When it comes to box sets, Elvis Costello’s 49th-anniversary edition of his debut album “My Aim Is True” is a dream compilation for completists. The original 12-song LP clocked in at a swift 33 minutes, while the special edition features a whopping 104 tracks, along with Costello’s 72-page essay about the album’s origins. It’s a veritable feast for the ears, and “My Aim Is True” is a worthy subject for all of the attendant attention.

Released by Stiff Records in 1977, Costello’s debut took full advantage of the burgeoning punk movement. To commemorate the anniversary, such as it is, “My Aim Is True” features a fully remastered edition of the album. Stateside listeners will be delighted to learn that the edition concludes with “Watching the Detectives,” the searing track that was appended to the American release. The balance of the LP was recorded at North London’s Pathway studio with Clover, a California-based country rock band, and produced by Nick Lowe, Costello’s fellow Stiff Records colleague.

As presented here, “My Aim Is True” is every bit as explosive and exciting as the original release, an album that featured a clever blend of punk, rockabilly, pop and new wave sounds. With standout tracks like “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Less Than Zero,” and “Waiting for the End of the World,” it could hardly fail. Meanwhile, “Alison,” “(The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red Shoes,” and “Watching the Detectives” were early classics among the Costello canon.

What makes the 49th-anniversary box set particularly special is the inclusion of the extra discs. When “My Aim Is True” originally saw its release, Costello was at a crossroads. Working by day as a data entry clerk, he was contemplating different futures for his artistic self, as evinced by disc two, for example, which is entitled “The Blue Print” and is comprised of 17 acoustic demos for future tracks on such LPs as “Armed Forces,” “Get Happy!!” and “Trust.”

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A third disc, “The Stranger in the House,” finds Costello imagining another potential career for himself as a professional songwriter. Like “The Blue Print,” “The Stranger in the House” is made up of demos and outtakes he created for his fantasy life as a working songwriter — possibly even in faraway Nashville. Meanwhile, a fourth disc, the best of the lot for fans of his longtime backing band, is entitled “Becoming the Attractions” and finds Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bass player Bruce Thomas transforming “My Aim Is True” for mass consumption.

A fifth disc, “Covered in Clover,” takes the story of “My Aim Is True” full circle with Costello’s 2007 live performance of the LP with Clover. A benefit performance for victims of Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, Costello’s reunion with Clover demonstrates one of the singer-songwriter’s greatest strengths: the elasticity of his music and his uncanny ability to remake himself across the decades. Indeed, it is the variety and profundity of his music since 1977 that continues to make him one of his genre’s most intriguing artists.

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Nik Cohn’s “Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old” is alive with mystery, intrigue and revelation. An exquisite anthology of Cohn’s writing from his early days through the present, “Corner Boy” bristles with the electric, contrarian voice of a working cultural critic.

But as Cohn pointed out to me during a recent interview, the notion of being considered a critic has never felt comfortable to him. “I never thought of myself as a critic, really. And certainly not at that time. I saw myself as a pop writer.”

While his work associated with The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones would see him branded as one of the premier rock critics of his day, he vastly preferred pop’s egalitarian “ethos,” admitting, “I didn’t really identify with rock very much. I liked rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’50s.”

But as rock grew and changed as a genre, it became “torturing” to Cohn’s ears, with bands competing in terms of their comparative loudness and audacity. And besides, he says, “I liked singles. I didn’t like albums.” For Cohn, pop, unlike rock, offered “a quick hit,” in contrast to album-oriented fare. When a new single comes out, says Cohn, “you’re walking down the street, you’re driving, and you hear something coming out of a window, out of a basement, and it knocks you out. And it’s over, and for three months, you can’t listen to anything else.”

Conversely, with an album, you take it home, “keep it for 20 years and contemplate its tracks,” says Cohn. “What I wanted was the physical buzz, the immediacy, and that’s a single, that’s a jukebox. It’s this kind of moment of immediacy that exists in a certain space and time. If you go to the jukebox and you play the song, while it’s the recording that we may all know and love, it’s happening to you in that very instant.”

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When Pete Townshend debuted “Tommy” for Cohn in the late ’60s, the rock opera lacked that same sense of immediacy. “Pete starts writing,” Cohn recalls, “and he comes up with his whole concept. He worked in the studio for months, and finally, he wanted to play something to me. And it was very, very serious.” Not mincing words, Cohn told him that “there’s some interesting things here, but there’s no excitement.” And that’s when the idea for “Pinball Wizard” came to the songwriter, who used to play pinball at the local arcade with Cohn and The Who’s producer Kit Lambert. “So he wrote ‘Pinball Wizard,’ which he knew I’d be a sucker for.”

