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There seems to be little confinement to the pop sensibilities of Elvis Costello. Within the last 15 years alone, he has explored chamber music, orchestral pop, symphonic works and collaborations with song stylists as varied as Jenny Lewis, Allen Toussaint and Anne Sofie von Otter. And, yes, there have been great mountains of rock ‘n’ roll to climb, too, although they have seemed more like interludes than the primary focus of Costello’s musical adventures.
Secret, Profane and Sugarcane would seemingly represent another avenue. It’s an acoustic, T Bone Burnett produced country/Americana recording cut with such esteemed string players as dobro ace (and one time Lexingtonian) Jerry Douglas, mandolinist Mike Compton and fiddler Stuart Duncan. But the album is really more of a musical reiteration, and a pretty fine one, too.
The artistic ties to Burnett extend back to the mid ‘80s. But here, the producer simply lets Costello’s inner country demons run loose, even though they differ little from the rock, pop and even operatic upstarts that inhabit his music. “Each time I try to tell the ugly truth, you always let it pass you by,” Costello sings with his usual sense of detached irony during Hidden Shame. “You said I’d never tell you a lie just because I could.” The music roars along with a pronounced bluegrass swagger fortified by Douglas’ wiry dobro accents, Dennis Crouch’ doghouse-style bass and spot on vocal harmonies by Jim Lauderdale. Musically, it sounds like Costello slipped back in time to sit in on a vintage string band session with Jimmy Martin. But the sentiments also possess a dark, human core that links bluegrass to Costello’s keener songwriting.
More playful is Sulphur to Sugarcane, a string-savvy slice of burlesque that outlines a gigolo’s confessional of womanly encounters on the road. Supposedly, Costello added couplets to the song that referenced each city he played during a 2007 tour with Bob Dylan (“The women in Poughkeepsie take their clothes off when they’re tipsy; in Albany, New York, they love the filthy way I talk”). Louisville was part of that tour but escapes mention in the songs. Probably just as well.
As usual, Costello is often as sobering and he is sly. Red Cotton is one of four songs offered in string band form from an in-progress opera Costello is composing about Hans Christian Anderson. Some are achingly romantic (She Handed Me the Mirror, I Dreamed of My Old Lover). Red Cotton, though, leaps from Anderson to P.T. Barnum’s views of an abolitionist America. Who else but Costello could discover a link like that? The back story doesn’t matter here, though. The song’s depiction of slavery, played over elegiac strings, stings all on its own (“White is the color on your fine linen bed, the blood stained red on each cotton thread”).
Other, less weighty delights include The Crooked Line (one of two Costello tunes co-written by Burnett) with Emmylou Harris singing harmony, a re-designed Complicated Shadows (first cut with more rockish intent on 1996’s All this Useless Beauty) and an album closing update of Changing Partners (a 1954 hit for Bing Crosby).
Costello has made bolder Americana statements (2005’s The River in Reverse, for example). But Secret, Profane and Sugarcane is a wondrous, dark and unendingly human scrapbook of songs. That it possesses an equally fascinating string band sound is a mammoth plus.
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