Former Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas (not pictured) titled his Elvis Costello-offending memoir "The Big Wheel."

Even so, he changed things up impressively from when he brought his Spectacular Spinning Songbook to Wolf Trap’s Filene Center back in June, repeating only eight tunes from the three-dozen-song epic he performed then. (You’re welcome, trainspotters. Someone has to pay attention to this shit.) You need a deep catalog of strong material to get away with that. (I'd already heard Nick Lowe play "Alison" when he opened for Wilco Sunday night, so I didn't mind that Elvis, or perhaps his wheel, chose last night to give his most resilient crowd-pleaser a rest for once.)

The Spinning Songbook is a game-show-style wheel Elvis has been using this year to keep his setlists from becoming too predictable. He first toured this concept in 1986-7, when these songs would’ve been fresh; he hadn’t revived it since. There’s a carnivalesque atmosphere to these shows, with Elvis pulling double duty as event MC Napoleon Dynamite, abetted by two lovely assistants and a go-go cage audience members can dance in if they’re brought on stage to spin the wheel. (Guest hosts on the 1986 tour included Roberto Benigni and Tom Waits. That’s some inspired casting, there.)

Anywho, here’s the rundown on five of the wheel-selected songs performed last night that you won’t find on the many, many best-of (and rest-of) compilations Mr. Declan Patrick MacManus has given us over the many, many years.

(1) “The Other End of the Telescope.” Elvis shares credit on this farewell ballad with Aimee Mann, which first appeared on the third and final ‘Til Tuesday album, Everything’s Different Now, in 1988. Elvis’s own version opens his marvelous 1996 set All This Useless Beauty, an attempt to reclaim some of the songs he’d written for other artists.

One of that album's strongest tracks is “Complicated Shadows,” a don't-take-your-guns-to-town sort of thing he wrote for Johnny Cash. Cash never recorded it, though he did cut a different song Elvis wrote for him called “Hidden Shame", and he also used a cover of Elvis’s “The Big Light” to open his Johnny Cash is Coming to Town album in 1987. Of the sole song Cash and Costello ever recorded together—a cover of George Jones’s “We Oughtta Be Ashamed” cut at then-Cash-son-in-law Nick Lowe’s home studio the day after Christmas, 1979—Costello once quipped, “the title proved to be prophetic.”

Elvis has a history of singing Johnny Cash songs. When the spinning songbook landed on “CASH” last night, the result was back-to-back covers of “Cry, Cry, Cry” and a haunting, solo acoustic (2) “I Still Miss Someone.” It wasn’t as great as the many occasions on which he has performed this song with Emmylou Harris, but it was pretty goddamn good.

Another of last night’s jackpot selections was “TIME”, prompting performances of Elvis’s “Strict Time,” “Man Out of Time,” and “Next Time ‘Round,” followed by — and this was a delightful surprise—(3) The Rolling Stones’s “Out of Time,” from the mid-60s, when they could do no wrong. Elvis wandered the Warner’s aisles as he dug into the kiss-off's refrain, finally inciting the largely trousers-and-Blackberries crowd to stand and sing.

Other surprises? Well, Elvis got the crowd to sit still for four tracks from his most recent release, National Ransom, a generally well-regarded effort that even I haven't spent much time with. He performed three of them in a single solo acoustic sequence, after the Imposters had taken their first bow following a smoldering “I Want You.” Near the end of the fizzy (4) “A Slow Drag of Josephine,” he broke out one of his better tricks, stepping away from the microphone to fill the hall with his unamplified voice. You know who takes this as an invitation to clap along? The kind of jackass who needs to have his hands amputated, that's who.

The Imposters returned to the stage to join him on “Sleep of the Just,” a ballad from 1986’s King of America that felt of-a-piece with National Ransom’s caravan of weary hustlers, deserters, and entertainers.

Imperial Bedroom, the 1982 album that brought a previously-unsuspected lushness and gloss to the Attractions's sound, got a lot of play last night. A pair of its selections, “Beyond Belief” and “Man Out of Time” appear on the long-supplanted single-disc compilation The Very Best of Elvis Costello & The Attractions (my personal gateway drug to this music) and thus can’t really be counted as rarities. But two IB album cuts made the gig, too, "Town Cryer" and "You Little Fool." Please enjoy these official music videos for (5) "You Little Fool" and (6) “New Lace Sleeves,” which showed up as another audience-pick late in the show. They differ radically in their approach, hiding their singer and putting him front and center, respectively, but they wear their early-Thatcher-era incept dates with equal pride.

