Elvis Costello has confounded easy stylistic pigeonholing for over forty years, his work spanning a wide range of musical interest that demonstrates innovation and boundary pushing. His music also reveals something more personal about the artist himself; that he’s as much a music fan as any of us. His own love of pop music as a thing to be regarded and treasured is more advanced than most, with a varied list of collaborators and excursions into unexpected territories where lesser artists would not even think to go, must less dare to.
When it comes to choosing key tracks, Costello’s broad palette and prolific output makes for a tall order to represent such an extensive body of work. But with that acknowledgement out of the way, here are 20 great Elvis Costello songs, inclusive of hits and deep cuts across his career to be listened to, considered, and enjoyed by long-time fans and newbies alike. Of course, like nearly all lists compiled by music writers and fans, the list itself may irritate as much as resonate. So, open your ears and choose your weapons.
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Miracle Man
A song only a young man full of piss, vinegar and a lack of worldly experience could write, Costello outlines a vicious narrative full of nervy sexual frustration. The portrait of the woman with the ten-inch bamboo cigarette holder and the black patent leather glove who will not be pleased even as you crawl around on all fours comes right out of the pages of a sketchy pulp magazine. He’d get much better at writing three-dimensional women characters as we’ll see soon enough further down the list.
Meanwhile, the raw fury of youthful vigour leaps out of the speakers as Elvis and members of California backing band Clover, all crammed into a recording space the size of someone’s living room, lay down this track from Costello’s 1977 debut My Aim is True, propelling the tale along with bristling rock n’ roll energy that draws you right in.
Listen: Miracle Man
Alison
Elvis Costello’s early career was significantly boosted by this tune that positioned him as a nuanced and highly literate songwriter among his peers and even his influences. An early cover version of this song from one of the brightest lights and prodigious talents of the era — Linda Ronstadt — illustrates the point.
“Alison” is a pop music lament that circles around disappointment’s emotional neighbourhood, looking for a place to park. That doesn’t mean it’s unfocused. In fact, it deftly suggests the sad dynamic that the more you build up your expectations around someone, the more you’re likely to be let down by them. Luckily, that was not indicative of Costello’s path that took him from his humble pub rock beginnings into the unique and multifaceted artist that his early compositions suggested he could be.
Listen: Alison
Lipstick Vogue
For drummer Pete Thomas’ rightly-celebrated opening salvo alone, this song is a highlight on 1978’s This Year’s Model and notable in the annals of pop music perfection in general. At least a subtle reference to Costello’s time as Declan MacManus, data entry clerk at a cosmetics factory, “Lipstick Vogue” is a kinetic excursion into insecurity, lust, and anger, driven by fearsomely interlocked instrumental dynamics and Costello’s trademark petulant delivery.
If the dextrous skills of the then-new backing band the Attractions needed a sonic proving ground, this cut provides it and then some. Bassist Bruce Thomas shines particularly brightly here with countermelodies and lower register underpinnings held down all at once and at a furious pace that will characterize his approach and contribution throughout his tenure with the band.
Listen: Lipstick Vogue
Accidents Will Happen
Kicking the remnants of his pub-rock roots to the curb, Costello and the Attractions extend their sonic reach on 1979’s Armed Forces, bringing in soul pop, ABBA-adjacent sheen, and even a splash of psychedelia on this particular single that followed up the high-charting UK hit “Oliver’s Army”. This cut presents a woozy aural landscape with impressionistic lyrical outpourings from a young and newly famous songwriter finding himself out of his depth.
Costello is buoyed up by keyboardist Steve Nieve’s meticulous aural latticework that is particularly effective on the layered and spacey I know, I know outro — the sound of too little sleep itself. The key tension here is all about the way the song seeks to distance itself from its own emotional core of confusion and guilt, and in so doing bringing it closer to the surface instead.
Listen: Accidents Will Happen
Riot Act
The Armed Funk tour of 1979 did not go as planned, with hotel bar fights and careless, cruel, self-professed stupid nonsense on Costello’s part marring what should have been his levelling up in America. It was time to face the music, and he knew it. Luckily, he didn’t just pay the fine with this slice of retro-psychedelia that closes out 1980’s Get Happy!!. Perhaps not coincidentally, that record stands as an exceptional ode to what made America so inspiring to him in the first place — its vintage pop music.
