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On his countrified new album, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, Elvis Costello sings in the guise of P.T. Barnum, a honky-tonk drunkard and a sleazy politician barnstorming from Albany to Ypsilanti. One character missing from this tableau of Americana: the so-called angry young man of British music that many listeners still identify with the bespectacled 54-year-old singer.
In an unpredictable career spanning three decades, Mr. Costello has collaborated with everyone from symphony orchestras to young pop acts such as Fall Out Boy. To feed his live act, the rock hall-of-famer has recorded recent albums at the pace of a garage band, an approach that's seen him through the recording industry's recent implosion. And now — intentionally or not — he is solidifying a role as a journeyman of American music and one of its most high-profile curators. That came into focus recently with his television show Spectacle, in which he interviewed and performed with influential musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Tony Bennett and Smokey Robinson.
Mr. Costello, who was raised in West London, married a Canadian (jazz singer Diana Krall), and has two-year-old twin sons who are American citizens, dismisses the idea that his art has a national identity. "In my mind the most important thing is the truthfulness of the emotion rather than where it appears to come from geographically," says Mr. Costello, who lives primarily in Vancouver.
But some people close to Mr. Costello say he's evolving into something of an American institution. "He's the closest thing in our culture to a George Gershwin character, not just in his sophistication but in how he moves comfortably from one genre to another," says Bill Flanagan, editorial director of MTV Networks and a friend of Mr. Costello. Spiky anthems like 1978's "Pump It Up" represent Mr. Costello's most familiar hits, but his legacy may be leaning more toward the sound of his new album, which features mandolin, fiddle and a country ballad co-written with Loretta Lynn.
"An awful lot of his greatest work has been in this American-roots music vein," says Mr. Flanagan.
Mr. Costello, whose father was a bandleader and whose mother ran a record shop, has always borrowed from the pop, soul and folk of the U.S. But his collegial standing among earthy American artists, from George Jones to Solomon Burke, has been decades in the making and is unique among British acts of the punk generation. The relationship hasn't always been smooth: He didn't tour the U.S. for two years after a scandal erupted in 1979 over insulting remarks he made about black American singers including Ray Charles. (He immediately repudiated the drunken comments and continued to atone for them over the years, including in his 2003 liner notes for an album reissued from that era.)
The twangy sound of Secret, Profane & Sugarcane may be just a stopover for an artist moving through middle age, but the way it was created could signal where Mr. Costello is headed. He cut the album in three days and before he knew which record company would put it out. Album producer T-Bone Burnett says that approach "sends a powerful statement" about how a veteran act can operate in unsteady times.
The narrative of Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is set in the American heartland, but the project started with the story of a Dane and his love for a Swede. In 2005, the Royal Danish Opera commissioned Mr. Costello to write an opera about Hans Christian Andersen. "Rather than set The Ugly Duckling to music," Mr. Costello says, he found inspiration in Andersen's unrequited obsession with the Swedish songbird Jenny Lind.
"So many people feel themselves unfit and unsuitable for love, and Andersen, in this romantic era with a capital "R," had this tortuous relationship with love," Mr. Costello says.
As a vehicle for this story and other historical threads, including slavery, Mr. Costello incorporated the true story of Lind's turbulent concert tour of the U.S. in 1850, which was organized by P.T. Barnum.
Mr. Costello performed 10 songs from the opera commission — its only staging so far — in Copenhagen in fall 2005. Later, he considered using some of the songs for a solo acoustic album, but as he discussed them with Mr. Burnett, the singer decided they called out for additional instrumentation and "colors."
A year ago the men convened at the Sound Emporium, a Nashville studio built by the musician and producer Cowboy Jack Clement. ("The best sounding room for acoustic music in the world," Mr. Burnett calls it.)
They sat in a semicircle with the country string band they'd assembled and laid down three or four songs a day. With Mr. Costello setting the pace — "He just goes in and pulls the trigger," says Mr. Burnett — there was little risk of overthinking the arrangements.
