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By now, Elvis Costello's career has lasted almost as long as the original Elvis' — about 23 years. That's roughly the same amount of time that separates the King of Rock 'n' Roll's 1954 sessions at Sun Studios in Memphis and the release, in 1977, of My Aim Is True, Costello's debut. It's enough time to change the world, create a myth and become the punchline to a million bad jokes.
Instead, Costello — also known by his comparatively unglamorous birth name, Declan MacManus — did what a lot of rock stars never manage to do. He blasted through the world/myth/joke cycle within a few short years and kept going. A former computer programmer who once said all his songs were about guilt and revenge, Costello came on like a motor-mouthed Shakespeare crammed inside Buddy Holly's body. He wrote tight three-minute pop songs dense with double meanings and inverted cliches, tunes that refracted a record nerd's affection for Stax/Volt soul or mid-'60s Rolling Stones or ABBA through the nervous prism of punk rock. It wasn't punk, but punk's influence gave Costello's songs an air of crackling danger, of scary stalker's obsession.
By 1984, when he released the sadly apt Goodbye Cruel World, Costello was done with the major thrust of his career. He had one more great album to make, King of America (1986), for which he summoned members of Presley's TCB band to back him up. It was an effort to find a new kind of identity, but, as the years have gone by, Costello has become less rock star than what always really lurked underneath: the professional tunesmith. It's not sexy, because you're not of the moment. You're beyond it.
"Will you still love a man out of time?" Costello beseeched, on only his second song during a recent concert at the Tabernacle, where pianist Steve Nieve (an original member of Costello's rowdy and versatile '70s band the Attractions) joined him. The format was semi-acoustic in the sit-down style of shows such as VH1's Storytellers and PBS' Sessions at West 54th, where the artist roams his catalog for a fresh nuance, often using lower key instrumentation or new arrangements to let the words and melodies breathe differently.
The evening could have been more of a treat. There was something out of place in herding together on the venue's sticky main floor, with a crowd that was talky enough for Chastain Park Amphitheatre. And while he generously performed for 2½ hours, Costello milked applause through multiple encores that could as easily have been accommodated in the regular set. That seemed too needy, as though he really did have to play a lot of older hits ("Alison" or "The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes," which first established him for a U.S. audience) because no one's been paying him enough attention lately.
Pare that away, though, and it was gratifying to hear how Costello continues to remake himself. It's not enough to want to be Cole Porter, you see. You've also got to be your own Sinatra. Or Pavarotti. Costello has been steadfastly refashioning himself as a crooner in recent years, a heroic task considering the limits of his voice. But with his most recent material, a collection of songs written with Burt Bacharach (and released on the album Painted From Memory), Costello's gambits are beginning to pay off. You could hear it in the heartbreaking turns of phrase in "Almost Blue," an older song written for jazz musician Chet Baker (whose desiccated rasp finally rendered it not so much an exquisite love song as a coroner's report). And in the dramatic pauses and stresses of "I Want You" (from 1986's Blood & Chocolate), which resurrects the stalker/ obsessive as a breathy masochist for whom the title phrase conceals boundless pain and fascination. Costello brings some of that to the newer songs, but his bitterness has begun to yield to grace.
A Bacharach-Costello song such as "God Give Me Strength" is, in essence, sad. But sad in an epic way, like opera sung by a man who is willing to sink with his heart, if he must, because really there's no other choice.
And in sinking, he soars.
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