Elvis Costello – This Year's Model

Elvis Costello is back with his 31st (or so) studio album. But don’t look for any consolation from him.

- By David Yaffe

I KNOW WHERE THE BODIES are buried and the choices that I can’t or won’t take,” Elvis Costello tells me with utter conviction and without going into the specifics. He’s sitting under a photograph of a young Aretha Franklin in mid-song and cradling what appears to be a Fender bass guitar, which he seems to be on the verge of playing but never does. He’s outside Vancouver, where he lives with his wife, the jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, and their two 13-year-old sons, and I’m on my front porch in Syracuse talking to him through my computer screen. We are both wearing black sweaters and specs. Sometimes I wear a hat, as he does. Maybe I’d be dressed this way if I had never heard Costello, but this person was still the same character who grabbed hold of me at age 14 and never let go.

For millions of spectacle wearers like me who came of age in the 1980s, if you put on an Elvis Costello record, it all comes rushing back: your adolescent bile and angst, the pique of every slight, your ex-friends and ex-lovers. It’s an awkward thing to try to thank him for, so I don’t. He was born Declan MacManus in London in 1954 and, thanks to his bandleader father, had access to the latest records: Joni Mitchell’s Song to a Seagull, Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, Charles Mingus’s Oh Yeah, along with Marvin and Tammi, Lou Rawls, Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, and on and on.