Happy Boxing Day!

A hit for Elvis Costello, but this slow acoustic version by the dude who wrote the song? Magic. Merry Christmas.

Elvis Costello and the Attractions in 1982. It's hard to pick the best of Costello's couplets, but "'Cause the high heel he used to be has been ground down, and he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around" has to be up there.

Fun fact: Napolean Dynamite was a name used by Costello on the 1986 album Blood and Chocolate, a fact filmmaker Jared Hess claims he was unaware of until he was nearly finished shooting the film. Costello believes it was stolen from him but has taken no legal action.

Did you ever see the Simpsons where they go on vacation for the summer to the Springfield equivalent of Cape Cod and Lisa wears sunglasses and a backwards hat and tries to be dumb so the cool kids will like her but it just doesn't take? That's more or less the story of Chicago's Enuff Z'Nuff.

If you forced Poison to listen to the first three Elvis Costello albums for a year straight, and then asked them to double up on the outfits and hairspray, the result would sound something like Enuff Z'Nuff. You can hear (and see... dear god, can you see) them trying to fit in with their late-eighties contemporaries yet unable to shake their smarmy power-pop sensibilities. Predictably, they received accolades from critics who found this incongruous combo intriguing, and lukewarm response from power-pop fans who were repelled by their image and hard rock fans who found little to love in their suburban paisley-pop traditions.

I thought they sucked when they came out. I heard them again years later and found myself unable to resist such classy material being filtered through the overblown, pompous sonic and visual stamp of the end of the hair metal era. Whether by accident or by design, they're one of a kind.

In the latest installment of transatlantic stylistic trading, Elvis Costello will release an Americana record, Secret, Profane, & Sugarcane, on June 2nd. In an age when artists spend more and more time making albums (Black Sabbath's debut in 1969 took 8 hours to record -- Guns N' Roses' latest took 8 years), Costello's record is an anachronism. Secret, Profane, & Sugarcane was recorded in just three days in Nashville with legendary producer T Bone Burnett (K.D. Lang, Robert Plant and Alison Krause, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) at the helm.

Costello flirted with Americana on 1986's King of America and dove headfirst (and frankly, smacked the bottom of the pool) on 1981's collection of country covers, Almost Blue. Costello's new collection, some of which was originally written for Johnny Cash, threatens to be both his most deliberate and spontaneous C & W attempt yet.