Why Wait?
“Making my first record seemed like the beginning of something that I’d imagined for a long time," Costello writes in the liner notes, 'before I had any sense of a potential audience"
Elvis Costello‘s debut LP My Aim Is True will turn 50 next year, but it’s such a landmark event that he’s not waiting to celebrate. He’s instead dropping a massive, five-disc box set of music from this era on Oct. 2 that features 104 tracks in total, 52 of them previously unreleased. The package is called My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition), and he’s shared four early renditions of “Watching the Detectives” today to give fans a little taste of what’s to come when the packages hit record stores shelves.
“When first proposed, I thought the whole idea of celebrating a 50th Anniversary of My Aim Is True was preposterous,” Costello writes in the liner notes. “It made my teeth itch. It couldn’t just be set up like a venerable object in a glass case.”
The first disc is a remastered version of the original album that fuses together the track listings from the U.K. and U.S. releases. “Last night I listened to this wonderfully wonky record in its entirety for the first time in about 45 years,” My Aim Is True producer Nick Lowe writes in the notes. “[It was a] priceless opportunity to observe at close range the extraordinary work of one of the foremost composers of popular song of this or any other era.”
