“There’s a river of love that runs through all times,” the singer-producer T Bone Burnett sang in a signature song of his back in the 1980s. But that’s not a river he’s necessarily always been riding. A lot of music from his debut solo album, 1980’s “Truth Decay,” on forward (and even going back to his late 1970s albums with the Alpha Band) has been in the cautionary tale vein. And even when he stepped away from releasing solo albums for decades — focusing on production work, winning Grammys for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and the first Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration — his writing or public speeches were prone to sounding warnings, about everything from degraded audio quality to Silicon Valley making artists’ lives more difficult.
On his new album, “The Other Side,” though, Burnett sounds like he really has rounded a corner to another side of his music — the side that used to have “Generosity is the hallmark of an artist” as his going motto. This record, his first solo album of all-new material in 18 years, has him singing in an arguably warmer voice, with a definitely warmer attitude. It stands in contrast to the chilly, electronically oriented “Invisible Light” albums he has done with a trio in recent years, closer to the string-band sound he’s mastered in some of his production efforts but only occasionally adopted in his own very intermittent records over the years.
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A T Bone Burnett who is embracing the spotlight as an artist would seem to be a different guy than the fellow who’s often insisted over the years he prefers to stay out of it. But, as he tells PvNew in an extensive interview conducted in his room at the Village Recorder in West L.A., he still has trepidations about returning to having his name on the front of the album and on the marquee. His touring for the time being is limited to a series of shows in his adopted hometown of Nashville, although he’s considering gigs in his second home, L.A., or on the festival circuit. Whatever you do, don’t call yourself a follower of his — Burnett makes it clear he doesn’t like being tailed.
“The Other Side” is being described as your first solo album of new material in almost 20 years — since “The True False Identity” in 2006. You’ve had some other projects during that time, and you released a couple of “Invisible Light” concept albums billed to a trio. But does this really feel like your first new solo record since the 2000s?
In a lot of ways it feels like my first solo record at all. Everything I’ve written up until now was written from within, and most often about, this dystopia we now find ourselves in. And this is the first record I’ve written since I escaped the dystopia. So I’ve lost the cynicism… I don’t even know how to categorize it. It is the first post-dystopian record I’ve made, let’s put it that way.
Your records have usually been filled with a lot of social commentary, and you’ve given talks about the uses and abuses of the Internet to trample on artists’ rights or exert social control.
When I was a kid, when I was about 11 or 12, I started having this dream — I had it probably 30 times through my teenage years — that we were lined up in the parish hall of my Episcopal church in Fort Worth, Texas. And there were these shadow men at the far corner that you couldn’t make out. You couldn’t see their faces; you could just see these sort of dark figures way down the way down the hall. And they were removing everyone’s right hand and replacing it with an electronic hand that could become their control mechanism. I would wake up from that dream in a cold sweat, because I was already playing guitar at the time, and I would be almost screaming in the dream, “I gotta get outta here! They can’t take my hand.” I would wake up in a panic.
And I started reading Orwell and Huxley, of course, but also more importantly, Marshall McLuhan and JacquesEllul, who was the brilliant Christian lay theologian — I guess you would call him sociologist — who analyzed propaganda and technology and their role together, and Neil Postman, who wrote a brilliant book called “Technopoly” and “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” There were a number of writers I followed all through my life that were all writing about a dystopia, and it was the dystopia of my dream. And my nightmare came true in the early 2000s, when I walked into a coffee shop one day and saw everyone in it looking at his phone in silence. I realized they hadn’t had to cut our hands off; they just put it in our hands.
And I decided, OK, we’re here now in this dystopia I’ve been trying to warn about for more than 40 years, and so I want to wrap this up. And that’s when I began the “Invisible Light” records [which have been credited to Burnett, Jay Bellerose and Keefus Ciancia]. And I was just finishing the third “Invisible Light” record, which is called “IT” … when all these other songs started coming, I just realized I didn’t need T Bone Burnett anymore, whoever or whatever I thought I was. And so I just let go of it all. I’m going to finish that resolution [to “Invisible Light”], because it’s pretty interesting. But I really do consider this the first record of whoever I am now — that person.
