New Elvis Costello Produced by T Bone Burnett! 

Elvis Costello's new album Secret, Profane & Sugarcane was produced by T Bone Burnett and recorded by Mike Piersante during a three day session at Nashville's Sound Emporium Studio. 

The album includes ten previously unrecorded songs. "Sulphur to Sugarcane" and "The Crooked Line," were co-written with T Bone Burnett while, "I Felt The Chill" marks Costello's second recorded songwriting collaboration with Loretta Lynn. Costello revisits two songs from his catalog in string band style. Both songs were originally written for Johnny Cash. "Hidden Shame" was indeed included on Cash's album Boom Chicka Boom.

The album title makes reference to The Secret Songs, Costello's unfinished commission for the Royal Danish Opera about the life of Hans Christian Andersen. Seeking a new connection from the author to the Anglophone world, Costello wrote about the Andersen's relationship with the world famous singer, Jenny Lind in "She Handed Me A Mirror" and "How Deep Is The Red." "She Was No Good," relates some of the chaotic details of Lind's famous All-American concert tour of 1850, which was promoted by P.T. Barnum. In its aftermath, "Red Cotton" imagines Barnum reading an Abolishionist pamphlet, while manufacturing cheap souvenirs of the adventure. The record concludes with the waltz, "Changing Partners," a song made famous by Bing Crosby.

These are first Costello compositions to be predominantly rooted in acoustic music since his 1986 album, King Of America, which was produced by T Bone Burnett. He also produced the 1989 album, Spike. Joining Costello were Jerry Douglas (dobro), Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Mike Compton (mandolin), Jeff Taylor (accordion) and Dennis Crouch (double bass), some of the most highly regarded artists and musicians in traditional American country music, Bluegrass and beyond. T Bone adds his distinctive Kay electric guitar to several of numbers, the only amplified instrument on the recording. Jim Lauderdale takes the close vocal harmony part throughout the record and Emmylou Harris contributed a third vocal part on the chorus of "The Crooked Line" on the final day of recording.

This vinyl edition contains two bonus tracks, an arrangement of Lou Reed's "Femme Fatale" and Costello's sequel to the old Appalachian murder ballad, "Ornie Wise," entitled "What Lewis Did Last."

Elvis Costello Secret, Profane & Sugarcane Track Listing

1.  Down Among the Wines and Spirits
2.  Complicated Shadows
3.  I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came
4.  My All Time Doll
5.  Hidden Shame
6.  She Handed Me a Mirror
7.  I Dreamed of My Old Lover
8.  How Deep is the Red
9.  She Was No Good
10. Sulphur to Sugarcane
11. Red Cotton
12. The Crooked Line
13. Changing Partners
14. Femme Fatale
15. What Lewis Did Last