with a beloved narcissist friend.
65. The Other End of the Telescope
Costello co-wrote this with one of the other greatest songwriters of the modern era, Aimee Mann, and as with his co-writes with Paul McCartney, it’s fun to go line by line and try to imagine who wrote what. There are some clues if you go back to the version that Mann recorded first with her then-band Til Tuesday, which contained some different lyrics. The good news is that both of them have such a way of cutting an ex-lover down to size that lines like “I think you’re shrinking” could have come from either of them.
64. Stranger in the House
Costello said in his biography that he wrote “Stranger” at the beginning of his career as a sort of premonition, as a young family man, of how he might go off the rails, which soon came true as stardom allowed him to, er, explore his options. But he filtered those dark predictions through the patina of classic Conway Twitty. He never did enlist Twitty to cover the song, but he did do it as a duet with George Jones for a TV special (see video, above). For an audience that thought they knew Costello in the early ’70s as a sneering neo-punk, this early excursion into C&W offered an indication of just how stylistically diverse his roots and his future were.
63. My Dark Life (with Brian Eno)
Working on a companion album for the “X Files” television series, back in the days when all-star soundtracks ruled, producer David Was hooked Costello up with Eno for a collaboration that somehow caught the spirit of a show that was meant to be both friendly and unnerving. Even if, in Costello’s world, the disturbing truth is always in there, not out there.
62. Alibi
If I had just one song to play to make my argument to someone that Costello is one of the great rock vocalists of all time, I might choose this one. He has never been in more passionate or more vocally vituperative form than in this slow-burner that’s basically a catalog of every excuse anyone has ever used to justify their sins, or being “stupid and lazy,” as he puts it. And I do mean “every,” because the song goes on for nearly seven minutes, all of them delirious and delicious. There is comedy amid the taunting, as is his wont: “Maybe Jesus wants you for a sunbeam” is a true LOL line.
61. Magnificent Hurt
What was it Nicole Kidman said… that heartache feels good in a place like this? Listen to the words of the prophet. Costello devoted this rave-up from his most recent album, 2022’s “The Boy Named If,” to the idea that feeling good is worth the feeling bad, at least for the insatiably lovestruck.
60. My All Time Doll
Once upon a time, Costello sang, “Forever doesn’t mean forever anymore,” seeming to swear off the idea of a lasting or eternal love. But he changed his tune later on — the goddess Diana will do that to a guy — and he’s written some corker love songs in the latter part of his career. Among them is this highlight from what is arguably his rootsiest album, in which he sweetly avows that his love is, for him, an all-timer.
59. American Without Tears
Costello is a master of the kind of story-song in which thoughts or events of his own life flit in and out of an outside narrative. That’s the case in this song from “King of America” in which he addresses one of his favorite subjects, one that isn’t a going concern for that many other pop songwriters: immigration. He has a fine time encountering a couple of aging “G.I. brides” who emigraed from Europe during WWII to be with their new U.S. soldier husbands — and, as he bittersweetly notes, they no longer “speak any English,” this many decades into their Americanization. After a funny quotation of a Carole King song (via a cocktail lounge performer who is “singing that ‘It’s Too Late’ / I agreed with that part”), Costello turns the last verse on himself, as a visiting European who is “in America and running from you.” This would all bowl you over even if the song didn’t have freaking Jo-El Sonnier holding the whole thing together with beguiling accordion.
58. TKO (Boxing Day)
In honor of Boxing Day, some of us love to play this song every Dec. 26, even though it’s really all about the pugilist metaphors and has nothing to do with the season beyond the title. Getting into the boxing ring allows Costello to weave in his usual mastery of phrases with double meanings — “I can count you out,” et al. But it’s not one of his deepest songs: You come to this to fully indulge in the glorious peaks of his horns-and-female-backing-vocals phase, which was too short-lived.
57. Beaten to the Punch
This super-hard-charging “Get Happy!!” deep cut apparently is not one of Costello’s favorites among his own catalog; according to one primary EC info site, he has only been known to ever perform it in concert a grand total of 12 times, and only twice since 1981. But in some way, it’s the apotheosis of the whole grand ethos of “Get Happy!!,” which was to approach soul music as if it was best heard or best played on amphetamines. (Note, we said “as if.”) It’s proof that there is a lot of rocking that can be accomplished in one minute and 42 seconds. Memorable couplet: “Your body speaks so much louder than your voice / You let it do the talking so I don’t have any choice.” Yeah, right — but all the suitors fighting each other off for a woman’s attention are “saved by the wedding bell.” The most delightful part is when Costello breaks into something between a falsetto and a howl to wrap up the furiousness.
56. 13 Steps Lead Down
The world loves a 12-step program. Leave it to Costello to add one step to that to make the whole thing deliriously unlucky.
