Tomorrow, the great Elvis Costello will release Hey Clockface a new album that he recorded with a small jazz ensemble in Helsinki just before the pandemic. With the new LP imminent, Costello showed up remotely on last night’s episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, and he seriously brought the charm. That guy is just fun to listen to.

Colbert started out his Costello interview by plainly stating that Costello is his favorite rock artist of all time, and you can tell that these two enjoy each other. Costello kept an extremely distracting and constantly-changing Zoom backdrop throughout, and he started out the interview by wearing two pairs of glasses — one over his eyes and one propped up on his head. This was apparently accidental.

Colbert and Costello discussed the pandemic and the comic books included in Costello’s new box-set Armed Forces reissue, and Costello did a dramatic reading from one of the songs he wrote for a forthcoming stage-musical adaptation of the classic film A Face In The Crowd. It was just a good time. Afterwards, Costello sang his recent single “Hey Clockface / How Can You Face Me Now?” with Late Show bandleader Jon Batiste backing him up on piano. Watch the interview and the performance below.

He also did “Party Girl” as an online bonus:

Hey Clockface is out 10/30 on Concord Records.