For his second venture recording in the American South this decade, Elvis Costello enlisted producer T-Bone Burnett, coming off his successful collaboration with Robert Plant and Alison Krause on Raising Sand, for an album with bluegrass musicians.

But Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is hardly just a bluegrass album. Costello imbues his songs with rock, country blues and jazz sensibilities as well as folk themes built around four songs from an unfinished Hans Christian Anderson opera.

The playing is immaculate in a traditional bluegrass style, no drums, and the songs are vintage Costello, always interesting musically and lyrically stories easy to follow and ringing with truth, depth of emotion and at times a sly whimsy.

The album was recorded in a scant three days in Nashville and each track features the core band of Costello on acoustic guitar, T-Bone on most tracks with a Kay 161 electric, Dennis Crouch, double bass, Stuart Duncan, fiddle/banjo, Jerry Douglas, dobro, Mike Compton, mandolin and the harmony vocal of Jim Lauderdale, who often traces Costello closely throughout entire songs. Emmylou Harris joins them on one song, The Crooked Line. Jeff Taylor plays accordion on three tracks.

Things don’t work any better than on Complicated Shadows with its upbeat country feel driven by Burnett’s clicking electric rhythm and Douglas’ complementary dobro fills under lyrics about criminal mistakes and having to pay the price for them.

The moderate tempo opener, Down Among The Wines And Spirits, also wallows in the profane as a drinker won’t give up his demons even for a woman. The omni-present Lauderdale easily follows Costello through all his melodic turns and twists on the track without ever seeming obtrusive to the lead singer. I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came, written with Loretta Lynn, is arranged with a traditional waltz-time country feel, flowing over words that suggest imminent betrayal.

My All Time Doll has Costello using his best new wave vocal inflections in the most rock-oriented tune on the album, a moderate straight four feel built around his staccato acoustic rhythm with Compton’s mandolin dancing on top and Taylor’s accordion weaving lines underneath the rhythm.

The high-flying country rocker Hidden Shame, with all the players pulling out the stops, most notably Duncan, leads into a four-song interlude, three from the Anderson opera Secret Songs and one from Delivery Man, which Costello recorded mostly in Mississippi. The Delivery Man’s I Dreamed Of My Old Lover is a captivating waltz with the provocative lyric of a woman who fears betraying herself as she sleeps.

Of the Secret Songs, the two with allusions to blood, How Deep Is The Red? and Red Cotton, which comes up later in the running order, work the best. The sprightly feel of How Deep belies its forboding lyric and Red Cotton speaks with the voice of P.T. Barnum, juxtaposing the slave trade with preparations for his American tour.

No question, the listener will have the most fun with Sulpher To Sugarcane, a 1920s jazzy romp with baudy lyrics about what Costello calls the Old Campaign. The Crooked Line with Harris is another highlight, featuring a melody that takes unusual rhythmic turns over the conventional upbeat bluegrass feel and precedes the curious closer, Changing Partners, a Bing Crosby staple.

Despite some of its slower, less interesting offerings, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane holds together well. Still it falls short of the mark set by its Nashville predecessor The Delivery Man, which was more consistent throughout. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the two just on the basis of where they were recorded.

I saw Costello and Harris in concert in Wallingford, Conn., at the Oakdale in support of Delivery Man in 2004 with an all-star band that included string master Larry Campbell. That concert equaled if not topped his previous outing at Oakdale with The Imposters in 2002 following the release of When I Was Cruel, which at the time I thought couldn’t be topped. But the ever-changing Costello continually finds new ways to top himself as he moves easily through myriad musical genres.

This time he hasn’t, but what he has created is certainly worth a listen.