Rank the Records: My Aim Is True

If we’re lucky, we all get one shot. 

Maybe it’s for the big job in the corner office. Maybe it’s to fall in love with your dream and spend the rest of your life there. Or maybe it’s to create something that will find an audience and begin a conversation. 

Listening to My Aim Is True, the debut album from Elvis Costello, is to hear an artist’s one shot, the record they have been waiting their entire life to make. It’s an album of fierce conviction, exceptional musicality, and production touches co-opted from the mainstream pop, rock and soul of the 1960s and early 1970s. If EC had emerged ten years earlier, he might have made the exact same album he made in 1977. 

Sometimes, Elvis Costello gets lumped into a big late-seventies bucket of “punk” artists. He’s not really a punk, and his debut album is not a punk record. It eschews a typical punk “sound,” for sure. There’s no razor chords, no breakneck speed, and definitely no fumbling instrumentalists who sound like they’ve just picked up their guitars for the first time about twenty minutes before the recording session.

It’s an album outside of its era, influenced by the moment but not beholden to it. If you had to assign it to a specific musical movement of the era, you could call it “pub rock.” But even then, it’s a little too polished for that. 

The songwriting on My Aim Is True is sometimes more direct than in EC’s later compositions, but that makes it no less striking. Costello’s vocal approach and energy was unlike anything else on the pop scene at the time; there’s a pent-up fire that licks out from every second of every song. These are mostly songs about relationships, or whatever frayed and fractured connections qualify as such to our various protagonists. There’s no winners in these songs, only varying degrees of losing, many of them so polluted that it’s hard to imagine what the appeal of the affair was in the first place. 

“I could tell you that I like your sensitivity/but you know it’s the way that you walk,” he sings on “Miracle Man,” admitting his most base desires even as he reveals his resentment for her demands in the chorus: “Don’t you think that I know that/walking on water won’t/make me a miracle man?” 

Costello does cast his songwriter’s eye away from romantic entanglements for a few cuts. “Less Than Zero” is sparse and striking compared to the warmer, fuller arrangements elsewhere on the record. It places more emphasis on EC’s voice and lyrics, which sketch out allusions and images of the fascist racist Oswald Mosley and his sinister behavior alongside a pair of lovers using the volume of the television to drown their actions. The implication is that it’s somehow possible for many of those exposed to cruel ideologies to simply tune out the insidious darkness and remain in their self-centered pockets of existence. “Everything means less than zero,” Costello concludes in the chorus, capturing the absolute nihilism of a country that cannot summon the humanity to confront its own villains. 

“Less Than Zero” was the first single from My Aim Is True, and yet it’s not close to the best-known song from the album. The second single, “Alison” is maybe Costello’s best-known composition, and third single “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” was not a hit upon release but has since become a beloved part of EC’s early catalog. Three songs from My Aim Is True are in the top twenty songs that Costello has performed the most often throughout his career, and if you count “Watching the Detectives” (released as a single in the UK but tacked onto releases of My Aim Is True in other parts of the world), it’s four songs. 

When you’re taking that one shot, you assume you’ll never have another one. It has to count. That’s what lingers decades later about My Aim Is True; though his artistry would evolve and grow in spectacular ways, Elvis Costello was ready to be Elvis Costello from the start. He’d been waiting his whole life for the opportunity, and he didn’t let it go to waste. 

Rank the Records is a recurring feature at That Fatal Mailing List, where we dig into one of Elvis Costello’s 32 studio albums (according to Wikipedia, just cause we need a source of truth; there are a few that may be worth quibbles but we’ll write about them anyway). At the end, I’ll drop each record into an ongoing ranked list that will fill out as the articles appear. What’s my favorite EC record? What’s my seventeenth-favorite EC record?! Find out as we…RANK THE RECORDS (TM).

6. My Aim Is True (1977)