12.03.2018
ELVIS COSTELLO GOES EPIC AND EUPHORIC WITH THREE-HOUR SOCAL SHOWS
Variety: Chris Willman: December 2nd 2018
Health scare, schmealth scare. Elvis Costello’s run of shows in California this week proved that he’s in more than fighting fettle, on a tour that’s being characterized most nights by set lists of peak-Springsteenian proportions, including a 2-hour-54-minute, 33-song performance at L.A.’s Wiltern Thursday night that counted as one of his more epic shows, locally or probably otherwise. “They’re only being nice to me because they think I might die,” he quipped in apparent reference to his band the night before, early into an only slightly shorter show at Anaheim’s House of Blues. After an operation that caused some canceled summer dates, Costello has insisted he isn’t “battling” anything. But any performer in his 60s faces a struggle with, if nothing else, stasis. That, he’s quite handily licked.
This sense of leaving it all out on the stage isn’t a new thing: Costello has been elongating his shows with the Imposters to the two-and-a-half-hour point and beyond for at least the past decade now. But if there is some added wind in his sails now, that and the “sold out” messages on the marquees may have something to do with the enraptured response from the fan base and critics to his October release, “Look Now,” his best-reviewed album in 20 years. At the Wiltern, during what turned out to be a 14-song encore, Costello kept holding up his index finger, in the “one more?” sign. That wasn’t to inquire if the crowd wanted one more, period, but to rhetorically inquire if they’d take one more from the new album, since he ultimately ended up playing 11 out of 12 songs from “Look Now,” for the first and probably only time on the tour. (He kept the new song to seven in Anaheim, and eight in Saturday night’s San Francisco show.) That kind of indulgence is the hallmark of a “friends and family” show, with the rest of the Wiltern audience being the beneficiary as a show that started fairly on time with no opening act managed to slightly bust curfew.