{"id":20653,"date":"2024-05-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=20653"},"modified":"2024-04-30T18:10:47","modified_gmt":"2024-04-30T17:10:47","slug":"t-bone-burnett-finds-the-other-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2024\/05\/01\/t-bone-burnett-finds-the-other-side\/","title":{"rendered":"T Bone Burnett Finds\u00a0The Other Side"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T Bone Burnett Finds The Other Side<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

and Norman Warwick reads Paste\u00b4s news<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The legendary producer discusses his inspirations and the all-star cast of musicians featured on his first solo album in 16 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo by Dan Winters<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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T Bone Burnett<\/a> is best known for producing such classic albums as Los Lobos\u2019 How Will the Wolf Survive,<\/em> Elvis Costello\u2019s King of America,<\/em> Robert Plant & Alison Krauss\u2019s Raising Sand <\/em>and the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? <\/em>But he is now reviving his own fruitful\u2014if not sporadic\u2014career with his first solo album in 16 years: The Other Side<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>If it\u2019s less brittle and biting than much of his previous work, it\u2019s no less sceptical about the state of the modern world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe live on a hostile planet,\u201d T Bone Burnett says over Zoom from the patio of a Los Angeles hotel, \u201cand life has always been outrageous. That hasn\u2019t changed. What has changed is the tone of my response to that world. Before my tone was too strict, too hard, not loving enough for what I care about now. I asked myself, \u2018Do I want to be in the room with that tone?\u2019 The answer was no.\u201d When he uses the term \u201ctone,\u201d Burnett means more than just the timbre or texture of the music. After a note is first struck, it hangs in the air, either ringing with sympathetic overtones or clanging with discordant vibrations. The one unconsciously evokes conciliation in the listener, while the other suggests confrontation. Either way, it creates an emotional temperature for the song. There\u2019s a time and place for each, and in the past Burnett has often chosen the latter, but for his new album, he adopted a friendlier tone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m too old to be an angry young man,\u201d he explains. \u201cI\u2019m 76. It\u2019s not that I believe in something different; it\u2019s that I believe in more things. Hopefully I\u2019ve gotten smarter in my old age. I\u2019ve had incredible experiences in my life, and all that experience goes into these songs. I feel I\u2019ve come into a clearing where I don\u2019t have to save myself or anyone else, where the songs don\u2019t need to be anything but beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTone is underneath everything,\u201d Burnett continues. \u201cAuthors, filmmakers, painters all talk about the tone of their work. In the human voice, there can be a kind tone and an angry tone; people can say one thing with their words and another thing with their tone. When you\u2019re reading there\u2019s a tone underneath the words. That\u2019s what poetry is all about; it takes you into the mystery of life. That\u2019s tone; that\u2019s music. It\u2019s clear to me that we invented spoken language to be able to lie, because when you sing, the tone lets everyone know what you mean.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Burnett\u2019s use of tone is evident on the new song \u201c(I\u2019m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day.\u201d Over the drummer-less, clickety-clack train beat reminiscent of Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Two, there\u2019s a bouncy, friendly dobro lick from Colin Linden (right)<\/em><\/strong> and a fence-mending vocal from Burnett. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be the judge, and I don\u2019t want to hold a grudge,\u201d he sings. \u201cI\u2019m gonna get over this someday; I might as well get over it now.\u201d Cash\u2019s daughter Rosanne adds a humming harmony, and the song\u2019s healing, hymn-like quality is complete. \u201cThat was like a song by Don Gibson, a 1950s country songwriter I like a lot,\u201d Burnett explains. \u201cAnd the arrangement had that Tennessee Two sound. To me, Johnny Cash is like Walt Whitman, an American giant. I like that early rockabilly period before they had drums, and there are no drums anywhere on this record. Drums take up a lot of sonic space\u2014they reach your ears very quickly\u2014and I wanted a lot of room on this album.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