55. Someone Took the Words Away
Costello once admitted in a song that he was known for his “Mouth Almighty,” but here, in as hushed a song as he’s ever done, he admits, “It’s strange to finally find myself so tongue-tied / A change has come over me / I’m powerless to express / Every thing I know but cannot speak.” The Krall’s got his tongue, in other words. While it’s always dangerous to read too much autobiography into things, the severely underrated “North” album seemed to be half about the end of one relationship and half about the beginning of another — with the timing indicating that the latter part was strongly influenced by Costello falling in love with his wife-to-be. This haunting ballad catches him right at the nexus point where he hasn’t yet put words to those newly stirring emotions… and climaxes with a sax solo that doesn’t quite know whether it’s supposed to be sad or happy or sad, and so just goes with gorgeous.
54. That Day Is Done (with the Fairfield Four)
Costello doesn’t shy away from writing death-related songs — see “The Birds Will Still Be Singing,” “The Puppet Has Cut His Strings” and “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4.” This might be the only one in his catalog to be sung by a dead man, though. It’s a little more unusual for Paul McCartney to indulge in the subject, and what a team they made in coming up with this funeral-ready classic. McCartney cut it for one of his own albums, and it’s his that is primarily known, but the superior recording belongs to Costello and the gospel quartet the Fairfield Four, included on one of their albums and also belatedly as a bonus cut on one of Elvis’. For anyone dealing with grief, which is everyone at some point, it’s moving stuff.
53. It’s Time
Costello alludes to a Drifters classic early in this song, “This Magic Moment,” and yet he’s out to sing about just how un-enchanting things in a relationship have become when he veritably sneers, “This magic moment concludes when that cigarette ends,” as if his better half has just that long to wait before he walks away. It’s a powerful build of a track that is both majestic and brooding.
52. Motel Matches
A “Get Happy!!” country-soul ballad employs one of Costello’s best double-entendres: motel matches are something that are given away but also something that will give you away, if you’ve been cheating. “In your eyes there is a vacancy,” he says, presumably to a woman he’s lured to this lurid no-tell mo-tel. Big bonus points for, in the very first line, employing a “who shot Sam?” reference that manages to invoke the George Jones song of that name but also the gun death of Sam Cooke in a motel room. Doubles for everyone!
51. Still Too Soon to Know
“Still Too Soon to Know” sounds like it was written to be recorded by a thousand torch-singer chanteuses, and it’s been done by a few, but no one could make it sound more resonant than Costello. It captures a very specific moment in time few have really tried to lay down in a song, when someone has learned that a lover or spouse has fallen in thrall to another, but isn’t quite sure whether it will end up being just a speedbump in their relationship or the End of All Things. “When I think back a couple of days / If I wasn’t happy then, I never will be / I wonder was this ignorance or bliss?” he sings. It ends on a cliffhanger, meaning that in the world of the song, it will forever and always be too soon to know.
50. The Birds Will Still Be Singing (with the Brodsky Quartet)
If you’ve ever been to a funeral on a beautifully sunny day, you may recognize the sentiment in this “letter,” in which someone who is presumably mortally ill writes: “Banish all dismay / Extinguish every sorrow / If I’m lost or I’m forgiven / The birds will still be singing.” And without casting any slight on Costello, there’s no “singing” quite like the exquisite instrumental outro that the Brodsky Quartet provides to wrap up this straight-faced look at the world going on after each person passes.
49. Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head
It’s almost too crude to even pass as a pun, the way Costello turns “hang your hat” into “hang your head” for the purposes of this deep cut. But it sure works. The theme of obsessive, unrequited love runs throughout most of the classic “Blood and Chocolate” album, and it’s deeply felt here, although with some leavening, mordant wit, with the singer referring to our sad-sack hero — possibly himself — as “Mr. Misery” right from the first lie. It’s either comedy or poetry, or both, when Costello sings about the universe’s indifference to romantic suffering: “They day ended as it began / As he was seconds older than the man he was this morning / And the world has wiped its mouth since then / Or maybe it was yawning.”
48. Either Side of the Same Town
Costello would seem to be referencing Dan Penn’s “Dark End of the Street,” and if so, the allusion doesn’t diminish his own take on forbidden lovers encountering one another on a city street one bit. For Elvis, it’s all about pretending to be “strangers when we meet,” although he allows that he might touch the sleeve of his ex as they pass on the sidewalk, if no one’s looking too closely. In his concerts nowadays, he tends to emphasize hits from the late ’70s and ’80s, as is a typical audience’s want, along with the newest material he has to bring out — but it’s no wonder that this is a song from the early 2000s that has also remained a staple in his set. He clearly cherishes this song, and so should we, not just for its irresistible sense of romantic tragedy but also the way the upwardly cascading melody makes use of his chops.