As he provided harmony vocals, Grammy-winning singer Jim Lauderdale "had to trail Elvis like a bloodhound because nothing was rehearsed," Mr. Burnett says.
In lieu of drums, mandolin player Mike Compton and double bassist Dennis Crouch supplied a driving beat to songs such as "Hidden Shame," about an accidental killer. "My All Time Doll," a brooding blues about an out-of-reach lover, is flavored by Jeff Taylor's accordion.
Dubbed the Sugarcanes, a version of this band will tour with Mr. Costello, starting this month. His long-term focus on his live act has helped insulate him from the industry-wide plunge in sales of recorded music, including his own. Released in 1998, Mr. Costello's collaboration album with Burt Bacharach, Painted From Memory, sold more than 300,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
By comparison, his album Momofuku, which he recorded in a week last year and did little to promote, sold about 48,000 copies. "Any number they sell above zero is good," he says.
His current disregard for the machinery of the music industry — "A lot of these people aren't that smart" — caps a career of defying commercial expectations. When Warner Bros. hungered for new-wave hits in the vein of "Radio, Radio," he delivered a country record, 1981's Almost Blue. He continued to zig-zag, jumping from the solo folk of King of America (his first album with Mr. Burnett) to the pop punch of Spike in 1989.
"What seemed like career-wise counterproductive now seems pretty smart, because he has a tremendous live audience who never know what they're going to see," says Mr. Flanagan. "That actually turned out to be a good strategy for the post-record company world that we're entering."
After a decade under the Universal Music umbrella, Mr. Costello is releasing Secret, Profane & Sugarcane on Hear Music, a joint venture between the Concord Music Group and Starbucks Coffee, which will carry the CD in its cafés.
The album's credits reflect Mr. Costello's ties to a group of distinctly American musicians. Johnny Cash recorded the song "Hidden Shame," which Mr. Costello wrote for him. In the kitchen of Mr. Cash's cabin in Tennessee, Mr. Costello sat down to write "I Felt the Chill" with Ms. Lynn. And on the song "Crooked Line," about the challenges of fidelity, Mr. Costello harmonizes with Emmylou Harris, who he first toured with 20 years ago.
Popping up in cameos and collaborations with Zelig-like frequency, Mr. Costello is as much a music geek as a pop institution. Last week he appeared at New York's 92nd Street Y for a concert celebrating Mr. Bacharach. Sitting alone in row X at the rear of the theater, Mr. Costello balanced his purple fedora on his knee so he could clap loudly and hoot for Dionne Warwick and Sarah Dash, a founding member of the R&B group Labelle. Later, he crept out of his seat to take the stage and croon Mr. Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" to orchestral accompaniment. He remarked, "I put that in my set in 1977 when people were expecting daggers and razor blades."
The night after the Bacharach gala, Mr. Costello sat in at a jazz club with New Orleans piano player Allen Toussaint, who he made an album with in 2006, The River In Reverse. Earlier this week he helped sing the Spinal Tap song "Gimme Some Money" at a concert by members of that satirical band.
All this came on the heels of a guest appearance on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, in which Mr. Costello took heat about his given name (Declan MacManus) and sang a satiric "We Are the World"-style anthem with the likes of Sheryl Crow, Mary J. Blige and the Beastie Boys.
Mr. Costello's overlapping roles as performer, collaborator and music buff formed the basis for his TV show, Spectacle. The series appeared in the U.S. on the Sundance Channel, which is currently re-running the 13 episodes. Sundance recently announced that Spectacle had been picked up for a second season and discussions are underway with other broadcasters to fully complete financing for the new episodes.
Though Spectacle welcomed a few acts who originated outside the U.S. — including Elton John (who, along with his partner David Furnish, produced the show) and the Police — the roster was dominated by Americans. They ranged from the young indie rocker Jenny Lewis to Herbie Hancock and other artists who influenced the young musician who became Elvis Costello.
"To sing with Smokey Robinson at the Apollo and have him say you take lead and I'll sing harmony, I couldn't believe that was happening," Mr. Costello recalls. "The show is not about the host's personality. It's not about me, it's about them."
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