T Bone Burnett had produced the Grammy-winning soundtrack for the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. <\/em>This time, he was applying to his own songs the \u201ctone\u201d of Cash\u2019s earliest Sun singles. On those, the resonance of Cash\u2019s baritone and the clipped, percussive sound of the guitars and upright bass made drums superfluous. As such, Burnett is returning to the approach of what many believe is his greatest solo album, 1980\u2019s Truth Decay.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI did that record without drums,\u201d he remembers. \u201cWe sat around in a circle and just played. Working with those guys\u2014Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer, Mark O\u2019Connor and Roy Huskey\u2014led me into the world of O Brother, Where Art Thou? <\/em>We recorded that with one mic, so the instrumentalists were several feet away. When you put a mic too close, the attack overwhelms the tone. Singers can get close, and it sounds exciting, but a drum or banjo has too much attack. When the drums are loud, they force everyone else to play loud too. It forces you to play through a microphone into an amplifier and back from a monitor, you\u2019re further removed from the source.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burnett is stretched out in a chair\u2014all six-feet-four-inches of him\u2014in front of his hotel\u2019s stucco wall. His silver hair is cut short, and he wears a black suit that makes him look like a 19th-century preacher. There have been times when Burnett has climbed into the pulpit to skewer the contradictions and dysfunctions of contemporary America by casting it as \u201cZombieland\u201d or \u201cFear Country.\u201d These apocryphal pronouncements were accompanied by stabbing, jagged music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on Truth Decay,<\/em> 1986\u2019s T Bone Burnett <\/em>and this year\u2019s The Other Side,<\/em> Burnett becomes a different kind of preacher, one whose comforting hymns assuage wounds and channel longing. The opening track on the new album is \u201cHe Came Down,\u201d a lulling, rolling river of song that praises a hero who may or may not be a Messiah. The vocal is backed only by Linden\u2019s tumbling dobro figure. \u201cMy wife Callie and I were having coffee one morning,\u201d Burnett recalls, \u201cand she asked me something about Appalachian music. I played those opening lines\u2014\u2018After he climbed the mountain high, he came down\u2019\u2014as a kind of explanation. I liked them. I asked myself, \u2018Is he coming down from drugs? Is he coming down from heaven or from his high horse?\u2019 When I started chasing the song down, I didn\u2019t think of it as religious but as mythical, as everything we\u2019ve learned from Greece and India.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s just Burnett and Linden on the second song too, but on the third they are joined by Rosanne Cash and bassist Dennis Crouch. On the fourth and fifth songs, Rosanne is replaced on harmonies by the two women in Lucius: Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig. On the sixth song, mandolinist Stuart Duncan and singer Peter More are added. Thus the album begins at its leanest and quietest and gradually expands without ever losing its hymn-like, country-blues feel\u2014and without using any percussion heavier than a tambourine. \u201cT Bone felt there was a natural arc to the way the songs played,\u201d explains Linden, who not only played on every track but also co-produced the album. \u201cIt started out with just him and me then adding Dennis and Rosanne Cash (left)<\/em><\/strong> . That was his way of reeling you in. Then you get to \u2018The Town That Time Forgot,\u2019 and it sounds like the climax of the Ten Commandments<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the pandemic, Burnett broke his own longstanding rule against buying guitars that were too expensive to lose. He went ahead and bought three instruments he\u2019s always wanted: a 1949 Gibson Southern Jumbo, like the one Don Everly played on \u201cWake Up, Little Suzie\u201d; a 1959 Epiphone Texan, like the one Paul McCartney played on \u201cYesterday,\u201d and a 1932 Gibson L5, Maybelle Carter\u2019s guitar. The new guitars soon sparked new songs. The first was \u201cCome Back.\u201d \u201cT Bone sent me an email at the end of \u201922,\u201d Linden explains. \u201cIt said, \u2018I just got three new guitars; why don\u2019t you come over and we\u2019ll play them.\u2019 Then he called me one morning and said, \u2018I just wrote a song, can I come over and play it for you?\u2019 That was \u2018Come Back,\u2019 and we started recording on February 15, 2023. He\u2019d come over every day at noon and we\u2019d work till six. He\u2019d come over and work on songs, just chipped away at them. He\u2019s got such a great vision of what something can be, so he\u2019s extremely patient.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cRingo Starr (right)<\/em><\/strong> asked me to write a song for him,\u201d Burnett says. \u201cI\u2019d always liked his voice and his way of telling stories, so I decided to write him a Gene Autry song on the L-5. That was \u2018Come Back.\u2019 Once that happened, it all started happening. On the first verse of that song, it sounds as if those four lines rhyme, but actually they\u2019re alternating rhymes though they\u2019re very close. That made me want to write in perfect rhyme again. When you start writing in perfect rhyme, it sounds like a classic song. I find it\u2019s freeing, because when you find a rhyme, you can work backwards from that, and you can go in either direction. I never would have said something like \u2018I feel you gone\u2019 without looking for a perfect rhyme. It\u2019s a phrase that feels completely new.