Man, this cat has written a lot of good songs, holy cow.

Oh, here's the complete setlist:

01 Lipstick Vogue
02 Watching the Detectives
03 So Like Candy / Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (The Animals)
04 The Other End of the Telescope
05 All-Time Doll
06 Strict Time
07 Man Out of Time
08 Next Time ‘Round
09 Out of Time (The Rolling Stones)
10 Cry, Cry, Cry (Johnny Cash)
11 I Still Miss Someone (Johnny Cash)
12 Town Cryer
13 You Little Fool
14 Pump It Up
15 Heart of the City (Nick Lowe)
16 (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea
17 I Want You

ENCORE

18 All These Strangers (solo acoustic)
19 A Slow Drag with Josephine (solo acoustic)
20 Bullets for the Newborn King (solo acoustic)
21 Sleep of the Just

ENCORE 2

22 Welcome to the Working Week
23 No Action
24 Uncomplicated
25 Beyond Belief
26 New Lace Sleeves
27 National Ransom
28 (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?

Elvis Costello knows all about Mondays. No need to beat around the bush, just rock his "Welcome to the Working Week" and enjoy the evening however you please.

When it comes to doing your own thing, De La Soul know what's up. They weren't afraid to confound hip-hop expectations and stay true to their own creative and strange visions. "Me, Myself, and I" should keep your day fresh and independent.

Local emcee Ardamus likes a good time as much as you do. Probably more. His tracks are both conscious and toke-worthy. Screw the weekend, go party with Ardamus and Beans (from Anti-Pop Consortium) tonight at DC9.

So begins Bret Easton Ellis’s new meta-meta-novel, Imperial Bedrooms, a 25-years-in-the-making sequel to his 1985 debut Less Than Zero. This latest effort borrows another line from Elvis Costello and returns us to the dark void of Hollywood, where a familiar cast continues to live out its morally questionable lives. Blair, Julian Wells, Trent Burroughs, and Rip Millar are all here and, once again, Clay is our narrator. He’s a successful writer now, and his novel The Listeners is being made into a film, which he’s writing the screenplay for and has a hand in producing (nudge nudge, wink wink).

Of course, this isn’t The Hills or Entourage (thank God) and so this isn’t a glitzy, glamorous exploration of Hollywood success. Instead, we follow Clay’s navigation of the town’s underbelly, where he is haunted by strange visions, a dubious past, an ominous stalker, and the unspoken darkness that looms just out of the frame. This is all a complex cipher, because you’re never quite sure what’s just in Clay’s mind, what’s merely an extension of Ellis’ life, and what you’re purposely not being told (or being lied to about). But that’s to be expected. Ellis has never been good with a definitive narrative truth and he’s not about to change.

A lack of change is the real problem with Imperial Bedrooms. There’s little new in the story and Ellis’ writing style hasn’t evolved much, either. Like its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms is a strung-out series of vignettes that rely on paranoia, manipulation, and extreme violence to propel the reader. At times, this violence seems unnecessarily grotesque, as if Ellis is merely trying to top his own previous excesses or, worse yet, trading obscene violence for another shot at seizing the zeitgeist. It’s sad to think that so little has changed for him in the past 25 years. In some ways, Less Than Zero predicted our love of extreme news and celebrities like Paris Hilton and Tila Tequila–which was part of its considerable brilliance–but now that’s just the way things are. Imperial Bedrooms holds an unflinching mirror up to the shallowness of the Thirty Mile Zone (and our fascination with it), but it’s a picture we’ve all seen before.

Bret Easton Ellis speaks tonight at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose. Free.