Cohn is perhaps most famously known as the writer behind “Saturday Night Fever,” the film that captured the disco era for a generation. The movie was based on Cohn’s New York Magazine article on the “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night.” Back in those days, Cohn recalls, “New York was crumbling, was in terrible shape. And that’s when disco came out as a trickle in Black gay clubs in Harlem, and from there, it came downtown, and then spread to the boroughs.”

Smelling a story, Cohn took a taxi out to Brooklyn’s 2001 Odyssey club. “It was the dead of winter, and there was this 18-year-old, I would say, standing in the doorway, hunched over against the cold.” For Cohn, “something echoed there” in the image of the young man, who reminded him of the young, wayward Englishmen of the 1950s. The next evening, Cohn made the long slog back out to 2001 Odyssey, but the young man had disappeared. “I didn’t find him again. I didn’t find anybody there. So, what to do?” Desperate to capture the feeling he had experienced the night before, “I made it up, really. It was a work of fiction.”

As with his mother, who wrote tall tales during his Northern Irish youth, Cohn resorted to literary imagination and exaggeration to bring the story to life. “It’s just a little magazine story, and not my best work,” says Cohn. “I mean, I knew even then, it wasn’t my best story. It was something that I immediately wanted to take back and do over again.” But in short order, Cohn’s New York Magazine article was adapted into “Saturday Night Fever,” a blockbuster film and one of the bestselling albums of all time.

For Cohn, the entire experience was transfixing. “It was completely discombobulating. It seemed to be unreal for me. It was as if it was happening to somebody else. It was great to have that amount of attention. But at the same time, it wasn’t what I signed up to do when I became a writer, and I kind of lost contact with myself with disastrous consequences.” Those disastrous consequences included a drug bust in the 1980s at the hands of the FBI. Although the charges were later dropped, the whole experience forced Cohn to reconsider his place in the world. “It made me put my foot on the brakes and think, ‘What are you doing with your life here?’” He stopped using and quite literally met his future wife at the jailhouse door.

But as “Corner Boy” so presciently reminds, Cohn has never given up his contrarian voice and his yen for anti-complacency and ferreting out new experiences.

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When it comes to The Beatles, “Rubber Soul” is the album. They may reach arguably loftier artistic heights with “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “The White Album,” or “Abbey Road” — take your pick — but “Rubber Soul” embodies the group’s decisive turn towards self-conscious greatness. As far as The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was concerned, “Rubber Soul” marked the invention of the album as a long-playing musical format. And more than six decades later, with the release of the latest Beatles box set, “Rubber Soul” — incredible as it may seem — has never sounded better.

The album’s title harkens back to “I’m Down,” the B-side of the “Help!” single. At the end of the first take of “I’m Down,” Paul McCartney famously quipped that the band sounded like “plastic soul,” a joking but revealing phrase that captures The Beatles’ relationship to American rhythm and blues. Their British approach to R&B prized tightness, clarity, and buoyant precision over the loose, improvisational grit often associated with American soul. “Plastic soul,” then, becomes a conceptual shorthand for The Beatles’ chameleonic ability to absorb a genre’s core qualities and refashion it into something distinctly their own.

That idea became the musical firmament for “Rubber Soul,” which was recorded in a tight four weeks across 17 studio sessions and released in December 1965. Fittingly, The Beatles’ new box set captures the fervor which characterized the LP’s original construction, including early takes of a spate of classic songs ranging from “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” to “Girl,” “Nowhere Man,” and “Michelle.” Being able to listen to various attempts as the band and producer George Martin build “I’m Looking Through You” from the ground up, for example, is a wonder to behold.

As with so many of The Beatles’ signature albums, “Rubber Soul” proves to be an embarrassment of riches. The box set reaches its apex with a generous three takes of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” one of John Lennon’s most enduring and sophisticated compositions, as well as the debut of George Harrison’s sitar, the microtonal instrument at the heart of Eastern music. Meanwhile, with “In My Life,” listeners are treated to multiple takes in which Martin transforms the song’s Bach-like keyboard interlude from a Hammond organ solo into a piano flourish for the ages.

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Much has been made about the box set’s inclusion of “Little Girl,” a previously lost Lennon demo. In many ways, it is difficult to associate the song, with its sophomoric romantic lyrics, with the “Rubber Soul” era. The composition’s primitive lyrics seem to place its genesis much earlier, likely around the time of “With The Beatles” or “A Hard Day’s Night.” But at the same time, listeners will hear what sounds like the early strains of “I’m Only Sleeping,” a standout track from “Revolver.” In this vein, “Little Girl” fully belongs on the “Rubber Soul” box set, a collection that points towards the bold sense of artistry already taking hold of the band. In its finest moments, the box set captures the astonishing level of musical development that will energize the remainder of The Beatles’ career, a period of unparalleled pop-cultural ambition and stylistic experimentation.

Love these deep dives into The Beatles? Check out the annual Everything Fab Four Fest held in November, and register for the conference here. 

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