Full of remorse and self-flagellation, this song presents an artist considering his uncertain future with the gravity of a black hole, teetering on the edge of oblivion, and yet finding that his way with texture, melody, and wordplay are no less potent as he counts the costs. With a “Don’t make me laugh/By talking tough”, the whole “angry young man” vibe of the past is put to bed for good.
Listen: Riot Act
Opportunity
A jubilant and bouncy 1960s soul-jazz background hosting a post-1970s jaded voice of experience, “Opportunity” dances between the two extremes while providing another high point of the Get Happy!! Album. The song suggests how slippery the term opportunity can be, giving way to deception and exploitation as much as it does to personal betterment.
Steve Nieve’s chirpy organ serves as a response voice to the call of Costello’s lead, elusively playing in and out of the phrasing. First prize goes to the line The chairman of this boredom is a compliment collector/I’d like to be his funeral director … as a singular cocktail of clever and cutting for which the song’s writer is well known.
Listen: Opportunity
Town Cryer
Closing out the landmark 1982 record Imperial Bedroom, a release that was celebrated and hampered by a provocative and potentially self-defeating Masterpiece? promotional tagline, “Town Cryer” is equal parts lush, sophisticated, and melancholy. Elvis and the Attractions had come a long way since “Pump it Up”, a distant four-years behind him by this time that sounds a lot longer.
Full of grandiose brass, weeping strings, gospel-tinged piano, and led by Costello’s forlorn lead vocal, this song is one of his most affecting and least emotionally elusive pop portraits even when considering that this is a tale of a heart’s austerity in the face of love and loss. Costello’s membership as a part of Burt Bacharach fandom is on full display here, ignoring the then-current era’s penchant for synthpop in favour of a grand and sweeping pop symphony instead.
Listen: Town Cryer
The Long Honeymoon
This is a full-on foreign movie of a song found on Imperial Bedroom, lit up by Steve Nieve’s Gallic accordion, and a rhythmic pulse by which to dance a tenuous tango as the hour grows later and later. This tune stands as one of Elvis’ most compelling story songs, with a wife waiting at home for a husband who may or may not return to her, suspicion and doubt growing in her mind all the while as to where both he and her best friend (whose phone keeps ringing) might be.
“The Long Honeymoon” is Elvis at his most cinematic, with aural shadows and light bringing out the black and white expressionist drama in sharp relief. It leaves the final scene up to the listener as to the outcome that we innately sense is more aligned to our heroine’s misgivings than it is to her hopes.
Listen: The Long Honeymoon
Shipbuilding
The Falkland Islands conflict grabbed headlines by 1982 as jingoistic sloganeering usefully drowned out criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Meanwhile, Costello and producer Clive Langer penned this reflection on propaganda and industry, with burdens carried by those who seek better lives for their children, sometimes at the cost of the very same.
No less than jazz great Chet Baker plays the lilting and ethereal flugelhorn solo on a melody that would not have been out of place in his own 1950s catalogue. The song appeared on the otherwise brightly coloured 1983 Punch the Clock record, and was also a hit for Robert Wyatt around that same time. Costello finds new artistic dimension for himself here on his own version, certainly standing as one of the most potent and poignant statements he’s ever made.
Listen: Shipbuilding
Brilliant Mistake
With a persistent curiosity and interest in a range of pop musical worlds, Costello turned outward even from the versatility of the Attractions for 1986’s King of America album. Here we find him throwing in with Rolling Thunder Revue veteran T-Bone Burnett and with many of the other Elvis’ former employees who are dubbed The Confederates as Costello surveyed the state of his own union.
The allure of the American myth permeates a number of songs on the record in one way or another, with this one exploring the curious role that superficial appearances and values play within that myth, and the writer’s own perceptions in relation to them. Drawing from a kind of ringing Byrds-like jangle meeting acoustic earthiness, “Brilliant Mistake” sounds and feels like a man at a crossroads, considering who he really wants to be.
Listen: Brilliant Mistake
Little Palaces
Costello would express his interest in Anglo-Irish folk music and its impact on Americana throughout his career with “Tramp the Dirt Down” and “The Scarlet Tide” being some of the best examples. This one is his most compelling songs in that stylistic vein even if it’s not his most high-profile.
