Elvis Costello and the Magnetic Fields: Songwriter Sessions

Having by now gone well beyond establishing himself as the pre-eminent songwriter of his generation, Elvis Costello was back on the road with keyboardist Steve Nieve finishing up a stripped-down bandless tour last week. It's something he started several years ago, with a series of five American shows with Nieve that included a May date at the Paradise and culminated in the release of a limited-edition five-EP box set of highlights. And, like the collaborative album he recorded with Burt Bacharach last year, it seems to have been designed to showcase Costello the singer as much as, if not more than, the songs.

He opened his Thursday set at the Orpheum a week ago with a prickly new tune, "Alibi," that drew on a trusty Costello theme -- romantic betrayal. But before long he was offering up familiar favorites like "Man Out of Time," "Little Triggers," "Beyond Belief," and "Alison." This was the crowd-pleasing Costello who'd long since abandoned the twitchy, paranoid persona of the ferocious "Radio Radio" performance featured on the new Saturday Night Live 25th-anniversary CD -- plumper, softer, and altogether more congenial than the angry young man of the punk '70s. And in a comically exaggerated display of generosity, he returned to the stage for five encores to round out a two-and-a-half-hour set, which ended on an dramatically intimate note with Costello walking away from the microphone to sing "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4" sans amplification to the gentle accompaniment of Nieve's grand piano.

It would be hard to imagine Stephin Merritt attempting anything along the lines of Costello's closing display of vocal prowess, even in the confines of the much smaller downstairs room at the Middle East, where he performed backed by the quiet guitar/keyboards/cello of his Magnetic Fields band last Saturday. Merritt's feelings about his own baritone are best summed up by the fact that he didn't sing his own songs on the first couple of Magnetic Fields releases, and though he's now more comfortable at the mike, he's continued to put his words into other people's mouths. But if Costello is the once-rebellious songwriter laureate of his generation, then Merritt would appear to be the '90s analogue, particularly in the wake of the release of the new Magnetic Fields three-CD 69 Love Songs (Merge), an epic work that's sure to place high on many critics' year-end lists.

Merritt's set, like Costello's, reflected a range of classic song forms, from the clever country clichés of "Chicken with Its Head Cut Off" and "Papa Was a Rodeo" to the sentimental Bacharachian strains of "The Book of Love" and "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side." And it was full of deft, memorable rhymes like "All the umbrellas in London couldn't stop this rain/And all the dope in New York couldn't stop this pain." So perhaps it's simply a sign of the times that the '90s underground has found a songwriter laureate who seems more comfortable ruling the margins as an acquired taste than conquering the world. Or maybe it's just the luck of the draw.

-- Matt Ashare