47. From a Whisper to a Scream (with Glenn Tilbrook)
“From a Whisper to a Scream” has not often been performed in concert, which is surprising, since it’s one of his most effective rockers — but also not surprising, since it was recorded as a duet with Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, who is never going to be around to reprise his duties. (Actually, the same goes for “There’s a Story in Your Voice,” Costello’s great duet with Lucinda Williams, which never became a big part of his sets.) In any case, we’ll always have “Trust,” the early studio album in which Costello largely moved toward more temperate or varied material — but pulled out all the rock ‘n’ roll stops for this galvanizing outlier.
46. Brilliant Mistake
At least once in concert, Costello mashed up this acoustic-driven song with Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” in the way he sometimes slyly acknowledges the roots of what he’s doing. No one would mistake this for a knockoff, but it’s in a solid tradition of strummy ballads about encounters with women the singer is a little unsure about. OK, more than unsure, in Elvis’ case — this meeting of the minds is probably not destined to last, when he insults her with the memorable couplet, “She said that she was working for the ABC News / It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use.” Truthfully, that’s such an applause line that it almost throws off the sensitivity of the rest of the tune. But ultimately it’s a hell of a tune as Costello wrestles with mixed feelings, not just about allegedly illiterate women but about being an eager foreigner and a supplicant to the mistress that is America herself.
45. Just About Glad
How many great songs have been written about not having sex? Not many, really. There’s “Let’s Wait Awhile,” but Costello’s song asks: How about never? Is never good for you? Certainly never has there been a more sheerly exultant number written about keeping it in one’s pants, with the idea that it was a near-miss that could have led to a fatal-attraction situation, or at least a relationship he imagines would have been fatally banal. And it rocks awfully hard for a tune about not getting rocks off.
44. Mystery Dance
Costello imagined he was riffing on “Jailhouse Rock” when he dashed off this early tune in the style of so many seminal rock classics. The candor was part of what made fans fall for Costello in the first place in the late ’70s, as he made a tough-sounding song out of the idea of a nebbish lamenting his lack of sexual education. It’s funny, now that he is turning 70, seeing him still occasionally perform this hilarious song about the woes of inexperience… but, as Randy Newman could also attest, feeling like maybe you’re doing it wrong could just be a lifelong sensation.
43. Charm School
Let’s be glad the English pronounce the word “ass” the way they do, just so Costello could get a rhyme out of “You and I as lovers were nothing but a farce / Trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s arse.” The singer wonders why his love has to be cruel to be sexy: “Didn’t they teach you anything except how to be cruel / In that charm school?” Apparently not, and the inarticulate utterance Costello lets out at the end speaks with as much frustrated exasperation as the verses and choruses that led up to it.
42. Man Out of Time
It’s an odd ostensible subject for a song — a government official hiding out in the wake of a sex scandal — to have become such a major staple in the Costello catalog. But maybe we all feel like baby, baby, baby, we’re out of time, whether or not we’re “a minister of state” facing the consequences of a dalliance “at traitor’s gate.” For the beginning and ending of the studio rendition on “Imperial Bedroom,” Costello tacked on pieces of a previous version he and the Attractions had recorded, when they threw out all the nuance and approached it as a furious rocker. It was smart to rethink the thoughtful song the way they ultimately did, of course — yet that cool intro and outro also offer an intriguing tease of primal passions surrounding the song’s long, stately middle.
41. Everyday I Write the Book
One of Costello’s cleverest lyrical concoctions, “Everyday I Write the Book” also suffers a bit from an arrangement that sounded a little bit cloying in the early ’80s and sounds more so today. Fortunately, in concert, he’s performed it in a variety of other ways — acoustically, or in a “Merseybeat” version that can be found among his bonus tracks. He even does it in the familiar fashion, and of course the crowd goes wild, this being one of his biggest radio hits. “When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote, I’m a man with a mission in two or three editions”… this is just good writing, if you value wordplay.
40. What’s Her Name Today? (with Burt Bacharach)
Costello has often set himself up in song as a protector of women’s virtue, and that continues in “What’s Her Name Today?,” one of the best songs off the celebrated EC/Bacharach collaboration “Painted From Memory.” The singer is just slightly sympathetic to the louse who keeps upending his lovers’ lives, imagining that he must’ve been jilted by one woman who “took away your pride and your reason,” to make him end up “punish(ing) any girl you meet, to try and make that feeling go away.” But the sympathy mostly bends to the lives “ruined,” with Costello as their chivalrous defender. It’s deep armchair psychology, but Bacharach meets this with the same bravado he did anything of Hal David’s, while EC sings the hell out of his fury.
