‘I WAS ASKED TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY WHEN I was 24,” says Elvis Costello, 61, on the day he receives his first hard-bound copy of his revelatory, evocatively crafted, highly entertaining new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. “I said, ‘Could I just live some life?’ ”
Back then, Costello (born Declan MacManus), the son of a bigband vocalist, blew through rock & roll like a bespectacled tornado, fusing punk, American-roots music and slashing, literary candor on 1977’s My Aim Is True and 1978’s This Year’s Model, the latter with his feral combo the Attractions.
Early on, he famously said that all of his songwriting was driven by revenge and guilt, an image-making quote he now laughs off. “That was never all that it was about,” he says. “It just…