Elvis Costello is digging into the vault, and it's a treasure. He's sharing the original version of "I Turn Around," a previously unreleased gem pulled from the upcoming 49th anniversary edition of his debut, My Aim Is True.
Why 49 and not 50? Costello says a golden anniversary struck him as "preposterous" and "made [his] teeth itch." Classic. This five-CD box set stacks 104 tracks, 52 of them unreleased, a deep dive into the 1977 record that gave us "Alison" and "Watching The Detectives."
Speaking of that killer single, he already dropped a bunch of alternate versions. Now "I Turn Around" arrives raw, an early sketch of a track that would ripple across his early catalog and land properly on This Year's Model.
For anyone who fell hard for the Attractions era, this is the origin story laid bare. Scrappy, sharp, and full of that nervy energy Costello made his name on.
Forty-nine years later, the debut still hits like a debut.