As some of you may have noticed, this blog – its wildly ambitious concept stolen entire from Chris O’Leary’s masterful song-by-song David Bowie blog – never quite got off the ground.

Well, I seem incapable of devising blog ideas of my own: inspired by Ray Padgett’s fun on-this-day Bob Dylan blog, I thought I might reignite ecsongbysong with an occasional series of write-ups of past shows that you can revisit thanks to the magic of bootlegs.

I’ll try to stick to shows you can download from specific show pages on the EC wiki, and I encourage you to do so and listen along – but please do not think that in any way these recordings are substitutes for EC’s official catalogue.

Anything by Costello that you don’t have, please buy. Anything you used to have, but have subsequently lost because your college roommate borrowed it and never gave it back, please buy it again. Anything you’ve never heard of, buy it and give it a whirl – I bet you’ll like it. Costello has spent the past decade questioning whether or not it’s worth his time to produce records; let’s be sure to send him a signal that it very much is.

In the meantime, enjoy a little time-travel. For starters, we’ll go back five whole years, to 2015…