Elvis Grows Up; At 50, rock's most eloquent nerd isn't getting older, he's getting bolder. Just check out his two new albums.(Elvis Costello)

Byline: Carla Power

Plenty of stars grow old with rock and roll. A rare few continue to experiment beyond its borders, pushing the limits of their range. Elvis Costello may not be a global celebrity like aging rockers David Bowie and Mick Jagger, but he's had the gall to keep going on the strength of musical exploration. The skinny youth of the nerdy horn rims and livid eloquence turned 50 this year. The teens who grew up listening to him assail everything from romantic love to colonial armies to Margaret Thatcher are graying now. On a recent fall morning, Costello sat amid the businessmen and well-preserved blondes at Claridge's Hotel in London. He politely thanked the waiter who brought him his English breakfast tea and cakes. And when his wife, jazz singer Diana Krall, called on his mobile, his voice gained the unmistakable timbre of a man in love. "Hi darling, how you doing?... OK, my darling... I'd love to do that, that'd be perfect... I love you." You'd be forgiven for thinking he'd grown soft with age.

You'd be wrong. True, Costello is writing for ballet and opera. And, yes, he's done cameos in a Cole Porter biopic and an "Austin Powers" sequel, of all things. But these are less signs of his selling out than of his branching out--something he's done regularly since he first released "My Aim Is True" in 1977. His 24 albums have included forays into jazz, classical, country and blues; his collaborators have ranged from Burt Bacharach to jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz to mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter. And this fall, he released two dazzlingly disparate albums on the same day: "Il Sogno," his orchestration for a ballet based on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "The Delivery Man," a rock-and-roll album with its roots in the American South. In the past critics have mocked his musical curiosity. But for Costello it's as essential as breathing. "When someone from my world moves into collaborating with jazz or orchestral musicians, it's seen as something that happens when their hits run out," he says. "But having hits isn't that satisfying to the writer. It's satisfying to your bank manager."

Releasing two albums at once is a showy move. Still, Costello's a man who stuck words like "quisling" into songs while his peers were busy screaming single syllables into mosh pits. He wrote the 200-page orchestration for "Il Sogno" after the Italian dance company Aterballetto approached him. Though he'd never been a dance fan and had little experience composing for orchestras, his fondness for Italian audiences--whom he credits with a rare musical sophistication--and his admiration for the company's performance of Dante's "Paradiso" convinced him to do it. First he created a score, based on the dancers' interpretations of Shakespeare's characters, drawing on everything from baroque to jazz to country folk tunes. Then last year he reworked the ballet score so it could stand alone without dancers.

"Il Sogno" was a multilingual, multicontinental collaboration with dancers, designers and conductors. "The Delivery Man" was recorded in a studio with his seasoned band, the Imposters. The album began life as a short story Costello wrote about two friends--"a floozy and a pious war widow"--and the insane convict who obsesses them both. It's steeped in Americana: Costello and the Imposters create a rockabilly sound with Wurlitzers, ukeleles and a Hammond organ. Lucinda Williams does a mad, slurry turn as the floozy on "There's a Story in Your Voice"; Emmylou Harris sings ...