As he gears up to release a 49th-anniversary edition of his beloved 1977 debut My Aim Is True, Elvis Costello has returned with another rarity from the vault: “I Turn Around.” The song is the first track on the second disc of the forthcoming box set, which is out on October 2.
Recorded solo in early 1976 at Hope & Anchor Studio with future Stiff Records co-founder Dave Robinson, “I Turn Around” never saw the light of day in its original form. But the chorus will likely be familiar to some listeners, as it resurfaced years later on a B-side on Costello’s 1982 album Imperial Bedroom. The song is the latest preview of the new material available on the expanded My Aim Is True, which comprises five discs and 104 songs. The second disc, titled “The Blue Print,” to trace how Costello’s earliest bedroom tapes, demos, and Hope & Anchor sessions from 1975 and 1976 planted the seeds for songs he would complete and share much later in his career.
More than half of the music in the box set was previously unreleased, and the revamped My Aim Is True features a new 2026 remaster of the original album sourced from the Pathway Studios master tapes. The anniversary edition also folds in an essay from Costello along with contributions from collaborators and admirers including Nick Lowe, Rosanne Cash and Jim James, tracing his ascent from an obscure aspiring songwriter into a bona fide star. The set also revisits Costello’s early break into the music industry, his brief run with the pub-rock band Flip City, and his rapid rise once Stiff Records took notice of his songs.
“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 liner notes. “Nevertheless, I raise a chaste glass to My Aim Is True and all who sail in her.”
