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Elvis Costello's genre-jumping has gone from parlor trick (his 1980 faux-Memphis soul album Get Happy!) to calling card (Classical music? Fake Nashville? Write adult pop with Paul McCartney and Nawlins soul with Allen Toussaint? Done, done and done.)
Even his hardest-core fans a whole mess of whom were at Bass Concert Hall on Tuesday night to see ol' Napoleon Dynamite — are probably grateful he's never made a hip-hop album.
(Note to Elvis: Don't.)
His latest record Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is another country-ish one, part bluegrass, part Americana and, well, part songs from an unfinished musical about the life of Hans Christian Andersen. As you might imagine, it is intermittently successful at all three.
For the tour, however, Costello decided to bet it all on a faux-grass/ drummerless Americana set up.
Opening with "Mystery Train" and flanked by such string-band ninjas as dobro player Jerry Douglas, guitarist Jim Lauderdale and mandolin player Mike Compton, Costello treated fans (or forced them to Sit through, judging from a few scattered reactions) to nearly three hours of nearly all of the new album, fresh arrangements of Costello classics and a few covers.
(How long has the Grateful Dead's "Friend of the Devil" been part of the set? A few folks who clearly remembered Costello's angry young punk days looked a little weepy when he started to sing "I lit out from Reno / I was trailed by twenty hounds...." But the one woman who stood up to do the Dead's "noodle dance" was thrilled.)
Most of these songs, of course, didn't really sound like country or bluegrass numbers — these were Costello style tunes played by a string band. The closest to honky-tonk was "I Felt the Chill Before The Winter Came," written with Loretta Lynn.
He found the little-discussed Euro-folk roots of the Velvet Underground in an Americana-fied "Femme Fatale," and went electronic on "The Delivery Man."
Once a notorious cranky pants, Costello has aged into a chatty showman, explaining how the Anderson songs ("She Handed Me a Mirror," for example) were about the "unfortunate-looking" writer's love of Jenny Lind.
"Everyday I Write the Book," "Brilliant Mistake" and "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" all got rootsy reboots. ("Everyday," which reworked the chorus into a stretched-out harmony, scored a standing ovation.)
Patty Griffin even showed up for "The Crooked Line," where she was merely the background and "The Poisoned Rose," which she owned.
"I need a love that can keep me happy," Costello sang in another unexpected cover. Since his live audience will follow him wherever he goes, he seems to have found one.
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