originally published: 12/05/2024

(MONTCLAIR, NJ) -- Fans of Elvis Costello have two chances to see the artist when his tour with Steve Nieve comes to New Jersey in February 2025. They will be at the Count Basie Center for the Arts on Friday, February 21st and at The Wellmont Theater on Monday, February 24th. The tour will play selections from a songbook that is fifty years long and twice as deep.

“Costello is one of the world's greatest songwriters, up there with McCartney. You forget how many timeless songs he actually has until he plays them.” - Irish Independent

These dates follow on from the acclaimed Costello & Nieve tours of 2023-24 which traveled from the Palau de la Música, Barcelona to the Oslo Opera House and from the Béla Bartók Concert Hall Budapest to the Paris Philharmonie - augmented by trumpet, reeds, cell and percussion before visiting Japan and playing three sold-out shows in Tokyo and one night in Osaka, in April 2024.

Their 2024 dates in the UK and Ireland included a momentous show at the Liverpool Olympia recruiting seven horns - student, graduates and tutors from LIPA - the performing arts school founded by Paul McCartney.

That night was described as “Soul music to warm the coldest of hearts” by Liverpool Acoustic

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The 2024 tour concluded with two sold-out concerts at the London Palladium and a sold-out four-night stand at Vicar Street, Dublin. The second London show and the last two nights in Dublin also featured the Brodsky Quartet with whom Costello and Nieve have collaborated with over a thirty year period and with Uilleann piper, Sean McKeon also joining the last of these Vicar St. dates.

“Elvis Costello remains the most fascinating songwriter Britain has produced in the past 50 years” – The Spectator

On November 1, 2024, UMe released, King Of America & Other Realms - a 6-CD collection tracing Elvis Costello's travels from his 1986 album recorded in Hollywood through his work in the American musical cities and towns of New Orleans, LA; Oxford and Clarksdale, MS; and Nashville and Memphis, TN and brought up to the present day with a haunting minor key arrangement of “Brilliant Mistake” recorded in Cape Fear, NC.

“Costello challenges us to confront the stories we inherit and the places we inhabit. Almost 40 years later, King of America remains Costello's map of disillusionment and aspiration, both timeless and acutely of its moment, a kingdom where invisible walls define the boundaries of our dreams” - Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Costello’s 35-page accompanying essay for the King Of America & Other Realms box-set traces the forty year collaboration and friendship with songwriter and producer, T Bone Burnett, the latest installment which is “The True Story of The Coward Brothers” an Audible Original comedic drama, written by Elvis Costello and directed by Christopher Guest in which Burnett and Costello take the roles of the rock and roll charlatans and charmingly deluded siblings “Henry and Howard Coward” in a cast which includes Harry Shearer and Rhea Seehorn.

The 20-track accompanying album, 'The Coward Brothers' was released in November 2024 by New West Records and features the full-length renditions of the songs heard in the course of what the author refers to as “a wireless address”.

Tickets for both shows in New Jersey are going fast. Tickets for the Count Basie Center for the Arts show on Friday, February 21 are available for purchase online. The venue is located at 99 Monmouth Street in Red Bank, New Jersey. Tickets for the Wellmont Theater show on Monday, February 24 are available for purchase online. The Wellmont Theater is located at 5 Seymour Street in Montclair, New Jersey.

Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve have been cohorts and bandmates since 1977, appearing together on more than twenty-five recordings and performing on stages from the Grosse Freiheit 36 in Hamburg to the Royal Albert Hall in London, debuting songs such as “Accidents Will Happen” and “Shot With His Own Gun” with only piano accompaniment and playing their first two-man shows in 1995, then undertaking “The Lonely World Tour” together in 2003.

“Nieve is astonishing, like the ghost of George Gershwin being watched over by Philip Glass” - Irish Times

Steve Nieve is a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of Elvis Costello and the Attractions and the composer of “Welcome To The Voice,” an opera written with Muriel Teodori, which was produced at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris and later recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. He has played with Elvis Costello and The Imposters since 2002.