39. You Bowed Down
The definitive version of this might be the one Roger McGuinn recorded, before Costello took it on himself; it’s hard to imagine the ex-Byrd felt the lyric as deeply, but the 12-string part was tailor-made for him. In actuality, this feels like a great Bob Dylan put-down song — and the Byrds covered so many of those, it was natural that Elvis felt the instinct to take it to Roger first. Some people have interpreted the song as being Costello’s complaint about a business relationship gone sour, maybe due to lines like “I’d promise you now and again that I’d honor the contract, if it hadn’t crumbled away in my hand.” But it’s certainly just as easy to see it as being about a relationship that felt transactional. In the end, it could go either way — there are a million ways to sell out or worship a golden calf, in the music business and in love.
38. What If I Can’t Give You Anything but Love?
Costello’s most recent album, “The Boy Named If,” was acclaimed as a return to form — and that risks being patronizing toward the other great albums he’s made in recent years, but it’s hard not to agree that this one benefits from the kind of rock ‘n’ roll fire fans have traditionally loved. Somewhere between the album’s ballads and its rave-ups is this astonishing, expansive number, full of propulsive rhythm, the interjection of screaming guitar licks and hooks to beat the band. The actual narrative remains a bit mysterious — extramarital infidelity? hit men? — but what’s important is that key, pleading sentiment: hoping to just be enough as circumstances fall to shit.
37. He’s Given Me Things
One of the most haunting melodies that Costello and Burt Bacharach ever wrote in their many years of collaborations was intended for a “Painted From Memory” stage musical that ultimately never got produced. Costello was able to rescue it and use it as the closer for his Grammy-winning “Look Now” album a few years ago. And if it took some setup or context to realize it was part of a larger narrative and Costello was singing from a woman’s point of view for a reason, you could still ignore the storyline and feel a sense of bitter tragedy just in the magisterial chord changes. The woman in the song seems to be saying: Yes, I sold out to the highest bidder — but what did you have to offer? That the guy doesn’t seem to have a good answer makes his lot sadder than the kept woman he’s accusing.
36. Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4
Costello has often sung this a cappella, even off-mic, or with just Steve Nieve over the years — either one a preferable approach to the circusy-sounding arrangement that didn’t do the song complete justice on the “Mighty Like a Rose” album. No matter how it’s performed, this is riveting, as maybe the darkest song in Costello’s catalog, which is saying something. The first verse describes a young woman who’s found solace in religion in the wake of the death of her father, which Costello has some sympathy for, as he goes on to contemplate “the sudden chill where lovers doubt their immortality.” His agnostic conclusion: “Toll the bell or rock the cradle / Please don’t let me fear anything I cannot explain / I can’t believe I’ll never believe in anything again.” You couldn’t call the goosebumps unexpected.
35. All This Useless Beauty
A tragicomic lament for how fall standards have fallen — for art, for humanity, and particularly for manhood. Costello brings some humor to this that keeps it from being a get-off-my-lawn lament: “Our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts / They still think they’re the gods of antiquity / If something you missed didn’t even exist / It was just an ideal, is it such a surprise?” But if you ever felt like you were born in the wrong era, he’s playing your song.
34. Heathen Town
It’s astonishing that Costello used to release songs this great as mere B-sides. His paean to the wages of sin, seemingly prompted by a visit to Las Vegas, is frankly hilarious, with lyrics like “The only stake you cannot raise is the one driven through your heart” — the kind of line that doesn’t seem like it should squeeze into a pop song and yet Costello makes it sound effortless. He has a great gift for alluding to other famous song lyrics, of course, and anyone who loves the Frank Loesser era has to love the moment in “Heathen Town” when Costello quotes liberally from the “Guys and Dolls” classic “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.” But even that is not as delicious as: “It starts as a flirtation and ends up as an expensive habit / With one eye on her place in debtor’s prison / And the other on a girl dressed as a rabbit.”
33. Monkey to Man
Another song that owes a big part of its raison d’etre to someone else’s classic song — in this case, Dave Bartholomew’s 1950s song “The Monkey.” But no foreknowledge of that predecessor is needed to get a huge kick out of this flat-out rocker, which wants nothing more than to have some fun at the expense of a human race that doesn’t want to accept it hasn’t evolved very far from its ape-like origins.
32. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
The most quoted lines in the Costello catalog surely have to be “I used to be disgusted / Now I try to be amused”… with “I said, ‘I’m so happy I could die’ / She said, ‘Drop dead,’ then left with another guy” surely being in the top 10, too. How exactly this blunt talk fits in with the peculiarities of a Hans Christian Anderson myth (or Powell/Pressburger film) remains a little elusive even after almost 50 years. But all we know is, this song hasn’t gotten any older, just like Elvis.
