Elvis Costello had been writing songs and performing them in public long before he became the most gifted Angry Young Man of the New Wave Class of 1977 with his debut album My Aim Is True. While plenty of punk and new wave acts espoused a Year Zero attitude about rock & roll, Costello obviously had a strong working knowledge of pop songwriting past and present, though it wouldn't be until he made 1981's Trust and 1982's Imperial Bedroom that he was willing to reveal just how firmly rooted he was in pop classicism. Years later, Costello and Burt Bacharach teamed up to write "God Give Me Strength" for Allison Anders' 1996 film Grace of My Heart, a pairing that seemed like an amusing mismatch only to people who hadn't paid much attention to Costello's career since 1979's Armed Forces. The song was a brilliant evocation of Bacharach's sweetly melancholic tunes of the '60s, with lyrics from Costello that were thoughtful, mature, and fully worthy of the gravity and craft of Bacharach's melody. "God Give Me Strength" was good enough that Bacharach and Costello chose to write and record an album together, and 1998's Painted from Memory was a master class in pop songwriting for grown-ups, informed by Bacharach's salad days without betraying the least bit of nostalgia, and featuring some of the finest, most well-considered vocals Costello ever committed to tape. Bacharach and Costello extended the collaboration to pen a number of songs for a projected Broadway musical (conceived by, of all people, Chuck Lorre, the sitcom titan behind Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory), and The Songs of Bacharach & Costello is a box set that combines a remastered version of Painted from Memory with 16 performances of songs either written for the uncompleted musical Taken from Life or adapted from tunes on the album. The Taken from Life material is splendid and should please any fans of the collaborators, though the performances by Cassandra Wilson, Jenni Muldaur, Audra Mae, and others point out how specifically these songs seem to fit Costello's voice, and that they were crafted to suit a narrative that was never fully resolved. Rounding out the set is a collection of live performances of the Bacharach/Costello numbers and a final disc of Costello singing Bacharach/Hal David classics on-stage. The sizable majority of this has been previously released, but the material here has been packaged and presented with consummate care, and Costello penned a fascinating 10,000-word essay on his work with Bacharach for this release. As fate would have it, The Songs of Bacharach & Costello arrived less than a month after Bacharach died on February 9, 2023 at the age of 94. This collection wasn't intended to be a memorial, yet the deep dive into one of his last major collaborations pays worthy homage to his skill and dedication to craft, and every moment testifies to Costello's towering respect for the great man. ~ Mark Deming