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Elvis Costello first saw Manhattan when he was 23. This was late 1977. He and his band, the Attractions, were coming down from New Haven on their first tour of the United States when the skyscrapers came into view.
“It was really like a jolt of adrenaline — it’s such a mythic skyline,” he said. “I’d only experienced that a few other times in my career. Another was when I first saw Shanghai: You feel like you’d been shot out of a rocket to another planet.”
Now he’s in his early 60s and sitting in a booth in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, seeming quite at home. He knows a bit about the place, too. He laments that the Oak Room, the cabaret where his wife, Diana Krall, had once performed, is gone and jokingly wonders whether Dorothy Parker could have afforded one of the suites that now bear her name ($424 a night).
Mr. Costello was in New York for a few days after playing the Newport Folk Festival in July. He’ll be back for three shows this fall — one Oct. 1 at Town Hall featuring his solo DeTour show, in which he ranges around his catalog, and the others on Nov. 6 and 7 at the Beacon Theater with his band the Imposters, focusing on his 1982 album, “Imperial Bedroom.”
Elvis and New York. The two have shared a long and deepening history since that first skyline jolt. There have been famous concerts and a legendary television appearance and recordings that included a late-career masterpiece. He marked his 50th birthday with concerts at Lincoln Center; his 60th with a show at Carnegie Hall; and the release of his 2013 album with the Roots, “Wise up Ghost,” with a performance at Brooklyn Bowl. He was in the city just after Sept. 11 and remembers how kind everyone was toward one another in those days.
In all, he has made 278 appearances in New York City. I was at roughly 25 of his shows, mostly as a deeply obsessed teenager, but at quite a few as an adult, too, and now I was sitting in that booth in the Algonquin pestering him about a longstanding theory of mine: that there is something in his music — caustic, smart, fast-talking, but with moments of deep compassion and sublime beauty — that is quintessentially New York. He made a habit early in his career of being in-your-face, maybe a bit of a jerk, characteristics some might associate with New Yorkers as well.
Never mind that he grew up in Liverpool and London and has lived in Dublin and now Vancouver, British Columbia. How else but with shared attitudes could a 13-year-old from Brooklyn latch on to a singer-songwriter-performer who peppers his lyrics with Britishisms (Vauxhall Viva, tuppenny ha’penny millionaire)?
The moment you meet a lifelong idol is transporting. Dressed in a blue suit jacket with small white polka dots, relaxed and enjoying the coolness of the lobby on a scorching hot day, Mr. Costello was game to knock around my theory, if at first not entirely convinced. We were both hard-pressed to come up with other examples of non-New Yorker musicians, artists or authors who conveyed the sense of the city without trying to, or even realizing they were.
As the conversation moved along, a rich stream of New Yorkiness did indeed reveal itself, both in Mr. Costello’s music and in his experiences, whether captured in song or his autobiography, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” (Blue Rider Press, 2015; out Oct. 11 in paperback). It even reached back to before he was born.
Mr. Costello made the first comparison to someone else famous — a transplanted New Yorker and a lifelong idol of his.
“John Lennon came to live here and volunteered the idea that he saw some equivalency between New York and Liverpool,” he said. “In a way, it was a heightened version, being a port. I felt at home the first time I came here.”
He was quickly on a roll.
“I didn’t drive a car until I was 38, so I liked any town you could walk around, and I never ever felt threatened. Maybe that was naïve of me, or maybe I didn’t venture far enough afield. People were generally not bothered by you. Why would they be bothered by you? It wasn’t as if I was wearing a gold suit.”
The young Mr. Costello had a firm handle on all the music scenes in the United States when he first arrived, and hungered to experience them. But he found many had faded; the only scene that really felt alive and happening was New York.
“I went to New Orleans, and there were little bits of music here and there, but I didn’t know enough to get to the right or wrong side of town,” he said, “whereas in New York you could actually walk into places, and it was actually happening.”
This was the age of Blondie and Talking Heads, bands he would get to know and with whom he would share bills. He played with Richard Hell and the Voidoids at CBGB and remembers wandering around Alphabet City, carrying a 1961 Fender Stratocaster he’d just bought on West 48th Street, looking for Mr. Hell’s apartment.
On the last day of that tour, Mr. Costello and the Attractions went to 30 Rockefeller Plaza to appear on “Saturday Night Live,” famously cutting off one song (“Less Than Zero”) to blast into another (“Radio Radio”). The change apparently messed up the show’s timing, and legend has it that Mr. Costello was told he’d never work in television again. Not quite. He made it back to “S.N.L.” for the show’s 25th and 40th anniversaries, at one point reprising the infamous song-switch with the Beastie Boys.
He toured furiously in the late ’70s and early ’80s, appearing at, among other places, the Bottom Line, Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Radio City Music Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Pier 84 on the Hudson River and, perhaps most often, the Palladium on 14th Street, which he called “our regular address in those days.”
It was there during an epic show on New Year’s Eve 1981-82 that he debuted many songs on “Imperial Bedroom,” his lavish, at times abstract but often soaring album that would be released the following summer, and which will be the focus of this November’s shows.
