icon: elvis costello

A few months ago, taking all of us by surprise, the entire Elvis Costello catalog showed up on the site. The instant it happened, we did the only thing we could: got Douglas Wolk on the case. You can read his album-by-album breakdown of Costello’s entire body of work below.

(UPDATE: Because of various territory restrictions, this feature is only viewable in the U.S.)

Icon: Elvis Cosetllo
By Douglas Wolk

Smart, angry and mercurial, Elvis Costello is one of the greatest living songwriters; for better or worse, he knows it. The man with the big spectacles (born Declan MacManus) is an exile everywhere he goes: an Englishman whose strongest work owes its greatest debts to American country and R&B; a new wave star who hated the term and the scene and has spent a lot of the latter half of his career working with classical and jazz musicians; an ungainly and adenoidal singer who built himself through sheer cussedness into a world-class vocal stylist.

Of course, Costello’s also got heavy-duty allies: His on-and-off band the Attractions are a supremely potent, versatile rock group, and he’s collaborated with everyone from Burt Bacharach to the Pogues. But his greatest virtues are his own: an encyclopedic fascination with the whole history of pop music (and a lot of other music too), an enormous and ever-growing catalogue of songs, a near-total unwillingness to repeat himself on record, and a scaldingly bitter attitude toward just about everything that covers up the heart on his sleeve like a barbed-wire armband. His 1977-86 records are still the core of his repertoire and his reputation, but nearly every album he’s made includes at least a couple of gems.

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