It is 1977 and a small man with a bulging bag of vexations has arrived at the door uninvited. With his strange name and Buddy Holly glasses, he seems vaguely ridiculous, and not the sort of person we’d be likely to discuss a half-century later. And yet his first LP is a masterpiece—one of a string of them that would elevate him to stratospheric prominence. With its fluttering Byrds riffs, Faustian bargains, and Oscar Wilde epigrams, My Aim Is True introduced the world to the brilliant songcraft and outsized neurosis of Elvis Costello. It begins with “Welcome to the Working Week,” a fantasy of opportunity and possession taken at a breakneck pace, an introduction to the fame he both fetishizes and fears. Over 90 seconds, Costello lays all his weapons on the table: chiming melodies played with Small Faces intensity and lashed together with Phil Spector backing vocals and the toxic hilarity of enfant-terrible Dylan.
“Now that your picture’s in the paper/Being rhythmically admired
You can have anyone you’ve ever desired
All you gotta tell me now/Is why, why, why?”
No score yet, be the first to add.
Why indeed? That’s what the new 5xCD edition of My Aim Is True—issued with light subversion on its 49th anniversary—is charged with finding out. This is a bildungsroman—the artist as a fidgety young man: trying on literal and figurative hats, channeling influences and then turning on them, his mind churning away with nervous poetry. Within the 104-song set there are demos and live shows, some new, some heard previously, some prosaic, some revelatory. This is not the first deluxe edition of My Aim Is True and I assume it won’t be the last. It’s tempting and maybe appropriate to grow cynical about the vulgar reissue-repackage cycle of rock’s major legacy acts, Costello included. And yet, the sheer welter of the new set manages to reopen the old case in fascinating ways, recasting Costello’s early years as a slow, thoughtful process of personal and aesthetic transformation that would pay off in spectacular fashion.
