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	ELVIS COSTELLO + EMMYLOU HARRIS THE DELIVERY MAN DELIVERS

Elvis Costello’s difficulties with the fair sex have been integral to his songwriting since his start, nearly three decades ago. "Alison," which the audience sang sweetly along with last Saturday night at Bank of America Pavilion, is anything but a warm romantic love song. Give a line like "I think somebody better put out the big light because I can’t stand to see you this way" a close listen before choosing it as a wedding theme. But The Delivery Man (Lost Highway), his latest disc with his latest band, the Imposters, takes the cake: not only did he write a tune ("The Judgment") about a relationship in ruins with ex-wife Cait O’Riordan, but he brings both Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris in for duets while dedicating a disc laced with guilt, betrayal, and crimes of the heart to his current wife, jazz singer Diana Krall. Call it truth in advertising.

Costello strode on stage with his Imposters (keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas of his old long-time band the Attractions plus Nashville bassist Davey Faragher), grabbed a Telecaster, and kicked into the noisy "Hurry Down Doomsday (the Bugs Are Taking Over)," a deep cut with a Bo Diddley beat from Mighty like a Rose made all the more discordant by Nieve’s newest acquisition, a theremin. Before long, a fourth Imposter arrived: Larry Campbell, a Nashville specialist whose pedal steel gave some authentic country to "Waiting for the End of the World." Next, a radiant Emmylou joined the party for another vintage nugget, "Stranger in the House," that reminded us country’s nothing new for Costello. If at first Harris, who has a special gift for harmonizing, struggled to find her place, it was only because they’d never done that tune together before.

For the rest of the 30-plus song set, Costello kept the crowd off balance, segueing from George Jones’s "These Days (I Barely Get By)" to "Sleepless Nights," a tune Harris famously sang with the late Gram Parsons, to Merle Haggard’s "Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down" (a track Elvis recorded on Almost Blue) to Costello’s own "Indoor Fireworks." A gorgeous encore of the Stones’ "Wild Horses," with Emmylou rejoining the band after a short respite, would have been shocking back in Costello’s angry-young-man days. But 27 years later, it seemed perfectly natural.