T Bone Burnett is best known as a music producer, but in April, he released “The Other Side,” his first album of new music in 18 years. Asked why he releases his own music so infrequently, Burnett replied, “I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes person. I like creating in private.”
Maybe even more remarkable, this fall, he’s touring behind it.
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He was quoted earlier this year saying he always viewed the audience as a mob coming to get him. “Yeah, like a lynch mob or something,” he laughed. “It was just raw paranoia, but also just insecurity.”
Burnett is more at home in the studio, where he’s produced albums for The Wallflowers, Greg Allman, and Elton John.
Asked what he thinks he can get out of musicians that maybe other people don’t, Burnett said, “Well, what I try to get out of them is just their full love, their full being.”
He certainly did with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on “Raising Sand,” and won the Grammy for album of the year in 2009:
He described “accidentally” ending up in the commercial mainstream in a big way a couple of times. “I mean, it’s always a fluke, but, yes, I have.”
“Has that surprised you?” Mason asked.
“Yeah. Well, in a way, there have been times when you see around a corner, like with ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?'”
Burnett produced and curated the music for the 2000 Coen Brothers film:
“When the Coens came and said they wanted to do a movie about the history of American music, I thought, oh, this all fits together,” said Burnett.
He went on to supervise the music for the films “Cold Mountain” (2004), “Walk the Line” (2005), and “Crazy Heart” (2010), which won him an Oscar for best original song.
Mason asked, “When you’re working on a TV project or a film, what do you see the role of music as? Is it an effective character in a way?”
“Yeah, sometimes it is,” said Burnett. “It’s always the subconscious, the unconscious of the character.”
“In ‘True Detective,” it’s almost like you were trying to curate a vibe.”
“That was a vibe and it had to do with the swamp, and it had to do with the darkness of it all.”
“Sounds kind of fun, actually!”
“It was so fun!” Burnett laughed. “That’s what I mean. It’s fun to do the dark world, you know, as long as you don’t have to actually live in it!”
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Joseph Henry Burnett III grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. He can’t recall how he got his nickname T Bone.
He was on the high school golf team. Golfing great Ben Hogan practiced at the course where he played: “And when he would hit that ball in those pecan trees over there, the resonance, that’s one of the places where I began falling in love with sound, actually, on the golf course, ’cause he would hit, crack that thing and you could hear it all through the trees. Isn’t that crazy? You know, I’m just sonically oriented.”
In 1975, Bob Dylan recruited Burnett to play guitar in his “Rolling Thunder” revue, starting a lifelong friendship. In 2021, they played together again, re-recording Dylan’s classic, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” using a special high fidelity analog system that Burnett says creates the highest quality audio ever.
“We decided to just make one disc; there are no copies,” he said. “The germ of it was, I wanted to do something that couldn’t be put online. It couldn’t be commoditized. I’m not doing this to keep it away from anybody. I’m just doing it to work at the highest possible level.” The disc sold at auction in 2022 for nearly $1.8 million.
Burnett said, “I love the process of recording. I love going into a room where there’s nothing, and then you come out and there’s something.”
“It’s a mystical kind of thing,” said Mason.
“Yeah, it is to me. And you build a world of resonance, and that’s the stuff that’s the most thrilling to me, and the part of life that a machine will never comprehend.”
T Bone Burnett’s new record earned a Grammy nomination this past week for best Americana album, and at 76, he’s even starting to enjoy another sound … the sound of a crowd. “I think I had a much more benevolent view of the audience than I used to have,” he said.
“And that’s because you’re just not overthinking it?” asked Mason.
“Yeah. That’s exactly right!” he laughed.
Asked what music gives him, Burnett replied, “Well, everything, really. It’s my religion. Music gives me life and hope and love, and everything worth having, really!”
You can stream T Bone Burnett’s album “The Other Side” by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Joseph Frandino.