Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True Boxed Set Revisits the Songs That Came Before the Debut

The 49th anniversary edition of My Aim Is True runs to 104 tracks, and its most useful material sits behind the album rather than on it. The set gathers a run of pre-debut recordings that reach from the mournful domestic balladry of “Stranger in the House” to country and roots inflections Costello would not pursue in public for years. Heard together, they undercut the idea that the debut arrived fully formed out of nowhere.

Discussing the record, Costello placed “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” on a train out of Runcorn Station, a fifteen minute ride toward Liverpool Lime Street, on his way to visit his mother. The song came to him close to complete, and he still sounds slightly suspicious of it. The line about not getting any older is an odd thing for a man in his early twenties to have written, and he says so. He now reads it as a relative of Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” a lament for a teenage place you cannot go back to.

What gives that admission weight is the timing. Costello was already a husband and a father, holding down what he describes as a responsible job, and still working out his feelings about the adult world he had entered. The famous couplet about being disgusted and trying to be amused reads, on his account, less as a jab at anyone than as a way of getting disappointed first. The same guardedness runs through “Alison,” which is a love song that keeps its distance, and through “Stranger in the House.”

The reissue is worth the space because it lets you hear the range before there was a settled name for any of it, including the stage name itself.