I was up — way, way up — in the balcony that night. I will never forget the thrill of the Attractions’ drummer, Pete Thomas, opening the show with the machine-gun intro of “Lipstick Vogue” in complete darkness. The band played for nearly three hours. Six months later, I bought “Imperial Bedroom” the day it came out at Record Factory on West Eighth Street in Manhattan (it took an extra day or two for records to reach Brooklyn). Unable to stand the suspense, I opened the sleeve to stare at the disc while riding on the subway, as if the melodies would somehow reveal themselves to my eyes.
Mr. Costello, amused if mildly alarmed by my subway story, calls “Imperial Bedroom” the last “collaborative” record he made with the Attractions; from then on, either he or a producer called the shots. And indeed, he and the band slowed their frantic pace in the mid-’80s. This allowed for some real vacations and one memorable scene in “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” in which he and his father, Ross MacManus, himself a singer and trumpet player, took a long walk around Manhattan. You can feel the city coming into sharper focus.
“It was the first holiday we had taken together since I was 7,” he wrote. “We walked all over Manhattan during those five days, from Park Avenue to Hell’s Kitchen, where my papa had lodged in the 1920s.” That night, he and his dad went to see Peggy Lee in Chelsea.
“My papa” was his grandfather, Pat MacManus, who makes a brief appearance on Mr. Costello’s 1986 album “King of America” — Mr. Costello sings how “my grandfather before me walked the streets of New York.”
Pat MacManus was a trumpet player aboard trans-Atlantic ocean liners. He used to regale his family with tales of rough New York. Not too long ago, after his father died, Mr. Costello examined an old photo album kept by his grandfather.
“It was a tiny little photo album with tiny little pictures,” said Mr. Costello, who was born Declan MacManus. “I had them scanned and blew them up, and they were a travelogue of New York. Pictures of Times Square — just over here — a guy crossing the road, cars going by. He just snapped it. And there are pictures of him lying in the grass in Central Park. And in Coney Island.”
Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Costello came to New York almost as regularly as his grandfather before him, often stopping to perform on “Late Show With David Letterman” at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway. But when, in 2001, he came to record horns for “When I Was Cruel,” a guitar-driven return to his youthful, aggressive past, he landed in a different city. It was mid-September: New York was still stunned by Sept. 11. “I flew in over the city and was here to experience something of that odd mood — nobody was angry with anybody, and there was just this heaviness of it all.”
In late 2002, he began to compose a ballad called “I’m in the Mood Again.” Now New York was more than just a single line; it was the whole song.
Hail to the taxis
They go where I go
Farewell the newspapers that know more than I know
Flung under a streetlamp still burning at dawn
I’m in the mood again
The song closes “North,” which came out in 2003, and which to me is Mr. Costello’s New York Album. He creased his forehead and nodded. “Yeah, I suppose it is.”
And it’s not just that song. Spare and sung in a register set so deliberately low that it forces Mr. Costello to nearly speak the lines, “North” paints images in my mind of autumnal city streets, mottled leaves on the pavement, lit only by the amber windows of a corner bar with an empty stool or two.
It was recorded at Avatar Studios on West 53rd Street and chronicles the dissolution of Mr. Costello’s second marriage (to the former Pogues member Cait O’Riordan), and the beginning of his romance with Ms. Krall — we imagine she’s the “marvelous girl covered up in my coat” in the song “Still.” The somber tone of much of the album contrasts with what sounds like a pretty joyful — and glitteringly Manhattan — experience making it.
“We were living in this kind of Fred-and-Ginger fantasy in the Carlyle Hotel,” he said of himself and Ms. Krall, by now married. “My wife and I were living in the most fantastic suite.”
Mr. Costello becomes somber himself when he discusses the current state of the music industry, and how he’s gotten off “the machine” of recording an album every year or two followed by tours. Now he focuses on shows, though he’s still prolific — he is currently writing songs for a musical of the 1957 Elia Kazan film, “A Face in the Crowd.”
Now he’s turning his attention to the shows focused on “Imperial Bedroom.” At the time, it was a departure: He and the Attractions stretched out in all directions, adding layers of instrumentation and even orchestral parts. Geoff Emerick, who had engineered numerous Beatles recordings, helped Mr. Costello take the songs apart in the studio and put them back together; a few have never been played live.
The Imposters are two-thirds of the Attractions — Mr. Thomas and the keyboardist Steve Nieve — and Davey Faragher, who replaced Bruce Thomas (no relation to Pete) on bass. Yet for all intents and purposes, they are a different band — more groove-based and, like all of us, a bit older. Mr. Costello says the record won’t be played in order, but beyond that he is still working out what the audience will hear.
“Do we return it to the raw version of the song, where we just blasted through it for the first time?” he asked. “Do we want the refinement of the record arrangement? Do we want to rewrite? What else did I leave out of the songs that I maybe need to say now?”
He finished a cappuccino. “Like that — we will take this music and just make it happen.”
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