07.30.2019
REVENGE AND GUILT: ELVIS COSTELLO’S MY AIM IS TRUE AT 40
Treblezine: Paul Pearson: July 24th 2019
There was no way of knowing what Elvis Costello would eventually become in the summer of 1977, when he released his debut album My Aim Is True in Britain. Even as it became, as a 1979 Creem article says, “the all-time biggest selling ‘import’ of this decade” and spurred a US release in December 1977, there was scant hint of what he’d soon inflict on the mainstream rock discourse.I certainly had no idea he’d eventually become my favorite musician of all time, nor about the several reasons why.
Not long after Elvis No. 1 collapsed for his last, Elvis Costello launched on a label, Stiff, that celebrated not just its lack of pretense, but its comical swing in the opposite direction via pub rock and early punk. My Aim Is True was recorded with, essentially, a pickup band that sounded very little like his subsequent group, The Attractions. Although it was willed into prominence by excited critics and a remarkably high-attention audience, My Aim Is True retains its scruff. Were it not for Costello’s well-built ambitions, it still could have been a single unit of mania from a brief but emboldened era in rock—like Steve Forbert, Bram Tchaikovsky, or the other hordes of undernourished power pop bands of the time.
What we didn’t know was that Costello would be prolific and directed, and that his musical IQ was so advanced, his range of reference so broad. If nothing else, the next 40 years of his career is a good argument for his being the greatest pop music fan who ever existed (a major reason for my own feelings about him). Knowing that now, it’s easy to see how My Aim Is True was a blueprint for what he’d construct afterwards.