Elvis Costello on the Birth of 'My Aim Is True'

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Brian Hiatt (1:00)

I'm Brian Hiatt. Welcome to Rolling Stone Music Now.

I'm so happy to say my guest today is a musical giant, a legend, Elvis Costello. He joins me to talk about My Aim Is True, 49th anniversary edition. A huge, incredibly impressive box set built around his 1977 debut album. He cut the original album in about 24 hours of studio time while he was working a day job as a computer operator. His backing band was Clover, which was a Bay Area group that Huey Lewis came out of. But Huey wasn't around for the recording. The new box set is five CDs with 104 tracks, and half of them are totally unreleased. I think the big revelation is a disc called The Blueprint, which is recordings from 1975 and 1976 before anyone knew who Elvis Costello was, and before he even had that name. And it really shows that a lot of the directions that Elvis went in later were already present in his music. He just chose to focus on one aspect early on. We go deep into the making of the album and the box set and the interview, and Elvis also reveals for the first time that he was pretty close to being Stephen Colbert's bandleader with The Impostors. Here's my interview with Elvis Costello.

There is an awful lot of stuff on this amazing box set. Some things that really upturn perhaps some of our perceptions about your past. But I want to start with something we've always known about. I used to be disgusted. Now I try to be amused, which was a pretty emblematic line to have on your very first album.

SPEAKER_4 (2:47)

I try to be amused. But now the wings are all rusted.

Brian Hiatt (2:56)

What do you remember about writing that line and about writing that particular song?

Elvis Costello (3:02)

I know I began writing at Leaving Runcorn Station 15-minute ride from Liverpool Lime Street. I was on my way to visit my mother. The song came into my head. Now, I still to this day cannot quite understand what all of it means, except that it felt emotional to say all of these things. On the one hand, it reads, when I read it now, particularly hearing the other version of the song, which has more or less the same words, but a slightly different rhythm, it made me focus on what I was actually singing.

It was obviously over years, you come to feel as if you know everything you could possibly know about a song you must have sung hundreds of times. But it was always an odd one to have written at 22

The idea of mortality in the lyric.

Maybe some young songwriters today would confirm for me that these thoughts do come in young people's minds. I know, I hear it in other, in younger writers work, you know, a great sense of dread. And it doesn't have to be about any one particular thing. It could be what's happening in the world, whether the sky is on fire or whether, you know, you lost someone's love or you lost someone's trust. A lot of the songs in My Aim Is True box, you know, the whole box of tricks of all these tellings of this tale. I noticed and I commented on this in the liner that there was quite a lot of despondency in the lyrics. And it was my good fortune that I sort of recognized the need to speak up for myself. And I happened to catch the... I was for once in tune with the way the things were flowing. But even then, I had this great American band who were very much technically at odds with... You know, they have much more capability on their instruments, certainly the guitar player, than anybody playing in London that I knew personally. There were obviously lots of great guitar players, but they weren't in the current bands. Not that could play like John. So, I mean, that was a tremendous thing to be given by Sheer Chance. As coming to this song, what I say is that it came into my mind, fully formed, and you don't argue with that, including you don't always interrogate yourself. What exactly does this mean, the angels? I won't get any older. What I've come around to thinking is it was kind of a version of Neil Young's Sugar Mountain. Do you know that song? Where he's lamenting that he won't be able to go back to this teenage place where they had friends and you're out, and you're venturing out into the big bad adult world. Well, that's a feeling I was still coming to terms with. Despite the fact I was 21 and a father and a husband, and I was working in a responsible job, I wasn't able to make my living from music, right up until this album was released. So I had a lot of contradictions between feeling kind of at the edge or outside of everything that was supposedly happening in that moment. And it really wasn't even quite in full force when I wrote these songs, obviously, that was more around the time that I actually were released on record.