31. Jack of All Parades
Costello has written a fair number of songs about selling out; this is the most beautiful one about resisting the temptation. “I was everybody’s boy /. But soon that thrill just fades / To be the love of one true heart / Or the Jack of all parades” — that is the question. It’s a professional dilemma, of course, and one that Costello settled by releasing as ostensibly uncommercial an album as the proto-Americana “King of America” in 1986. But the song is really framed as a love song, and close to the only pure one that he’s put on an album up to that point. (He’s done a lot of catching up since.) “When we first met I didn’t know what to do / My old love lines were all worn out on you… / I didn’t mean to say it / I just blurted it out / As you pretended not to notice / Or be taken aback / And I loved you there and then
It’s as simple as that.” The guy who’d been pegged as the Angriest Young Man seemed as shocked to be saying “I love you” in a song as we then were to hear it.
30. All the Rage
Right from the title, you can guess this is going to be one of Costello’s double-entendre songs, with a title that invokes both fashion and fury. It’s a nasty song, one that makes you laugh and flinch in almost equal measure. Has Costello ever written a grander put-down couplet than this one? “Alone with your tweezers and your handkerchief / You murder time and truth, love, laughter and belief.” That’s giving a woman a hilarious amount of power, particularly for someone armed with such a tiny blunt instrument. But he seems not to be kidding when he warns: “Don’t try to touch my heart, it’s darker than you think.” Of course, this being a Costello song, this venom is rendered in the form of beautiful, sing-along hooks befitting a great love affair.
29. Our Little Angel
Every bar scene should have an Elvis Costello positioned at the door, ready to step in to keep the wolves at bay when they approach young women. In this charming song, Costello speaks in more poetic terms in the minor-key verses: “She sits alone apart from the crowd in a white dress she wears like a question mark.” But for the verses, the key shifts to a cheerful major as a Dobro kicks in and the singer offers blunt warnings to the predatory menfolk: “Get your mind off the sweet behind of our little angel.”
28. Clubland
Is it any surprise that Costello is not a fan of the club scene… probably any club scene? He took the idea of clubbing down a peg with “Pump It Up,” and in this “Trust”-worthy followup several years later, he imagines a possibly more elegant but also more organized-crime-riddled network in which everyone but the performers will get paid. It evokes “Gilda” as much as it does any punk or new wave scene, and in concert settings of late, Costello is likely to drop in a bit of tropicalia and also a bit of the Specials’ “Ghost Town.” From the Great Lines Dept.: “The long arm of the law slides up the outskirts of town.”
27. In the Darkest Place (with Burt Bacharach)
You want it darker? This scene-setter for the duo’s classic “Painted From Memory” collaboration finds Costello sitting in the dark, much like we’d expect to find Sinatra brooding over Ava. Backup singers who seem to have momentarily drifted over from a Steely Dan record jump in to suggest he “find (him)self another lover,” but our man won’t have it — this is going to be a nearly album-length obsession. The whole “Memory” record is like the elegant, baroque twin of “Blood and Chocolate,” taking the single-minded inability to Get Over It to new lyrical extremes. A minor-key ballad finally oddly shifts to a calming major key for the extended coda, as if the singer has willed himself into a delirium from which there will be no escape.
26. This Year’s Girl
Costello used to get wrongly pegged as a misogynist in his very earliest days, but there was no doubting what was going on if you were paying attention: Yes, he was casting some judgment on the women who would pursue being the It Girl of the moment, but he was casting a lot more on the men who put and held them in those positions. “You don’t really give a damn about this year’s girl,” he asserted, implying that he did, at least a little, at the time. His empathy would grow over time, but his pure moral indignation over these transactional relationships in the late ’70s made for rock ‘n’ roll that felt like it had a sense of purpose — the purpose of knocking the goons who were getting the girl.
25. New Lace Sleeves
A deceptively lovely song about nice girls, not ones with the defects. In knocking upper-crust debutantes, he had the righteous anger to put down the “socialite sisters with their continental fingers that have never seen working blisters,” but also the self-awareness to add, as a confession: “Oh I know they’ve got their problems / I wish I was one of them.” As one of the standouts of the “Trust” album, this was particularly a showcase for the skills of Steve Nieve, who proved once and for all that he was not just a Vox man, nor one who would use piano just for ironic mirth, but one of rock’s most lyrically expressive keyboardists ever.
24. Sulky Girl
Yet another case of Elvis having a little bit of an attitude about a careless woman, but not nearly as much as the attitude he’s got for circling predators: “You’re no match for that sulky girl.” There’s a mysterious narrative at play on some continent closer to checkpoint Charlies than America. But what really lands for any listener is the outrageous amount of melodic invention here — how, long after you think you’ve heard the chorus, he finally treats you to the real chorus, and it induces a higher high than you could have imagined.
