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Much of the 30A Songwriters Festival is acoustic and intimate. But at the main outdoor stage on a grassy expanse behind Sandestin’s upscale Grand Boulevard retail development — the VIP area backed up to a Tommy Bahama outlet — the festival’s biggest names played fully amplified.
Such was the case for Elvis Costello & the Imposters’ energized afternoon set on Jan. 14. The prolific and literate Costello is an accomplished songwriter with a vast, ever-growing catalog of, in his words, “daft” songs (case in point: the unreleased “My Baby Just Squeals”).
But he also understands the power of an electric guitar, especially when his own is coupled with Charlie Sexton’s. For an audience mostly seated on their own folding beach chairs, Costello and company crammed a lot of stories and songs into 90 minutes.
Such as how his mother loved jazz and worked at a record shop, and his father wore jazzy yellow socks, so thus they were a perfect match. And how Bruce Springsteen’s first album inspired his own “Radio Radio.”
Throughout the festival, artists covered other writers’ songs, and Costello was no exception. He caressed Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy.”
Ever the entertainer, he doffed his hat to the crowd and at one point cautioned, tongue-in-cheek, that the only songs left to play have “girls’ names in the title, which I know are gonna thrill ya’, and ones about confectionaries.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. A girl figures prominently in “Watching the Detectives," but she isn’t named. And no one would likely consider “Blood & Hot Sauce” to be a confectionary.
Costello’s final charge encompassed “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea,” “Pump It Up,” “(What’ So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding)” and “Alison" — as promised, a song with a girl’s name in the title.
