My Aim Is A True Box

Elvis Costello‘s debut album "My Aim Is True" will turn 50 next year, but it’s such a landmark event that he’s not waiting to celebrate. He’s instead dropping a massive, 5 disc box set of music from this era on October 2nd, 2026, that features 104 tracks in total, 52 of them previously unreleased. The package is called "My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition)", and he’s shared 4 early renditions of “Watching The Detectives” to give fans a little taste of what’s to come when the packages hit record stores shelves.

“When first proposed, I thought the whole idea of celebrating a 50th anniversary of 'My Aim Is True' was preposterous”, Costello writes in the liner notes. “It made my teeth itch. It couldn’t just be set up like a venerable object in a glass case”.

The 1st disc is a remastered version of the original album that fuses together the track listings from the UK and the US releases. “Last night I listened to this wonderfully wonky record in its entirety for the first time in about 45 years”, "My Aim Is True" producer Nick Lowe writes in the notes. “It was a priceless opportunity to observe at close range the extraordinary work of one of the foremost composers of popular song of this or any other era”.

The set continues with a collection of 17 recordings from 1975 and 1976 that pre-date the "My Aim Is True" sessions. He calls this one "The Blue Print". They include homemade bedroom tapes, 13 recordings from a 1976 session at the Hope & Anchor studio, and a newly discovered reel of songs that Costello recorded that year, including an early rendition of “Radio Radio” known as “Radio Soul”.

Disc 3 is titled "The Stranger In The House". It spotlights all of the surviving demos and outtakes from "My Aim Is True". The 4th disc, "Becoming The Attractions", consists of live material from his earliest gigs with the Attractions. And the set wraps up with "Covered In Clover", an unreleased reunion show that Costello staged in 2007 with the band Clover, who backed him in the studio on "My Aim Is True", before some of them went on to form Huey Lewis & The News.

“Making my first record seemed like the beginning of something that I’d imagined for a long time, before I had any sense of a potential audience, let alone the expectation and the assumptions of others about songs written and performed in mere minutes”, Costello writes in the notes. “Nevertheless, I raise a chaste glass to 'My Aim Is True' and all who sail in her”.