Elvis Costello’s Debut Album, ‘My Aim is True,’ Gets Expanded 5-CD Set

The cover of Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True “49th Anniversary Edition.”

Elvis Costello’s debut album, My Aim Is True, is receiving an expanded “49th Anniversary Edition,” a 5-CD box set telling the story of how Declan MacManus became Elvis Costello – and how his first LP, recorded in a small London studio, was the first public step in a singular and enduring career. The deluxe collection, coming September 25, 2026, via UMe, is available to order in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here (where it arrives on Oct. 2). A new remaster of the original album will also be released on 180-gram vinyl and CD in the U.S. here, in Canada here and the U.K. here.

From the August 4 announcement: Across 104 tracks, demos, masters, outtakes, live performances, interviews, and other rare recordings (52 of them previously unreleased), plus a 2026 remaster of the original album from the original analog tapes (the vinyl original album is AAA all analog), the collection traces Costello’s transformation from a young computer operator through his brief attempts to break into the London “singer-songwriter” scene while recording songs in his bedroom, dreaming of them being sung by other artists; to eventually recording three failed singles for Stiff Records—”Less Than Zero,” “Alison,” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” with members of the American band Clover—before forming the Attractions and having a U.K. hit single with “Watching the Detectives” on which only Costello and Steve Nieve appeared.

Each of its five discs—My Aim Is True, The Blue Print, The Stranger In The House, Becoming The Attractions and Covered In Clover (the only live performance of Costello and Clover)—is accompanied by extensive new writing from Costello, alongside rare and unseen photographs, handwritten lyrics from his notebooks and diary entries from 1976, and lists of songs he was performing solo, as then he was being rejected by every publisher and A&R exec in London before Stiff Records heard something in his songs. The collection was produced by Costello and Steve Berkowitz.

My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition) presents the album as the beginning of a still-unfolding story. Its first disc pairs the original album as a hybrid of the original U.K. and U.S. track listings. Recorded with producer Nick Lowe and the Marin County band Clover during four six-hour sessions at Pathway Studios, the album emerged with little budget, limited overdubbing and Costello singing live on nearly every track.

“Last night I listened to this wonderfully wonky record in its entirety for the first time in about 45 years,” Lowe writes in a new note for the set, recalling Pathway’s unforgettably heady atmosphere of “cigarettes, ill-laundered clothes, exposed electrical units, and urinal disinfectant.” He adds that making the album gave him “the priceless opportunity to observe at close range the extraordinary work of one of the foremost composers of popular song of this or any other era.”

Handwritten lyric scans included with Costello’s new essay.

In his own accompanying essay, Costello remembers slipping away from his day job at Elizabeth Arden under the pretense of illness to deliver an unsolicited demo to the newly opened Stiff Records, then encountering Lowe outside the nearby Underground station. Within weeks, Lowe was producing his first session. Soon afterward, Stiff founders Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson supplied a new name and a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses, completing what Costello calls “a Superman costume in reverse.”

The second disc, The Blue Print, gathers 17 recordings from 1975 and 1976, including 13 previously unreleased. The songs span bedroom tapes, early Pathway recordings and 13 performances from a 1976 session at the Hope & Anchor Studio. Also included is a recording preserved by Costello’s ‘70s contemporary Charlie Dore, who just recently discovered a reel she taped of Costello trying out songs during a London afternoon in 1976. Together, these recordings reveal ideas that would resurface throughout his work: a lyrical couplet and image which eventually found their way into “Accidents Will Happen,” “Watch Your Step,” “King Horse” and “Just a Memory,” while “Radio Soul” – a song in praise of the power of broadcasting – later became a sarcastic song about the BBC called “Radio Radio.” “The more I’ve delved into these notebooks, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that these handwritten notes might actually be ‘The Blue Print’ for a lot of the work I did over the next five or six years,” Costello writes.

The Stranger In The House contains 28 demos, outtakes and early band recordings, 15 of which have never been released, including every surviving outtake and demo from My Aim Is True. Costello’s early, rather unfashionable fascination with country music can be heard here, with the songs he imagined pitching as a backroom writer. The disc reaches back to Flip City, the band Costello describes as “Pre-Professional:” “In the so-called Pub Rock scene, we barely qualified as also-rans. We were ready and we were willing, but the bookings were few and our progress was slow.” It also includes more of Dore’s tapes, and follows the evolution of songs including “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and “Living in Paradise” through the session that produced “Watching the Detectives.”

Costello’s 72-page liners include commentary and recollections from Nick Lowe and Columbia Records’ Gregg Geller—who signed Costello to the label in the U.S. after seeing him perform outside the CBS Records senior management conference in London earlier that year—while Nieve recalls his first ever recording session, providing the keyboards parts on “Watching the Detectives,” and Pete Thomas tells the story of befriending Clover when he was working in California in 1975, introducing them to Riviera in San Francisco and then playing drums with Clover in the same city on their only live performance with Costello of My Aim Is True in 2007.

The fourth disc, Becoming The Attractions, opens with a solo performance of “Alison,” from Costello’s U.K. television debut to his first live appearances under his new name to the sudden velocity of America in late 1977 and 1978. Its 25 tracks, 12 previously unreleased, include live recordings, broadcasts and a Nashville Room soundcheck from the summer of 1977, when Costello and the newly formed Attractions used a four-Sunday residency to sharpen their increasingly fast and ferocious set.

