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That Fatal Mailing List #33: "Complicated Shadows" (1996/2009)
“Complicated Shadows” has had a…complicated life as a song.
Elvis Costello recorded his original demo in 1992 or ‘93 and provided it to Johnny Cash as the legend was embarking on his first American Recordings project with producer Rick Rubin. The song went unrecorded, although Cash has covered two other Costello compositions, “The Big Light” and “Hidden Shame.”
“Complicated Shadows” then re-emerged in 1996 on the album All This Useless Beauty, which began life as a collection of EC recording songs he had written for others, explaining how “Shadows” found itself suddenly resurrected as a humid, claustrophobic rock song. That version featured in the closing credits of episode three of The Sopranos and was a close contender for the show’s theme song at one point.
Most recently, “Shadows” again returned to Costello’s mind as one of the songs performed for his 2009 album Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, an acoustic folk-country effort recorded with a murderers’ row of studio talent in Nashville and produced by T-Bone Burnett. For a blurb on his website around the time of that album’s release, Costello recounted the circumstances of returning to “Shadows” yet again:
I've recorded “Complicated Shadows” before, in 1996. I liked that version at the time but I've always been trying to get the song back to the way it felt when I first wrote it, without dreaming too much about how Johnny Cash might have done it.
The band is set up in a tight semi-circle at Sound Emporium. I've got my old Gibson J-50 for the rhythm. There are no drums in the room but we don't miss them. Mike Compton's mandolin is the backbeat and Dennis Crouch's bass, “the kick”, on most songs.
T Bone has come out of the production booth to play his Kay 161 – the only amplified instrument on the record but Jerry Douglas takes the solo on dobro. Stuart Duncan hangs back only to enter a just the right moment after the bridge. We cut “Complicated Shadows” in two takes.
All of which begs the question: Why male models? Also, why this song?
It’s a great tune, straightforward and brutal, evoking the classic “murder ballad” motif perfectly. But I don’t think EC has returned to it so often because he loves it just that much.
I think it’s more about what he mentions in the write-up above, an ongoing effort to “get the song back to the way it felt when I first wrote it.” You can tell Costello had a version in mind when he cut the demo; obviously, that version would have been sung by Johnny Cash. When Cash passed on the tune, it morphed into the crunchy rock version that the Attractions pulled off. The final version—a cover of an original, itself a cover of a demo—is probably closest to Costello’s vision.
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