Songfacts®:

• Elvis Costello recorded "The Death Of Magic Thinking" for his The Boy Named If album. The singer centered the record on the years between him leaving boyhood and those times in his adulthood when he'd been told to stop acting like a child.
• Costello wrote this song about the awakening of his teenage lust. It grapples with "the borderline of childhood and adulthood [where] there's a fear and thrill about anything sexual," he told The Daily Telegraph. "It's enticing, intriguing and intimidating, and maybe you don't really want to leave the magic of childhood behind, which I sense in one of my sons."
• The Sopranos writer David Chase gave Costello the title when he met him at a supper in 2010. Costello told him his grandsons had started school and Chase responded: "School. The death of magic thinking."
  
  "I knew exactly what he meant," Costello told The Guardian.
• Costello co-produced The Boy Named If with Carlos Vives and Luis Fonsi overseer Sebastian Krys.