Release of The Delivery Man and Il Sogno
Rolling Stone, 2004-09-14
- David Fricke

Elvis Costello
The Delivery Man
Il Sogno
September 21st
The New Wave icon, now fifty, is also putting out two records on the same day. Il Sogno is Costello's first full-scale orchestral composition. He originally wrote it as a ballet score, commissioned by an Italian dance company, but it was reconfigured for this recording by the London Symphony Orchestra. The Delivery Man is tougher and bluesier: a Southern-gothic song cycle that Costello cut over a single weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, with his band the Imposters. "The methodology is different," Costello says of the two albums, "but they come out of the same head." DAVID FRICKE