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linden and Burnett first met on a 1991 Bruce Cockburn tour. Burnett had just produced Cockburn\u2019s Nothing but a Burning Light <\/em>album, and Cockburn had just hired his fellow Toronto guitarist for the road band to support the record. Burnett played parts of the tour, and he bonded with Linden over their shared love of the blues. In 1997, Linden moved from Toronto to Nashville, where Burnett often worked as a producer. Burnett\u2019s wife Callie Khouri was a showrunner for the TV series Nashville <\/em>from 2012 through 2016, and the couple moved permanently from California to Tennessee in 2020. \u201cHe and I loved so much of the same music,\u201d remembers Linden, who also worked on the TV series, \u201cespecially early blues, I\u2019m so connected to \u201820s and \u201830s blues and also Howlin\u2019 Wolf. From the first time I met him, I was blown away by T Bone\u2019s sense of calling as a musician. He felt that playing music was a beautiful thing, and he was so eloquent and heartfelt in how he talked about it. He\u2019s a towering figure, both literally and figuratively.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blues element flavors all the songs on The Other Side,<\/em> sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously. It\u2019s most apparent on \u201cSometimes I Wonder,\u201d co-written by Burnett and Linden. The song is anchored by a relaxed, two-bar Jimmy Reed-like riff, reinforced by off-beat handclaps as Burnett and harmony vocalist Weyes Blood sing, \u201cHe heard her singing in a mournful tone.\u201d \u201cThat definitely comes out of Jimmy Reed,\u201d Burnett agrees. \u201cWhen I was growing up in Texas, Jimmy Reed was like the Beatles. Everyone\u2019s repertoire was part Jimmy, part Chuck Berry, part Buddy Holly. All three of them were great songwriters; all wrote their own music when not many people did. His touch and his tone were incredible\u2014and yet easy to play, like the Carter Family. In my day, the first songs every guitar player would learn first would be \u2018Wildwood Flower\u2019 and \u2018Big Boss Man.\u2019 I wanted a woman to sing on that song, but it needed to be a deeper voice. So I asked Natalie Mering, who goes by Weyes Blood<\/a>. I\u2019m a big fan of Flannery O\u2019Connor, and I was interested that a young woman would adopt one of O\u2019Connor\u2019s titles as a stage name.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burnett grew up in Fort Worth, where at 16 he played on the garage-rock classic, \u201cParalyzed\u201d by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Through his hometown pal Stephen Bruton, who played guitar for Kris Kristofferson, Burnett met Kristofferson, Bob Neuwirth, Steven Soles and Willie Nelson. When these men made a 1974 trip to Hawaii, Burnett, Neuwirth and Soles co-wrote \u201cHawaiian Blue Song.\u201d It remained unreleased until Burnett added a much needed bridge and harmonies from Soles and the song became part of the The Other Side<\/em> album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Bob Dylan<\/a> decided to do the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, he asked his former road manager, Neuwirth, to put a back band together. That\u2019s how the virtually unknown Burnett, Soles and David Mansfield wound up on the legendary tour of small New England venues. Afterward, that trio made three albums as the Alpha Band between 1976 and 1978. \u201cWe met on the Rolling Thunder Tour,\u201d Burnett explains, \u201cand we\u2019ve remained good friends through the years. We were scuffling around on the street when Bob swept us up and put us on stage and gave us the benefit of his energy and his audience. In many ways, it\u2019s been downhill ever since. Steven\u2019s an amazing musical intellect. I haven\u2019t co-written many songs over the years, and most of them have been with Steven and\/or Bobby Neuwirth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until 1980 that T Bone Burnett released his first solo album, Truth Decay. <\/em>But thanks to his mid-1980s work with Los Lobos, Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw and the BoDeans, Burnett became more acclaimed as a producer than as an artist, and he directed his energies in that direction. When he did record under his own name, it was usually with an edgy kind of satirical surrealism\u2014reinforced by the music as much as the lyrics. \u201cAlmost all my work since the time I was a teenager has been about this dystopia we\u2019re currently in,\u201d Burnett says. \u201cAs a kid I learned about Ivan Pavlov and his experiments with dogs. It was clear to me that the experiments he ran on animals were now being performed on humans. I had this recurring dream that there was a line of people wrapped around the block, waiting to have their right hands removed and replaced with consoles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThen in 2005, I walked into an L.A. coffee shop, and everyone was staring at their phones,\u201d Burnett furthers. \u201cI realized they didn\u2019t have to cut off our hands, they just convinced us to keep the consoles in our hands at all times. When I was living within and writing about this dystopia, a lot of my work was hard; the tone was hard. Only by learning how to accept the dystopia in my own life has my tone become kinder, a better tone for my work, for my relationship and for my friends. This album reflects that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

he blues element flavors all the songs on\u00a0The Other Side,\u00a0sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,45,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-music","category-performing-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20653"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20776,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20653\/revisions\/20776"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}