First Great Album from the 80s is Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom

The first great album I recall buying in the 1980s was Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom. The songs are catchy, and the embellished instrumentation indicates a change from the mostly guitar and keyboard new wave rock of Costello's first three or four albums.

The most impressive quality of the songs on Imperial Bedroom is the writing. Costello has always been a brilliant wordsmith, but he has never been wittier than on this 1982 release. On the track "Little Savage" Costello says such lines as, "The beauty is the beast" and "Now the lamb lies with the lion." The lines provide a double dose of poetry with not only the puns but the alliteration as well.

The wordplay is just as strong on Imperial Bedroom's opening track, "Beyond Belief." Costello writes of being "charged with insults and flattery" in a scathing message to hypocrites, who "Keep your finger on important issues, with crocodile tears and pocketful of tissues."

The opening track also establishes Costello as a serious vocalist. His voice ranges as deep as bass when the song starts with just a trace of soft percussion. On other tracks he sings with a clear tenor, which is really showcased on the tracks "Man Out of Time" and "You Little Fool." The album is not devoid of the new wave swagger of his vocals on previous albums, which is evident on "Pidgin English" and "Human Hands."

One often overlooked asset of Imperial Bedroom is the collaboration of Costello and Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford, who wrote the words for "Boy with a Problem." Costello's delivery of Difford's lyrics seems natural, since the latter wrote it exclusively for Elvis. It helps that the two artists at that time were also working together on Squeeze's popular album, East Side Story, which was produced by Costello.

Imperial Bedroom is such a great album that I could sing the entire album song by song and word for word in order. I actually did that one morning driving to the university. The tape player in my Pacer had stopped working, so I was unable to listen to the album. Instead I just started singing the album to myself track by track until I pulled into the campus parking lot a half hour later.