23. Party Girl
The world was insistent that Costello had written this about one of his girlfriends, but he insisted it was about an anonymous young lady whose name was connected to his — and sullied — in a local paper after he spent a late night with her following a concert. However it was prompted, this was the song that proved he had not been a one-trick balladeer with “Alison.” The long closeout to the tune, slightly redolent of the Beatles’ “You Never Give Me Your Money,” had Costello lamenting that he could give this woman anything but time — the time to stick around and be a boyfriend, or the greater sense of time she might need to figure out how to get her life together. It’s a pretty classic song to have come out of what he swears was a fleeting conversation with a fan.
22. No Hiding Place
A relatively latter-day song in the Costello canon that’s as smoking as anything from his initial heyday. The subject — something he couldn’t have written about back in those salad days — is the Internet, and what fools it makes of us all. The spies and trolls it makes us into, specifically. Costello (who has been known to occasionally go on Twitter and not treat fools gladly) rips into commenters who would never say things to a person’s face, or gossip-spreaders, spitting out verbiage like: “You sit in judgment and bitch / Well, baby, that’s rich / You’re nothing but a snitch.” This renewed anger becomes him, and the track absolutely soars on his righteous grievance.
21. Shipbuilding
Costello came of age in a time when there wasn’t as much need, or at least obvious prompting, to write anti-war songs. Then the Falklands “conflict” gave him all the impetus he needed to come up with a classic, with an unforgettable melody written by his producer at the time, Clive Langer. As an obvious appreciator of bitter irony, Costello found plenty in the towns that constructed ships for the English to sail off to battle, and that also carried local boys to their deaths — “diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls.” His recording had the greatest “feature” anyone could ask for: a close-out trumpet solo by the not-long-for-this-world jazz great Chet Baker. Talk about a pearl.
20. God Give Me Strength (with Burt Bacharach)
Costello and Burt Bacharach were initially put together by filmmaker Allison (no relation) Anders for the purpose of finding a signature song for her movie “Grace of My Heart,” as part of a whole plan to pair younger singer-songwriters with some of the great tunesmiths from the ’60s era in which the film was mostly set. The other songs she collected for the soundtrack were also terrific, but little could Anders have known she was setting up in this case something that would bear fruit over decades and stand as maybe the greatest intergenerational partnership in the history of pop. Their initial song later spawned a great album, but even if it had been limited to “God Give Me Strength,” the collab would still be iconic. Costello probably didn’t actually mean the song as a prayer, but it was if somebody heard him.
19. I’ll Wear It Proudly
Another uncharacteristic (in those days) love song. Does it get any more sweet or romantic than swearing you’d happily be crucified upside-down for the love of your life? It’s not as martyr-like as all that — Costello also offers a bit of eros when he sings, “I hate the buttons on your shirt when all I wanna do is tear.” It took doing an album as acoustically based as “King of America” for Costello to finally emerge as the King of Romantics, at least in small fits and starts.
18. Beyond Belief
Costello sounded menaced in the moody opener to “Imperial Bedroom,” maybe his best-reviewed album ever. “Charged with insults and flattery / Her body moves with malice,” he observes, lusting and longing and realizing he doesn’t have “a hope in Hades” of making this one last. Somehow, skipping over the linear parts of his analogy, his inability to seal the deal ends up equated with “the canals of Mars and the Great Barrier Reef” as things not to be believed. It seems ludicrous but, as the song drives toward its bitter end, it all seems to make sense.
17. Accidents Will Happen
Talk about a cold opening: “Oh, I just don’t know where to begin” is one of the great ones… just about right up there with “Help!” He knew to start, and also to finish, a classic pop song that treats infidelities as “accidents.” Costello has admitted that he mixed up the pronouns when he was rewriting the song so it would not come off as quite so much an admission of guilt as he first conceived it. But there was enough plainspokenness in the lyrics to give the song a kick anyway, with “It’s the damage that we do and never know / It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so” resonating as an especially effective bridge. By the song’s end, he’s found his words to apologize after all, but just barely: “I know what I’ve done” would have to count. So much goes right with this song, not least of all Pete Thomas doing one of the best single snare hits in history.
16. Radio Radio
It’s funny how the early demos Costello subsequently released showed that he actually started this song off in the mid-’70s as a tribute to the glories of radio, before having a change of purpose that found him wanting to bite the hand that fed him. And radio played it anyway, or a lot of them did — you know it’s a good track when defensive DJs give in and figure he must be talking about that other guy. When he and the Attractions went on “Saturday Night Live” and he made a show of stopping one song to play this one after all, it was theater, of course. But the song is so urgent and so pointed that it was possible to believe he was really doing something naughty. Those gapped teeth really did have bite.
