Elvis Costello

Also known as Declan MacManus, Declan Patrick MacManus

English singer-songwriter (born 1954)

OverviewAI-generated

Elvis Costello is a male singer-songwriter from the United Kingdom. His musical career began in 1970. He is associated with genres including new wave, rock, art rock, pop, and pop rock. Costello has been recognized in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame collection.

His discography includes works such as *2-12-years*, *Detour Live at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall*, *Every Night Is Saturday Night*, *Música infiel y tinta invisible*, and *Elvis Costello - The Juliet Letters*. He has authored 25 works according to Open Library records. On Last.fm, his music has accumulated 26,819,270 plays from 1,334,901 listeners.

Synthesized by Vinony from 22 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, Last.fm, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works: 25

Top works

2-12-years
Detour Live at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
Every Night Is Saturday Night
Música infiel y tinta invisible
Elvis Costello - The Juliet Letters

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United Kingdom
Active from: 1954-08-25

art rockbritishnew wavepoppop rockpower pop

Discography

Official site Discogs Stream

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 1,334,901
Total plays: 26,819,270

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data
· 2010 · cited 30,945x
DrugBank 5.0: a major update to the DrugBank database for 2018
· 2017 · cited 7,555x
Integrative analysis of 111 reference human epigenomes
· 2015 · cited 6,295x
The Immune Landscape of Cancer
· 2018 · cited 4,773x
Delivery mode shapes the acquisition and structure of the initial microbiota across multiple body habitats in newborns
· 2010 · cited 4,036x

via Crossref · CC0

Music

Open in Spotify

Quotes

“My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant, someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there's maybe more to it all than the mere hum-drum quality of existence.”
“I can't actually play any instrument properly. I can't read music. And here's the New York Times calling me the new George Gershwin. It was so ridiculous, really embarrassing. It was embarrassing to watch these people fall into the trap of their own critical conceits.”
“Then I became an altar boy because of the solemn face, but I got thrown out at fourteen for laughing, because the priest used to mumble everything except the church plate takings.”
“When the media attention switches away from this story onto the next thing that happens in the world, the circumstances will still be there.”
“The people with the most resources are the federal government. If you can invade a country halfway across the world in a matter of days, you can surely come to the aid of your own citizens in a shorter order of time.”
“Obviously the people that I admired, like the Beatles, were really into rock'n'roll, but it was already a little past rock'n'roll when I started listening and making my own choices about music. I've been lucky to listen to lots of different types of music.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Declan Patrick MacManus (born 25 August 1954), known professionally as Elvis Costello, is an English singer, songwriter, record producer, author and television host. According to Rolling Stone, Costello "reinvigorated the literate, lyrical traditions of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison with the raw energy and sass that were principal ethics of punk", noting the "construction of his songs, which set densely layered wordplay in an ever-expanding repertoire of styles". He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Grammy Awards and two Ivor Novello Awards, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003 and into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016.

Born into a musical family, Costello was raised with knowledge and appreciation of a wide range of musical styles and an insider's view of the music business. His professional career as a musician coincided with the rise of punk rock in England. The primitivism brought into fashion by punk led Costello to disguise his musical knowledge at the beginning of his career, but his stylistic range has come to encompass R&B, country, jazz, baroque pop, Tin Pan Alley and classical music. His debut album, My Aim Is True (1977), produced no hit singles but contains some of his best-known songs, including the ballad "Alison". Costello's next two albums, This Year's Model (1978) and Armed Forces (1979), helped define the new wave genre. From late 1977 until early 1980, all of his singles reached the UK Top 30, including his biggest hit "Oliver's Army" (1979). He has had more modest commercial success in the US, but has earned much critical praise. From 1977 until the early 2000s, Costello's albums regularly ranked high on The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll, with This Year's Model and Imperial Bedroom (1982) voted the best album of their respective years. His biggest US hit single, "Veronica" (1989), reached number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Elvis Costello” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.