Costello releases his 29th studio album
and first for Starbucks’ Hear Music, assembling one Tasmanian devil
of a Nashville bluegrass record in the process
Given its provenance as an acoustic
album recorded in Nashville in a mere three days, Elvis Costello’s
latest—Secret, Profane and Sugarcane -will inevitably draw
comparisons to his last transmission from the Music City, 1981’s
affectionate if perhaps overly fussed-over country covers essay
Almost Blue. But that sort of snap assessment would be a mistake—the
record this one most directly resembles is 1986’s folk-tinged King
of America, which also happened to be the first time Costello
collaborated with T-Bone Burnett in the producer’s chair, a duty
Burnett fills once again here.
Career comparisons aside, more than
anything, Costello’s latest (amazingly, his 29th studio effort
since My Aim is True was released back in 1977) represents something
of a back-to-the-roots exercise, featuring a batch of songs hauled
out of the closet and road-tested as a solo support act for Bob Dylan
in 2007, then refined in group settings at that year’s MerleFest
and 2008’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. It’s this
Appalachian turn of phrase—deftly supported and played with subtle
grace by an all-star backing group that includes singers Jim
Lauderdale and Emmylou Harris, dobro guitarist Jerry Douglas and
mandolin whiz Mike Compton, among others—that stitches the various
threads of this record into the whole cloth that it is, given that
its songs range from material Costello has written for others (the
country-noir tale “Complicated Shadows” and “Hidden Shame,”
both written for Johnny Cash; “Down Among the Wine and Spirits,”
originally written for Loretta Lynn), written with other purposes in
mind (“How Deep is the Red,” “She Was No Good,” “She Handed
Me a Mirror” and “Red Cotton,” all songs Costello wrote for
his, as yet, unfinished Hans Christian Andersen opera), written with
others at his side (the absolutely terrific Gram Parsons-like
tearjerker, “I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came,” co-written with Ms. Lynn) or
written by others (“Changing Partners,” originally recorded by
Bing Crosby). Even with such a grab bag of material, the record hangs
together seamlessly.
His prototypically clever and
articulate lyrical work infuses the album with a native intelligence
that transcends the inherent limitations of any given genre, perhaps
nowhere better than on “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” a riotous sexual
romp through the American countryside that skewers the reputations of
women from Poughkeepsie to Pittsburgh and dozens of towns in between
in the process. Costello has long since ceased being merely the
Angry Young Man associated with early tracks like “Watching the
Detectives”—he’s become a one-man Rockipedia, and latter-day
albums such as this one find him no less devoted to his craft but
having one helluva good time doing so, no matter the stylistic zip
code of the particular musical station in question.