Like many songs from The Animals, to Springsteen, to Bon Jovi, this is a song about a mundane town and life in it. This time there’s no promise of escape, lacking the optimism and hope of a “Born to Run” and weighted down instead by classism and the social inevitabilities that rigid caste systems produce. The burning light on this cut is in the depictions of the emotional and physical costs such forces have on real people’s lives, making this song one of Costello’s most compassionate and socially insightful compositions.
Listen: Little Palaces
I Want You
Back exclusively-but-tenuously with the Attractions and with stalwart producer Nick Lowe behind the board once again on 1986’s Blood & Chocolate, Costello and his compatriots etch out one of the artist’s most disturbing visions of jealousy and scorn laid down to date. The song sneaks up on the listener early on from the gentle Oh my baby, baby/I love you more than I can tell intro and pivots without warning into a jarring, noirish exploration of possessiveness, obsession, and even violence in word if not in deed.
Showing the ugly side of human nature with brutal starkness, it is no less artful and compelling. Recorded during a particularly tumultuous time for its writer, this song is as real as it gets. In 2006, Fiona Apple performed this track with Costello for a VH1 appearance, proving that it had lost none of its disturbing intensity.
Listen: I Want You
God’s Comic
The lines between theatre and organized religion have always been thin, and never more so as it’s portrayed here on this cut from 1989’s Spike, a texturally-varied and idiosyncratic record put out under Costello’s own name, post-Attractions. On the cover of the album, he grins in grease paint mounted on a wall as “The Beloved Entertainer”, perhaps in parallel to the initial narrator in this song who performs a similar function in (lip) service to a higher power.
Musically speaking, this song reflects a Tom Waits-like ramshackle magnificence, while lyrically switching the narrative from a pantomime priest to the Man Upstairs Himself who wonders if He should have given the world to the monkeys. With Costello’s unique brand of mordant black humour in the face of existential dread, the song’s title provides a signature punchline that revels in double meaning.
Listen: God’s Comic
So Like Candy
One of many songs written with Paul McCartney along with Costello’s “Veronica”, and Macca’s “My Brave Face”, “So Like Candy” presents some of the best singing of Costello’s career. The song is an anguished lament, full of longing and agony all for the sake of the titular heroine, her absence being the source of the song’s conflict.
Appearing on 1991’s Mighty Like a Rose, the song holds an ocean’s worth of feeling, streaked with the now-familiar self-loathing and regret with which Costello infuses so many of his musical tales and characters. This time, those themes are bolstered by genuine Beatlesque melodicism due to an actual Beatle on board, while hinting at Edith Piaf depths of despair that provides the requisite bitter pill with a candy coating.
Listen: So Like Candy
The Birds Will Still Be Singing
Veering away from his former new wave and power pop persona and into other musical territories had been a long journey for Elvis Costello. But on 1993’s The Juliet Letters, a collaborative record with The Brodsky Quartet, the artist seemed to wander off of the pop music map entirely. An amalgam of pop structure with chamber music arrangements while at the same time belonging in neither camp, this song stands as one of his sturdiest musical achievements.
This is in part due to some hands-on learning of musical notation on Costello’s part during the collaborative songwriting process with the Brodskys as he continued to follow his own path to explore the deeper questions without being too on the nose while doing so. Eternity stinks my darling/That’s no joke/Don’t waste your precious time/Pretending you’re heartbroken is as direct a way to say life goes on regardless as any.
Listen: The Birds Will Still Be Singing
This is Hell
Perhaps a third panel in the tryptic with “God’s Comic” and “The Birds Will Still Be Singing”, “This is Hell” comedically imagines eternal damnation as little more than an everlastingly tedious cocktail party complete with a poorly realized floorshow. Or, is it just about getting older, released the year the artist turned 40? Whatever the case, Costello’s advanced lyrical prowess reaches the heights here.
Musically, he’s seemingly energized by a reconnection with his old army buddies in the Attractions and Nick Lowe who all appear in the album credits but not collectively on the cover of 1994’s Brutal Youth. That record represented a return to the power-pop rock n’ roll stylings of yesteryear, mitigated by the experiences honed by time spent away from that musical home base. Costello revels in the density of the lyrics here, with an enthusiastic barrage of imagery that makes this song about quiet desperation and bruised dignity into a joyful effusion.
