“Secret, Profane and Sugarcane” (Elvis Costello)
According to the print edition of Rolling Stone issue 1080, Elvis Costello has stopped working on the Hans Christian Andersen opera he started in 2005. Some of the songs are getting used in a new “roots” acoustic bluegrass record, recorded in Nashville.
Though Costello releases music at an incredible pace – close to 30 studio albums since 1977 – this record was unexpected, even to the artist himself. “Two years ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make any more records,” says Costello, who released the freewheeling rock set Momofuku and hosted the talk show Spectacle in 2008. “It wasn’t much fun anymore.” But a stint opening for Bob Dylan as a solo act in the fall of 2007 got Costello excited about making an unplugged album. “Nobody was coming to hear me, so I could test out new songs,” he says. “The audience applauded, and then I was gone.” Most of the Sugarcane material, including a few songs he wrote for an unfinished opera about Hans Christian Andersen, was road-tested on the Dylan tour and then fleshed out with a full band at North Carolina’s MerleFest in 2007 and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2008.
Burnett assembled the band of top roots sidemen – including dobro player Jerry Douglas, mandolinist Mike Complon and singer Jim Lauderdale – and also fed Costello ideas for tunes. “T Bone sent me Robert Johnson’s ‘From Four Till Late’ and a Sidney Bechet record,” recalls Costello. “And he said, ‘Can we write something that jams those two ideas together?'” The result, “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” is an “I’ve Been Every where”-style blues ramble that wryly mocks loose women from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Ypsilanti, Michigan. “I played that one with Dylan every night,” says Costello, who will tour with the Sugarcane band this summer. “And I was amazed at how much applause you can get for impugning the reputation of a city’s womanhood from the stage.”
What I heard of Momofuku wasn’t all that interesting, but perhaps this new album will be more fun to listen to.