Music journalist, television producer and author Bill Flanagan chronicles Costello’s arrival in America, where listeners encountered a musical hybrid that resisted easy classification: country-rock, soul, reggae and terse British pop delivered by a singer who appeared at once confrontational and deeply romantic. Further recollections from Warren Zanes, Rosanne Cash, Peter Wolf (then of the J. Geils Band), and Jim James of My Morning Jacket (a bandmate in the “New Basement Tapes” studio collective) accompany Costello’s account of that first American trip – from seeing Iggy Pop in San Francisco and meeting Tom Waits in Los Angeles to replacing the Sex Pistols on Saturday Night Live and infamously abandoning “Less Than Zero” for “Radio Radio.”

The collection closes with Covered In Clover, an entirely unreleased recording of Costello’s 2007 reunion with Clover at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Performing My Aim Is True in its original U.K. sequence before concluding with “Watching The Detectives,” Costello and the musicians return to the songs they had recorded together three decades earlier, when he was 22 years old and had scarcely worked with players of their caliber.

Surprisingly, though “Allison” is long considered one of Costello’s signature songs, the single never charted on the U.S. Hot 100, despite Columbia’s best efforts and great airplay at album radio. Details on the label’s extensive marketing blitz for the original U.S. album release back in ’77 are available in our exclusive interview here.

Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True “49th Anniversary Edition” pack shot.

My Aim is True (49th Anniversary Edition) Box Set – Track List
** Denotes previously unreleased

CD1: My Aim Is True
1. Welcome To The Working Week – 2026 Remaster
2. Miracle Man – 2026 Remaster
3. No Dancing – 2026 Remaster
4. Blame It On Cain – 2026 Remaster
5. Alison – 2026 Remaster
6. Sneaky Feelings – 2026 Remaster
7. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – 2026 Remaster
8. Less Than Zero – 2026 Remaster
9. Mystery Dance – 2026 Remaster
10. Pay It Back – 2026 Remaster
11. I’m Not Angry – 2026 Remaster
12. Waiting For The End Of The World – 2026 Remaster
13. Watching The Detectives – Single Version

CD2: The Blue Print
1. I Turn Around – Hope & Anchor Studio**
2. Losing You – Hope & Anchor Studio**
3. Leverman – Hope & Anchor Studio**
4. Citizen Junction – Hope & Anchor Studio**
5. I Hear A Melody – Pathway Studios
6. Poison Moon – Bedroom Recording
7. Wave A White Flag – Bedroom Recording
8. Mercury Wings – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
9. Jump Up – Hope & Anchor Studio**
10. No Star – Hope & Anchor Studio**
11. Walk On – Hope & Anchor Studio**
12. Radio Soul – Hope & Anchor Studio**
13. Clean Money – Hope & Anchor Studio**
14. Don’t Put A Levy On My Love – Hope & Anchor Studio**
15. Play It Safe – Hope & Anchor Studio**
16. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) – Hope & Anchor Studio**
17. I Can’t Turn It Off – Hope & Anchor Studio

CD3: The Stranger In The House
1. Radio Sweetheart – My Aim Is True Outtake
2. Cheap Reward – Bedroom Recording
3. Mystery Dance – Bedroom Recording
4. Stranger In The House – My Aim Is True Outtake
5. Running Out Of Angels – Hope & Anchor Studio**
6. Just Like A Jukebox – Hope & Anchor Studio**
7. I Don’t Want To Go Home – Pathway Studios
8. Blame It On Cain – Bedroom Recording
9. Blue Minute – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
10. Pay It Back – Bedroom Recording **
11. Exiles Road – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
12. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
13. Sweet Revival – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
14. Pay It Back – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
15. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
16. Living In Paradise – Hope & Anchor Studio**
17. Welcome To The Working Week – Pathway Studios
18. Miracle Man – Bedroom Recording**
19. Miracle Man – Pathway Studios
20. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
21. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – Pathway Studios
22. Waiting For The End Of The World – Pathway Studios
23. Living In Paradise – My Aim Is True Outtake
24. Call On Me – Pathway Studios
25. Watching The Detectives – Pathway Studios Trio Version**
26. No Action – Pathway Studios Trio Version
27. Poison Moon – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
28. Stranger In The House – Ms. Dore’s Tape**

CD4: Becoming The Attractions
1. Alison – What’s On Granada Reports
2. Introduction By Dave Robinson – Live, The Nashville Room
3. Mystery Dance – Live, The Nashville Room
4. Pay It Back – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
5. Radio Sweetheart – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
6. Sneaky Feelings – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
7. Crawling To The U.S.A. – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
8. Lip Service – Pathway Studios**
9. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes- with Introduction Top Of The Pops**
10. Interview No. 1 – Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson
11. Watching The Detectives – Good Afternoon Broadcast**
12. Interview No. 2 – Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson
13. Hoover Factory – Good Afternoon Rehearsal**
14. I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself – Live Stiffs, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
15. Whole Wide World – Live Stiffs, University Of Leicester, Leicester, U.K.**
16. KSAN Intro – Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA
17. Pump It Up – Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA**
18. Lip Service – Unknown Field Recording**
19. Mystery Dance – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
20. Blame It On Cain – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
21. Less Than Zero (Dallas Version) – Warner Theater, Washington D.C.
22. Waiting For The End Of The World – The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, OH**
23. Miracle Man – Warner Theater, Washington D.C.
24. Watching The Detectives – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
25. I’m Not Angry – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**

CD5: Covered In Clover (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
1. Welcome To The Working Week 
2. Miracle Man
3. No Dancing
4. Intro To Blame It On Cain
5. Blame It On Cain
6. Alison
7. Intro To Sneaky Feelings
8. Sneaky Feelings
9. Intro To Red Shoes
10. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
11. Less Than Zero
12. Mystery Dance
13. Pay It Back
14. I’m Not Angry
15. Waiting For The End Of The World / Gloria
16. Watching The Detectives
17. Mr. Moon
18. Intro To The Love Trilogy
19. Love Has No Pride
20. Love Is Gone
21. (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding