What Was Elvis Costello’s First US Top 40 Hit?

They say to be careful what you wish for. Elvis Costello could probably relate. Frustrated by the mainstream audience’s indifference to material that many critics and discerning listeners found captivating, Elvis Costello decided that he needed to go all in for Top 40 hits.

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In that respect, he was successful. Especially when it came to the United States, as Elvis Costello was rewarded with his first ever US Top 40 single some seven years into his recording career. He also happened to write a classic song while making these efforts was almost secondary. As for the rest of the music he released during that stretch, well, that’s where it gets a bit tricky.

His Aim Wasn’t True… at the Pop Charts

Elvis Costello’s early career made him the poster child for artists who are critically successful but don’t make much of a dent when it comes to the songs that are played on the radio. At least, that’s how it might have seemed to the US audience. In his native UK, Costello actually did pretty well on the charts, including three Top 10 singles and ten Top 40 hits from his first six studio albums.

Then came the 1982 album Imperial Bedroom. Costello wrote a brilliant set of songs, perhaps his most personal and compelling to that point. He and his band, The Attractions, festooned the songs with Beatlesque production touches, with former Fab Four engineer Geoff Emerick helping on production to ensure the connection.

Many Costello diehards will tell you that Imperial Bedroom is his finest record. Yet none of the four singles released from the album made any kind of mark on pop radio, and the album sales as a whole were a letdown. It all convinced Costello that he needed to change things up.

Looking for Punch

Costello had written a song with Clive Langer called “Shipbuilding” that was left for Robert Wyatt to record. Langer also happened to be one of the hottest producers in Great Britain at the time, working in tandem with Alan Winstanley. It was decided that Langer and Winstanley would produce the next Attractions record, Punch The Clock, released in 1983.

Langer and Winstanley encouraged Costello to think in terms of rhythm as he wrote to make for catchier songs. Meanwhile, the pair instituted their usual method of relying on punched-in overdubs for constructing tracks, as opposed to getting them from the band playing together in the studio.

A few years earlier, Costello’s buddy and former producer Nick Lowe released a song with his band Rockpile called “When I Write The Book”. That song was about a man intending to novelize his romantic miscues. Costello took a similar tack, albeit with a more optimistic outlook, with a song for the new album, calling it “Everyday I Write The Book”.

“Book” Learning

“Everyday I Write The Book” contains some of Costello’s cleverest one-liners. He went for Motown-style wordplay with couplets like “When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote / I’m a man on a mission with two or three editions.” With keyboardist Steve Nieve pecking away with staccato piano notes and backing vocalists Claudia Fontaine and Caron Wheeler chirping alongside Costello’s lead, this Top 40 hit was certainly as accessible as Elvis Costello had ever been.

The gambit worked. To an extent, anyway. “Everyday I Write The Book” didn’t match some of Costello’s previous singles in England. But it squeezed into the Top 40 in the US in 1983, by far his greatest stateside success. Luckily, as a kind of signature song for those who don’t follow his work too closely, it’s one of which Costello can be proud, a pop gem that doesn’t skimp on his lyrical dexterity.

The problem came with the rest of Punch The Clock and its follow-up album, Goodbye Cruel World. Costello would later decry the steps he had taken to go for popularity on those records. He felt that they ended up lacking the lasting relevance of his other work. Nonetheless, “Everyday I Write The Book” still stands tall as a worthy first US Top 40 hit for this brilliant songwriter and performer.

Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns