Elvis Costello Nearly Became Stephen Colbert’s Late Show Bandleader

Elvis Costello appeared on several episodes of Stephen Colbert's Late Show over the years, including the series finale this past May. He could have been on a lot more of them.

Costello guested on the newest episode of Rolling Stone Music Now , the podcast hosted by the mag's ace feature writer Brian Hiatt, to promote his new 49th anniversary reissue of debut album My Aim Is True . As Rolling Stone highlights, on the pod Costello told Hiatt he once submitted himself as a candidate to be Colbert's bandleader. "It was an impulsive thing to put myself forward. Steve asked my advice about that role," Costello recalled. "I said, 'What about me?' And I think he thought I was joking, and I said, 'No, I’m not joking.'"

Costello got the idea after seeing the Roots, with whom he collaborated on the 2013 album Wise Up Ghost , find success as Jimmy Fallon's band on Late Night and The Tonight Show . The Roots had been unlikely candidates for such a gig when Fallon first recruited them in 2008, but the arrangement was a boon for them, raising their profile and offering them stability while still allowing them to tour and record at a reduced clip.

"I'd watched what happened with the Roots. I saw what the Roots had achieved across town, you know, that they had saved their own lives, and those of their family around them, by coming off the road. I thought maybe that would be good for us," Costello said. "It hadn’t inhibited them [from] making more records and working on things, and it put them at a center."

Costello added, "Branford Marsalis was the band leader of The Tonight Show . Lots of really great people have done that gig. … And don’t forget, my dad was a radio dance band singer who appeared a lot on the BBC. So I had continuity with the idea." Ultimately, Costello decided the logistics would be too difficult: "I started to think about how much it asked of my bandmates, that they would all have to relocate. I was the only one who lived in New York, so it would have never worked.” Also, he half-jokingly suggested that he probably would've been fired after a few weeks for running his mouth.

The Colbert bandleader job ultimately went to Jon Batiste, who held the gig for seven years before leaving in 2022 . Louis Cato took over as leader for the last four years of the show's run. Notably, Costello and Colbert's performance of "Jump Up" on the Late Show finale was joined by Batiste and Cato, perhaps a nod to the brief moment when Costello was pursuing the bandleader gig. "It was [Colbert's] idea to do that song as a quartet, which was an extraordinary thing to me,” Costello said. “It was a compliment, but it was also a beautiful arrangement that Louis Cato conceived with Jon Batiste and everything, and the three band leaders, as we joked about, ’cause I had briefly been in the frame."

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2513706/elvis-costello-reveals-he-was-almost-stephen-colberts-late-show-bandleader/news/)._