Lindstrom + Prins Thomas: "Rothaus (Groove Edit)"
Norwegian disco producers Lindstrom and Prins Thomas have always looked to the past for inspiration, but this time they're looking further back than usual. Where they were once content to tune the way-back machine into the '80s, to better feel the pulse of italo-disco, their second collaborative record, Lindstrom + Prins Thomas II, knocks off another ten years, going all the way back to the krautrock-era. "Rothaus" is more than a little jammy, with a handful of keyboards randomly gurgling over a steady rhythm, recalling the more transcendent moments of fusion-era Miles Davis or Ash Ra Tempel.

Animal Collective: "Summertime Clothes (Dam Funk Remix)"
Animal Collective's much loved Merriweather Post Pavilion proved once and for all that the Baltimore-bred trio could make decent use of bottom end. But getting all of those newfound bass frequencies into the pocket? Well, they aren't quite there yet. Perhaps that's why the band commissioned smooth-sounds maven Dam Funk for this remix of "Summertime Clothes." The Los Angeles-based producer scrapes off the atmospheric gook and rolls in the analog synths, re-shaping the song into something tight and slinky enough to fit comfortably on Prince's 1999.

The Dead Weather: "Treat Me Like Your Mother"
Speaking of Prince, since when did Jack White become alterna-rock's answer to The Purple One, jumping from instrument to instrument, and from band to band? "Treat Me Like Your Mother," by Dead Weather–White's new super-group with Kills singer Alison Mosshart–finds him serving two roles, drummer and hype man.
Doing both simultaneously must be a bit of a task, given the song's jagged and bombastic rhythms. But White nails it here with impressive dexterity or, possibly, just a few overdubs. Never the less, for a guy who's on his second side project, this isn't too bad.

Abba—The Album

Not my favorite Abba record, but my first. Arguably, Abba was a singles band, they didn't have a lot of deep cuts, and apart from "Take a Chance on Me" (the song that I bought the record for) and "The Name of the Game" there isn't a whole lot of love here. I suppose "Eagle", Bjorn Ulvaeus' take on Jonathan Livingston Seagull, is a cultural artifact of the '70s, entertaining for the same reasons Brady Bunch re-runs remain watchable. Anyway, when my college job ended, I left this CD at the warehouse and never came back for it. But it was an important purchase for me at the time, mostly because I would have been too intimidated to buy it until I got to college. In Salt Lake City, Utah, where I grew up, you generally got the stink-eye if you bought anything that even remotely resembled a disco record (but somehow Mormons seem to love Elton John, go figure). I recall that when I brought home a copy of Blondie's Parallel Lines my own mother asked me "Isn't that a gay album?" Obviously, this was not an accusation being leveled with any frequency in Dupont Circle, so I took a, er, chance.

Various Artists—Cold Blue: The Complete 10" Series

After college I spent some time writing scores for a local choreographer. I'll be honest, Phillip Glass I was not. Bang-On-A-Can runner-up, third class is a little closer to the truth. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out creative ways to skirt around my lack of formal technique and compositional training. There were many desperate times when I fled from my room—at that time a comically unhappy place that contained only a single-size bed and a few giant boxes of burned CDs— to rifle through the Olsson's classical section in search of inspiration. Usually I found something that helped me mop up my anxiety a little bit. One of those purchases was this three CD set collected a series of 10" records put out by the New Music label Cold Blue in the early/mid '80s. Some of it's pretty cheeseball–soothing tones from the Steve Lillywhite school of air pudding and yearning atmosphere. But the Chas Smith tracks are pretty chill. At the very least the music's simplicity made me a little more confident that I could follow a similar trajectory and at least not get laughed off the face of the Earth.

The Fall—"Perverted By Language"

My first Fall record. Like many other Fall records that I own, I listened to it exactly twice.

Deerhoof—"Apple O"

Typically, if I wanted something contemporary, I went to DCCD to buy it. But Olsson's generally kept the indie bands that I liked in stock. Also, at the Dupont Circle store they kept a copy of Orthrelm's Norildivoth Crallos-Lomrixth Urthiln on the staff favorites wall for nearly 10 years. Respect.

Elvis Costello—"Armed Forces"

Another Rykodisc re-issue. Probably my favorite Costello record. I listened to this record constantly until one day when I found his biography in the City Paper promo bin, read it, and decided that his whole rage thing was kind of a sham. Regardless, "Green Shirt" is a tight song. The keyboard parts always remind me of the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack.