Today’s selection marks the end of the line for Elvis Costello’s studio album releases, but despite everybody’s assumptions yesterday, I’m not ready to shut down the Costello Weekends just yet.

Over the next couple of weeks I will feature some of the many B-sides and alternate tracks that Costello has released over the years. Each of the CD reissues of his albums contains a treasure trove of material — songs that wound up as other songs in vastly different forms, covers, discarded tracks that are better than the album’s they were cut from, all sort of marvelous odds and ends.

I’ll spend two weeks on those before retiring old Elvis and giving somebody else a shot.

Continue reading →