Imperial Bedroom

Elvis Costello teamed with famed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick and made this gorgeous, nuanced and deceivingly optimistic album in 1982. The singer/songwriter had grown handsomely into his croon by then (check out “Little Savage” and the heart-tugging “Man Out of Time”), and the songs, many composed on piano, show breathtaking range, both lyrically (the melancholy “Kid About It” moves like good fiction) and musically (the bedroom-eyed jazz of “Almost Blue”; the baroque pop of “You Little Fool”). Each tune unfurls in its own kind of beauty.