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In just over two months, Elvis Costello will release North, his 24th album in 26 years.
That's right — two dozen albums since he blazed onto the scene, hanging tightly onto the coattails of the British new wave and punk invasion with his brilliant debut album, 1977's My Aim Is True.
But fans who show up at Bluesfest tonight with the hopes of hearing him showcase his new songs may be disappointed. North, written at the end of last year and recorded late this past spring, is, by all accounts, a richly textured album that features classical chamber ensemble the Brodsky Quartet, as well as a 34-piece orchestra (Costello conducted) and a lot of ballads on solo piano. Costello plays guitar on only one of the album's songs, and fewer than a dozen bars at that. Hardly the upbeat stuff of Pump It Up or Watching the Detectives.
More likely, Costello's headline show tonight will feature, along with his older hits, songs from last year's When I Was Cruel release, his first collection of new material in six years.
"(North) begins with a song called 'You Left Me In The Dark' and ends with a track called 'I'm In The Mood Again,'" Costello said recently of his yet-to-be-released album. "You have to listen to what goes on in between to find out why.
"(It) will be something quite different."
Well, that almost goes without saying when it comes to Costello. The 48-year-old musician, almost universally hailed by critics as one of the smartest, most honest and creative songwriters around, has made a career of mixing it up. His musical oeuvre is a Pandora's Box of genres based largely on the themes of women, guilt and revenge. With love as a metaphor for dissatisfaction and anger, soul, punk, ska, pop, reggae, classical and country have all found niches in his library. His current tour, which began Wednesday in Toronto, finds him sandwiching arena gigs between appearances at folk, blues and jazz festivals.
One result of this cornucopia is that Costello has never quite fit in anywhere. Still, when you consider a body of work that includes such brilliant songs as "Alison," "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding," "Shipbuilding," "Man Out Of Time," "Veronica" and "Everyday I Write the Book," it's somewhat surprising to discover that, in terms of record sales, he never really made it that big.
Born in London in 1954, Declan Patrick MacManus arrived — after borrowing Elvis Presley's first name and his mother's maiden name — in North America in late 1977, six months after My Aim Is True was released in Britain.
With his clumsy-looking glasses, second-hand jacket and narrow tie, he had something of the look — a kind of Buddy Holly-turned-punk image — that fit in with the punks and new wavers who were on the same ship to America — the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads. But Costello was never one with that crowd. Sure, he shared the Clash's clever cynicism and the Sex Pistols' honesty (or was it the other way around?), but Costello was never that angry, not quite so political, and certainly nowhere near as nihilistic.
In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, one that described him as "a sweet Bruce Springsteen," it was said of Costello that "in the prevailing British musical climate, where the punk phenomenon seemingly spawns new heroes overnight, Costello's success has been all the more remarkable because his music — smart, snappy, good-time rock songs — places him well beyond the conventions of punk."
But that's what Costello was: a pub rocker in a punk boat. In a 1999 article in Salon magazine, Bill Wyman claimed that Costello had almost everything that a stardom-bound rocker could want: "head-snapping songwriting skills, a rabidly supportive critical corner, a clue to the pop movement, ambition of a heroic size and the necessary accompanying ruthlessness besides."
Unfortunately, he added, it all came together at a time when audiences stopped financially rewarding music's most talented stars. Costello's records never sold that well; 1989's Veronica, co-written with Paul McCartney, was his most successful single, peaking only as high as No. 19 on North America's charts.
But if the commercial successes that seemed his due have eluded him, Costello has still produced a varied and interesting catalogue. He's collaborated with such diverse talents as Burt Bacharach, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and Lucinda Williams. His 1993 album, The Juliet Letters, recorded with the Brodsky Quartet, wavered somewhere between baroque pop and chamber music, not all that dissimilar to his For The Stars effort with Anne Sofie von Otter two years ago, which produced a curious hybrid of classical and rock.
And some of his old albums are being reissued, supplemented by a disc of bonus material related to the sessions, including This Year's Model (1978), Brutal Youth (1994) and Spike (1989). "Part of the possibility of the process of reissuing them is that people may hear them fresh," Costello told the Montreal Gazette. "Certain fashions of the time may prejudice people's ears to a record on its first release. A little down the road, the intentions become a little clearer on review — maybe not to me, but to the listener. I always knew what I was doing."
There's little doubt about that. Last March, fresh on the news that he and Canadian jazz chanteuse Diana Krall are to wed (third time lucky for Elvis?), Costello, along with the Clash and the Police, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Six weeks ago, he received a Founder's Award for songwriting from performance rights organization ASCAP, joining such previous recipients as Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits and Quincy Jones.
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