15. Oliver’s Army
On his previous album, Costello had issued a song about fascism called “Night Rally,” and it felt important and pertinent, but like no one’s idea of a banger. He solved that problem by coming up with “Oliver’s Army,” a tune about the mercenary forces the British sent out into the world, and feeling inspired to tweak it in the style of ABBA. Steve Nieve’s rollicking piano was suddenly as famous as his sneaky organ, and Costello suddenly had a big ole British hit with a song decrying homegrown imperialism that actually named names and countries. The sense of outrage came from the occupying forces he’d seen in Belfast… and identifying with the kids who were only on board because they’d been promised jobs after their service. Of course, taking off from that, “Have you got yourself an occupation?” is one of his great double-entendres. But the whole song is a glorious trick.
14. Almost Blue
He might as well have invented the torch song, the way he took it up and ran with it once this track revealed where some of his truest sensibilities were. Today, it’s not difficult to find cabaret singers who will put “Almost Blue” into the repertoire right alongside the Great American Songbook — like, for instance, a singer named Diana Krall. “Flirting with this disaster” became him, and if he had only stuck with this style for the rest of his life — instead of limiting it to the albums “Painted From Memory” and “North,” and occasional detours on others — it would have been a fine career.
13. I Hope You’re Happy Now
Far and away, this is the most childish song in Costello’s canon. But anyone who ever felt sideswiped by the end of a relationship may have at least thought the juvenile things he’s stating in this rocker, starting with the lie “I know that this will hurt you more than it hurts me.” He even insults his replacement’s physiology, imagining him as “a matador with his pork sword, while we all die of laughter.” It might all be a bit much if the song didn’t swing like it does… and if we just all hadn’t been there. it’s too goofy to be truly mean, of course; it’s probably universally understood the joke is on the guy insisting “I never loved you anyhow.”
12. Pump It Up
Costello has always been open about who and what he borrowed from for this song, which sounded at least a little sonically groundbreaking at the time — namely, the talking-blues tradition that produced Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” long before he came along. (Of course, he felt magnanimous when Olivia Rodrigo was accused of borrowing from “Pump It Up” — he saw it as a pay-it-forward situation.) Bruce Thomas’ bass will live forever just based on this lick. The funny thing was that Costello was decrying everything he described in the song — the sense of frenzy that is produced in a punk club, in particular — and his song in turn is used at sporting and other events to… whip up frenzy. It’s an irony we probably all can live with.
11. Lipstick Vogue
As if he needed to, Costello was already proving by the time of his second album that he was not the misogynist he was being falsely painted as. Some people missed the point of this one — that she was not just another mouth in the lipstick vogue. A love song? It was as close as he could come at the time without yet giving up his sneer. No more frantic song exists in the classic rock catalog, and its once-and-forever hero is Pete Thomas, who nearly turns the recording into an extended master drum fill that happens to allow for melody and lyrics.
10. The Other Side of Summer
Costello doesn’t really do parody or pastiche too much, but he made an exception for the obvious Beach Boys homage in “The Other Side of Summer.” Naturally this was no straightforward tribute — not when his aim is to make the most glorious months of the year sound positively dystopian. He dashes off barbs at rock heroes like John Lennon (“Was it a millionaire who said imagine no possessions”) and Roger Waters on the way to such random thoughts as defending a teenage girl who’s “crying ’cause she don’t look like a million dollars” (though he also manages to insult her, too). “Goodnight, God bless and kiss goodbye to the earth,” he sings, in an early climate-change reference — and damn if you don’t kind of want to hit the surf anyway, after all this bitter satire.
9. Alison
A chance encounter with an old flame — or realistically, probably just an old crush — leads to the revelation that she’s married, and to a whole reverie (taking place silently in the narrator’s mind, presumably) about how tragic it is she’s signed away the rest of her life. Costello said he wrote it not about anyone he knew but after seeing a supermarket girl whose youth he imagined receding in the time it took to check out. Why has this chance-encounter ballad resonated so strongly for nearly a half-century? It’s the idea that old flames never die, and that even if we haven’t seen someone for years, we can still be filled with umbrage that they married wrongly. Or maybe it’s just that Pete Thomas snare kick after “stop”… Who couldn’t use a good drummer around when we just want someone to shut up?
8. (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea
When Costello and his current band the Imposters play this live, it’s a sign that you’ve entered the final stretch of a concert — but even though it feels like it was meant to be a penultimate song, not an actual kicker, it’s legitimately hard for anything to follow this. Costello’s guitar lick, Bruce Thomas’ bass (now Davey Faragher’s) and Pete Thomas’ drumming are everything you could want out of a precision power trio that constantly seems about to go askew — accented by Steve Nieve organ parts that seem to want to turn the chaos into some kind of comical horror movie. It’s one of Costello’s many anti-fashion statements, but of course, he became a real fashion-setter with utterly original early tracks like these.
