Elvis Costello

Water claims four of his ten planets, earth three, air two and a single one fire, and six of the ten sit in cardinal signs with nothing at all retrograde. The element that would charge at a thing is down to one planet and nothing here faces backwards. The record gives Costello My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, and says he has worked across pop, country and chamber music with the Brodsky Quartet.

The Sun sits on the second degree of Virgo with Mercury at five, both in the sign built on doing the thing properly and seeing the detail everybody else missed. Jupiter and Uranus sit together in late Cancer, and his Moon sits at twenty six degrees of the same sign at noon. If the Moon was still in Cancer, as it was for most of that day, it sat conjunct Uranus at a quarter of a degree, which reads as emotional independence and as moods that change with no apparent cause. For a songwriter who moved between three different kinds of music, that is the placement to start from.

Mercury is tied to both Jupiter and Saturn. It sits in mild friction with Jupiter at thirteen hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here, scale outrunning accuracy, and sixty degrees from Saturn at just under three quarters, which is organisation and long concentration. A songwriter moving between those three kinds of music would need exactly those two. Venus sits seventy two degrees from Mars at four fifths, desire that moves easily, and Mars itself sits on the first seventeen minutes of Capricorn.

Jupiter came the whole way round to its Cancer starting point on 11 May 2026, at seventy one, and five circuits precede it. Cancer counts what is still being held, which for a record that names two early albums and then two other kinds of music entirely is the measure that reaches all of it. One planet in fire, with six in cardinal signs and nothing retrograde, describes somebody who keeps starting things in the open and has never needed to argue with himself about it first.