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For his new album, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, Elvis Costello reteamed with producer T Bone Burnett, who manned the boards for Costello’s 1986 masterwork, King of America, as well as 1989’s equally impressive Spike. On those albums, co-producer Burnett followed Costello’s lead and together they crafted works that adhered to Costello’s stylistic direction of the ’80s. For Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, Costello wanted to follow the more traditional Americana leanings of Burnett’s recent work, giving Burnett sole control in the producer’s chair.
Utilizing a core band of double bassist Dennis Crouch, fiddler Stuart Duncan, mandolinist Mike Compton and dobroist Jerry Douglas (with harmony vocals from Jim Lauderdale and Emmylou Harris), Burnett has steered Costello down a more typical Bluegrass path, which is clearly what Costello had in mind for this very traditionally skewed set of largely original songs. Costello’s first dalliance with Country, 1981’s Almost Blue, was a set of covers that blended Costello’s distinctive colorations with his love of the Countrypolitan style of the early ’60s and that confused a good many of his New Wave fans, particularly here in the States. Nearly 30 years later, Costello’s artistic shifts are not only accepted but eagerly anticipated.
Secret, Profane & Sugarcane turns the tables on Almost Blue; rather than adapting existing songs to his style, Costello brings his unique songwriting style to a gifted group of players who translate his reflective ballads into Bluegrass-tinged odes of loss and lechery and slight redemption. There are a handful of songs from Costello’s unfinished opera about Hans Christian Andersen, which fit the album’s tone perfectly. There are also a couple of co-writes with Burnett, including the Ragtime swing of “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” the gorgeous Loretta Lynn co-write “I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came,” and a stripped down Delta swamp reading of All This Useless Beauty’s “Complicated Shadows,” all of it bristling with Costello’s creative tension and guided by Burnett’s steady sense of contemporary traditionalism. There’s no mistaking Costello’s profile in here. If the Attractions were on hand, “My All Time Doll” would snarl and slash with the best of his electric catalog. As it is, Elvis Costello has proven once again that his musical mastery extends to whatever he attempts, largely because he understands the secrets of weaving his own identity into the various styles he absorbs and reinterprets.
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