Listen: This Is Hell
I Want to Vanish
Part of an ongoing callback to collaborations of the past, Costello teams with The Brodsky Quartet again on this cut taken from 1996’s All This Useless Beauty, the last album to date on which the Attractions’ name appears on the front cover with his own. This song is a baroque lullaby contemplating the promise of oblivion as something to embrace with a sense of relief rather than dread.
Folk singer June Tabor recorded her version in a similarly spacious arrangement two years previously, this being one of many songs from Costello’s pen that he’d farmed out to other artists, only to gather them together again for his own interpretive purposes on this album. In his own voice, this song finds him at his most vulnerable, with his delivery making this seem to be not so much a performance as it is an earnest plea.
Listen: I Want to Vanish
What’s Her Name Today?
After a clear devotion to 1960s pop songwriting and even a non-ironic cover of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” as early as 1977, Costello made a professional connection with Burt Bacharach on a collaboration for 1996’s Grace of My Heart soundtrack. This led to a whole album between them in 1998’s Painted from Memory, a record that’s artistically substantial, and heartbreaking in all the right ways.
“What’s Her Name Today?” aims its ire at a callous lothario who seeks to punish his paramours to salve his own broken heart. For all of the operatic grandeur of “God Give Me Strength” from this same record, “What’s Her Name Today?” is the leaner statement that is the culmination of the best work of both Costello and Bacharach for that decade.
Listen: What’s Her Name Today?
45
Costello greets a new century with a sense of self-reflection on his then-newest single from 2002’s When I Was Cruel numerically entitled to reflect his age at the time of writing. As personal a song as he would ever write, Costello makes the subtext the text in this song in a way that is uncharacteristic, the tale of post-war life and how it shapes a boy who spins his first singles as a means to reach other worlds.
The bittersweet mixed blessings found in many of his songs are left behind in favour of some genuine moments of gratitude among the double-meanings he can’t seem to resist. This is a song about how our experiences shape us into the people we are, and the bewildering nature of time as we reach middle age, the years passing quickly and yet seeming to be like such a long time ago at the same time.
Listen: 45
Unwanted Number
Costello continued to be artistically adventurous in the 2000s and 2010s, expanding his range via collaborations including those with opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter, R&B and New Orleans funk titan Allen Toussaint, and hip-hop boundary pushers The Roots. All of those partnerships yielded excellent results for completely different reasons.
After a period of questioning the value of making new records in the age of streaming and algorithmic playlists, Costello put out the acclaimed Look Now in 2018 with this cut as a single that could fit onto any of his classic records while sounding utterly new and fresh at the same time. Like so many others in his catalogue, “Unwanted Number” is a woman’s story that’s vividly told. This time, it’s in the vein of The Supremes’ “Love Child” in more ways than one, sizzling with kitchen sink drama, but also with fond affection for the musical traditions out of which it comes.
Listen: Unwanted Number
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Runners up and bubbling under:
- “Less Than Zero”
- “I Don’t Want to Go to Chelsea”
- “This Year’s Girl”
- “Pump it Up”
- “Senior Service”
- “Clubland”
- “New Lace Sleeves”
- “Shot With His Own Gun”
- “Almost Blue”
- “Man Out of Time”
- “Beyond Belief”
- “Indoor Fireworks”
- “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror”
- “Veronica”
- “London’s Brilliant Parade”
- “Why Can’t a Man Stand Alone?”
- “Complicated Shadows”
- “Monkey to Man”
- “Wake Up Ghost”
- “Byline”
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No list of great tracks from any artist is ever definitive, especially with one who still seeks to explore new territories. Costello’s 2020 album Hey Clockface is as sonically varied and as challenging a record as any put out in a troubled era of pandemics, lockdowns, and 24-hour news cycle barrages.
There’s still a lot to sing about, for good and for ill. We’re fortunate for Elvis Costello’s presence, particularly as the absurdities of our world and in human lives remain so ripe for his unique songwriterly lens to interpret, rail against, and send-up as needed.
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Learn more about Elvis Costello and keep with the news at elviscostello.com.
For more about his approach to songwriting, check out this Elvis Costello podcast interview from Sodajerker.
