My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition)

Instead, what we hear is an ambitious composer who sounds mostly inspired by the great L.A. songwriters of the era: Newman and Zevon, but also Bonnie Raitt and Lowell George.

With its emphatic acoustic strumming and tales of vigilante girls in the ruins of the night, “Losing You” circles Van Morrison by way of early Springsteen. “Citizen Junction” sounds like Jackson Browne taking a tour of Tom Waits’ weird-jazzbo side of town, with its put-upon waitresses and evocative references to “the broken pieces of the crystal moon.” This version of Costello is more serene musically, but still highly attitudinal.

“Wave a White Flag,” a paean to mutually assured romantic destruction, shares its pitch-black sense of humor with Richard Thompson. As proof of concept for Costello, The Blue Print is a compelling and persuasive listen. It’s also clear why, while everyone pretty much agreed on his talent, no one was quite sure what to do with it.

Flip City never really caught on, and the hip label Stiff initially signed Costello—going by the name D.P. Costello at this point—to a deal as a songwriter rather than a performer.

The metamorphosis came gradually, and then all at once. Stiff impresario Jake Riviera—an old school raconteur—suggested the name Elvis and the great agit-prop visual artist Barney Bubbles provided an aesthetic framework for his evolution from sharp-tongued folkie to belligerent visionary. On Disc 3, entitled The Stranger in the House, we hear Costello further refining his writing and persona, his songs coming into sharper focus, abetted by boisterous new confidence on tracks like the swinging country-and-western outtake “Radio Sweetheart” and the strutting shuffle of “Exiles Road.”

He was figuring it all out just as punk was coming into vogue, a fortuitous development for an artist whose intuitive truculence mapped perfectly onto the Year Zero ethos of the Sex Pistols and Clash. He wasn’t all the way there quite yet.