And that’s just the last five years...
It’s fairly obvious that thirty-something years into his career Costello’s modus operandi is to write first and figure out what to do with the results later.
In that regard it helps to be able to call on a variety of collaborators, co-writers, session players and production teams. Coming into Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, we’re back in Coward Brothers territory with T-Bone Burnett twiddling the knobs, but before anyone starts expecting King of America Mark II Elvis doesn’t really do reruns even though the album contains repeats of All This Useless Beauty’s Complicated Shadows, I Dreamed Of My Old Lover from The Delivery Man, a new Hidden Shame and covers of Changing Partners and (on the iTunes version) The Velvet Underground’s Femme Fatale.
Repeats and covers account for about a third of the album. Of the remaining tracks, four (She Handed Me A Mirror, How Deep is the Red, She Was No Good, Red Cotton) come from a song cycle for the Royal Danish Opera about Hans Christian Andersen’s love affair with Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.
The cycle is based around her 1850 visit to America, leaving her admirer behind, with She Handed Me A Mirror built on the story that Lind made Anderson look at his reflection to understand why she would never be his.
Of the other new tracks, two (Sulphur to Sugarcane and The Crooked Line) are Costello/ Burnett co-writes, and Costello shares the writing credit with Loretta Lynn on I Felt the Chill. Down Among The Wines and Spirits, and My All Time Doll are solo compositions.
It’s a collection of songs recorded in a three-day session in Studio A at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, where Burnett and engineer Mike Piersante had cut the soundtracks to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain as well as Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand.
In line with the subject matter of most of the songs, a sort of Deep South Gothic Victoriana if such a beast exists, the instrumental accompaniment is acoustic, and if there’s anything that actually has been electrified it isn’t obvious in the mix. Drums are also conspicuous by their absence.