7. So Like Candy
With Bruce Springsteen’s “Candy’s Room” and Costello’s “So Like Candy” being two of the most revered cult songs in their artists’ respective canons, why has there not been a resurgence of girls being named Candy in the last few decades? Maybe it’s because neither of those tracks is entirely flattering to the female characters in questions, although they’re both presented as objects of desire. The narrator of Costello’s song has been unceremoniously dumped, and it’s a testament to how hot she was that she scratched his records and he wants her back anyway. In all seriousness, this may be the best of all the co-writes that Costello and Paul McCartney did together… the kind of song that seems to top itself every 30 seconds till the bridge tops everything. It’s not altogether believable, as a scenario, but is so melodically overpowering, it’s haunting anyway.
6. Riot Act
“Forever doesn’t mean forever anymore” is all the portent you need to know that “Riot Act” will be a peak for grandiose disappointment in the Costello catalog. Eventually, he gravitates toward his trademark wordplay — and “Don’t put your heart out on your sleeve when your remarks are off the cuff” is the kind that could sink a song if everything leading up to it weren’t so deeply convincing. He knows he’s the guilty party, girl, but he’s still angry about being taken so strongly to task for his moral lapses, being perceived as “a villain in a million.” That he could make the vocals on a ballad feel this edgy and beseeching sealed the deal on Costello as one of our greats, all the way back in 1980.
5. Watching the Detectives
Film noir meets film bore — or, in any case, Costello had a lot of fun contrasting the intrigue of a mystery story on TV with a nail-filing companion who appears to be less of a cineaste. The classic song that brought Costello to the dance endures for its mixture of images from a TV screen and from the couch opposite the TV, but also because of its weird, insinuatingly sinister, reggae-like cadences. “Detectives” was recorded for his debut album, before he’d put the Attractions together, but did benefit from Steve Nieve coming in to lay down one of the offbeat organ parts that would someday make him a Hall of Famer. It only took his little fingers, and Costello’s imaginative vision, to blow us away.
4. Veronica
“Veronica” turned out to be Costello’s biggest hit in the U.S. It had already taken off when a music video finally revealed to the world what only some people had already sussed out from the radio — that the song was not about a flighty young lady but Costello’s dementia-afflicted grandmother. And even though Alzheimer’s is rarely — OK, never — synonymous with “hit single,” this did not dampen affection for the song (which was another McCartney/Costello co-write, this one mostly from Elvis’ hand). In the end, you could believe it was about a girl who’s “gone to hide” in her own mind rather than deal with her tormentors — Lord knows there’d been enough Costello songs leading up to that about oppressed women in bar scenes that this one fits right in, if you want it to. But in crafting such a fantastically melodic and energetic song about such an unlikely subject, he proved that anything can become pop of the highest order.
3. I Want You
Costello usually lends as much verbiage as possible to his breakup songs, but “I Want You” almost seemed like an experiment in how much he could cut the language down, even as he extended the tune well past usual song lengths, to make the anguish feel as primal as possible. On the rare occasions that he busts it out as an encore today, there is a cry of exultation at the desolation everyone is about to experience. Perhaps you have never had someone break up with you and then spent days, or weeks or months, listening to “I Want You” on repeat. If so, get on this, pronto — you haven’t lived.
2. (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding
No, he didn’t write it, and maybe there could be complaints about putting a “Nick Lowe cover” atop a list of greatest Costello songs (by which I really mean great Costello records). But Lowe would surely agree: this has been Elvis’ song, whether his name is on the royalty checks or not, since 1979. Lowe’s aim in writing it was true but a little different — half spoofing the remnants of the counterculture with the title phrasing, half being serious. In Costello’s reading, any trace of archness about the hippie language was eradicated: It’s a roar of disappointment with the way the world had gone… since Woodstock sure, but since the dawn of man. Between Pete Thomas’ thunderous drumming and the pleading in Costello’s voice, this was destined to close most of the shows in his career for good reason. Disappointment, hope and rock ‘n’ roll make for a great power trio.
1. High Fidelity
Can a song that Costello only occasionally breaks out in the middle of a set really be his “best”? That’s an impossible competition to begin with, and a role that at least half the songs on this list could reasonably fill on a given day. But besides inspiring a book, movie and TV series, “High Fidelity” comes close to being a pure distillation of what historically made so many Costello tracks great: It feels as urgent as a heart attack; it’s haunting; it’s filled with wordplay that somehow accentuate the deeply felt emotions rather being a distraction; it feels like something that is happening in your life right now, even if it happened 10 or 20 years ago; and it’s over before you know it. Like a lot of his songs, it’s about the impossible hope of reconciliation, even though the singer himself is “with somebody else right now” and his ex is with her lover in “the corridors of power” (seeing a justice of the peace?). “Some things you never get used to” is a mantra for people who feel things deeply — who says we have to get over a death, even the death of a love affair? And the universality of that final refrain, shared by musicians and just humans, everywhere: “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” Loud and clear, Elvis.
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