In 1987, Johnny Cash covered Elvis Costello‘s “The Big Light” on his album Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town. Costello first released the song a year earlier on King of America. By the late ’80s, Costello wrote a song specifically for Cash, “Hidden Shame,” and he recorded it on his 1990 album, Boom Chicka Boom, the title referred to the sound Cash’s backing band, the Tennessee Three, would often produce.
Boom Chicka Boom also features a cover of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” some rerecorded tracks, and collaborations, along with backing vocals by Cash’s mother, Carrie Cloveree (on “Family Bible”), and Elvis Presley’s old backing group The Jordanaires, who had also worked with Cash on some of his earlier Columbia recordings in the late 1950s.
Costello’s lyrics flip through the blame and the torture, and the misery of living with shameful deeds.
I’m sorry to say that you don’t know me
I’m sad in ways you never understood
Each time I try to tell the ugly truth, you always let it pass you by
You said I’d never tell you a lie, just because I could
Did you really think I was a bad man?
You always said that, that should be my middle name
But you don’t know the half of it, you don’t know how that name fits
You don’t know my hidden shame
Hidden shame, shame, shame
That I can’t get free
From the blame and the torture and the misery
Must it be my secret for eternity?
Till you know my hidden shame, you really don’t know me
Well, there’s a different kind of prison
And it don’t even have to look much like a cell
It’s already on your mind, boy, we can see it in your eyes
So, here’s the bars and walls as well
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“Complicated Shadows”‘
Costello finally recorded his version of “Hidden Shame” on Secret, Profane & Sugarcane in 2009. Produced by T Bone Burnett, the album also featured Costello’s co-write with Loretta Lynn, “I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came,” and another song he had originally written with Cash in mind, “Complicated Shadows.”
Initially written as a country song, in Cash’s style, “Complicated Shadows” was a song Costello said he could hear Cash singing as he wrote it.
“I sent it to him near the end of his life, and whether the song reached him or not, or whether it didn’t appeal to him, I hear it in his voice,” said Costello, who eventually recorded “Complicated Shadows” nearly two decades later on his 2009 album Secret, Profane & Sugarcane. “I imagine John to be someone who could deliver the final lines of the song with authority, and it helped me write them to think of him singing them: ‘Take the law into your own hands, but you’ll soon get tired of killing.’”
When Costello came around to recording “Complicated Shadows,” first on his 1996 album All This Useless Beauty, he reworked it into a more rock arrangement that fit the Attractions.
“I think at first it probably sounded a little bit too much like a Johnny Cash song,” said Costello, “and I didn’t want to record it leaning that way with the Attractions.”
Photo: Elvis Costello in Paris, July 1989. (Alain BENAINOUS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
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