Elvis Costello’s New York Soul

Elvis Costello’s New York Soul

Elvis Costello first saw Manhattan when he was 23. This was late 1977. He and his band, the Attractions, were coming down from New Haven on their first tour of the United States when the skyscrapers came into view.

“It was really like a jolt of adrenaline — it’s such a mythic skyline,” he said. “I’d only experienced that a few other times in my career. Another was when I first saw Shanghai: You feel like you’d been shot out of a rocket to another planet.”

Now he’s in his early 60s and sitting in a booth in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, seeming quite at home. He knows a bit about the place, too. He laments that the Oak Room, the cabaret where his wife, Diana Krall, had once performed, is gone and jokingly wonders whether Dorothy Parker could have afforded one of the suites that now bear her name ($424 a night).

Mr. Costello was in New York for a few days after playing the Newport Folk Festival in July. He’ll be back for three shows this fall — one Oct. 1 at Town Hall featuring his solo DeTour show, in which he ranges around his catalog, and the others on Nov. 6 and 7 at the Beacon Theater with his band the Imposters, focusing on his 1982 album, “Imperial Bedroom.”

Elvis and New York. The two have shared a long and deepening history since that first skyline jolt. There have been famous concerts and a legendary television appearance and recordings that included a late-career masterpiece. He marked his 50th birthday with concerts at Lincoln Center; his 60th with a show at Carnegie Hall; and the release of his 2013 album with the Roots, “Wise up Ghost,” with a performance at Brooklyn Bowl. He was in the city just after Sept. 11 and remembers how kind everyone was toward one another in those days.

In all, he has made 278 appearances in New York City. I was at roughly 25 of his shows, mostly as a deeply obsessed teenager, but at quite a few as an adult, too, and now I was sitting in that booth in the Algonquin pestering him about a longstanding theory of mine: that there is something in his music — caustic, smart, fast-talking, but with moments of deep compassion and sublime beauty — that is quintessentially New York. He made a habit early in his career of being in-your-face, maybe a bit of a jerk, characteristics some might associate with New Yorkers as well.

Never mind that he grew up in Liverpool and London and has lived in Dublin and now Vancouver, British Columbia. How else but with shared attitudes could a 13-year-old from Brooklyn latch on to a singer-songwriter-performer who peppers his lyrics with Britishisms (Vauxhall Viva, tuppenny ha’penny millionaire)?

The moment you meet a lifelong idol is transporting. Dressed in a blue suit jacket with small white polka dots, relaxed and enjoying the coolness of the lobby on a scorching hot day, Mr. Costello was game to knock around my theory, if at first not entirely convinced. We were both hard-pressed to come up with other examples of non-New Yorker musicians, artists or authors who conveyed the sense of the city without trying to, or even realizing they were.

As the conversation moved along, a rich stream of New Yorkiness did indeed reveal itself, both in Mr. Costello’s music and in his experiences, whether captured in song or his autobiography, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” (Blue Rider Press, 2015; out Oct. 11 in paperback). It even reached back to before he was born.

Mr. Costello made the first comparison to someone else famous — a transplanted New Yorker and a lifelong idol of his.

“John Lennon came to live here and volunteered the idea that he saw some equivalency between New York and Liverpool,” he said. “In a way, it was a heightened version, being a port. I felt at home the first time I came here.”

He was quickly on a roll.

“I didn’t drive a car until I was 38, so I liked any town you could walk around, and I never ever felt threatened. Maybe that was naïve of me, or maybe I didn’t venture far enough afield. People were generally not bothered by you. Why would they be bothered by you? It wasn’t as if I was wearing a gold suit.”

The young Mr. Costello had a firm handle on all the music scenes in the United States when he first arrived, and hungered to experience them. But he found many had faded; the only scene that really felt alive and happening was New York.