Elvis Costello

The singer-songwriter on mortality, talking shop with Bruce Springsteen, and his great new album

- Brian Hiatt

Elvis costello is feeling just fine, thank you very much. Reports of a “battle with cancer” were wildly exaggerated, he says — earlier this year, doctors found an isolated malignancy that they removed without complications. He got the news three-quarters of the way into the recording of Look Now, his first album in five years, and, if anything, he just threw himself harder into the process. The album turned out to be his best-received work of this century, combining immaculate, expansively arranged pop compositions (Burt Bacharach and Carole King were collaborators) with the elegant savagery of his band, the Imposters — which is, of course, his original crew, the Attractions, with a new bass player, Davey Faragher. “This is a different group than the group I started out with,” Costello says. “We have strengths in different areas than that first group, because, obviously, the three of us who have played together for 40 years should’ve learned something, you know?”

At a listening party, someone asked what your twentysomething self would think of the new album. You got so annoyed that your old self actually seemed to come out.

Well, that old self hasn’t gone away! It’s like, be careful what you wish for there, sunshine. That was a stupid question! You would not walk up to a judge and say, “When you read a book about the law when you were 10, what would you think if you saw that stupid wig on your head?” Only because there is an eternal-youth thesis about rock & roll, which is nonsense, obviously, is why you would ask that. I don’t know many people who question themselves in that way. And the ones who do tend to refer to themselves in the third person.

The offending implication was that you had your head straighter as a kid, right?