Elvis Costello makes his first appearance on this list at #11, but trust me, it won’t be his last. The 80s proved to be the man’s strongest decade by far.

Get Happy!!, Costello’s fourth album, typified the sort of stylistic shifts he had already made on his early records and continues to make to this day. Having explored punk and new wave (filtered, as always, through his own cerebral sensibility) on This Year’s Model and Armed Forces, he turned his attention to R&B.

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