What do you feel like you replaced the dystopia with, then, for this album?
Well, I have to say, without meaning to sound trite or any other negative quality, I think I replaced it with love. That’s the idea.
I do think underneath everything is love, and I think all things are sentient and all things love. My Callie (Khouri, his wife, the writer-filmmaker) sends me videos of different species of animals all helping each other and holding each other, and wild things. I grew up in Texas, so the general attitude was, if it moves, shoot it!. And I’ve come a long way from that. I think maybe I may become a vegetarian, because I’ve started realizing how much all of these creatures that we eat love, how much life they have in them. I still eat meat, and I don’t think it’s evil to do. We’re all conditioned to eat animals over centuries and eons. But maybe it is a better idea to go away from that… although plants are sentient too. So if we’re eating anything, we’re eating life, eating love.
So the answer to your question is, I think I replaced all that cynicism with love. I don’t want to place any jackets on myself about it, because I don’t want to prejudice people. I want to let them decide for themselves. I’m not gonna stop sounding the alarm. But certainly I think this album that I’ve just made is the most powerful response I’ve had in my own life to the dystopia. I’ve found that standing outside the dystopia and actually loving people is a much more powerful response to the dystopia than attacking it head-on. But I will continue to attack it head-on as well.
Musically, it will have some callbacks for fans of yours. People enjoy hearing you capture acoustic instruments like you have here, which you’ve done a lot in some of your productions for other artists. And you did it for yourself with “T Bone Burnett,” the self-titled record you recorded for Dot Records [in 1986].
Well, that album is the one that it’s most closely related to in my prior work, for sure — that no-drums, simple string-band music. And that was an album that started my interest in string-band music that led to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and all the stuff I’ve done in that vein. Because I met Jerry Douglas and Alison Krauss and that whole group of musicians at the time, I went to Nashville to start to explore that and that kind of music. But I was in a band with Stephen Bruton in the 1960s [in Texas] that played played “Hello Stranger” by the Carter Family [from the 1930s] and things like that. So I was well aware of it and loved it, but I never thought of it as in any way a viable way to make a living or to be a musician in the latter part of the 20th century.
I hadn’t abandoned it, I just sort of left it behind, even though (it factored into) records I did in the early 1980s. Like “Proof Through the Night” had “Shut It Tight” on it, which was very much a string-band record. And even “Truth Decay,” although that was a rockabilly kind of record, had a lot of that country music in it. Or what I think of as American music. You know, some of it has drums and some of it doesn’t, and sometimes the drum is a snare drum, and sometimes the drum is a mandolin. But it’s all essentially the same kind of hybrid American music.
I think of it as a country-blues record, very much. For one thing, Colin Lindon [Burnett’s co-producer and primary collaborator on the album] is definitely the best country-blues musician in the world today. He knows every single note Robert Johnson ever played and can play it brilliantly, and not just Robert Johnson, but Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell; he knows that whole canon inside out. So we were coming from that place.
Certainly the addition of Lucius expands it. They’re extraordinary orchestrators with their voice and take that music someplace else.
Lucius elevate everything they appear on. And their voices are distinctive, but very malleable, so they don’t sound the same very often on any two songs, even though you can tell it’s them. They have the ability to sound grand without sounding corny in the way that grandiose female backing vocals could.
They’re advanced. In fact, the things they sang, no one’s ever sung before. They’re not doing background parts. The overtones created by the two of them singing together are thrilling. I’ve never heard that sort of blend between two voices before. And then, their arrangements, their orchestrations of the parts are complex and inventive and, you know, I have no idea where they’re coming from.
This was your first time working with Lucius, right?
It is. I met them up at Joni Mitchell’s house at one of the rehearsals for the Joni Nights that they do, and they sang a new song they had written, and it was otherworldly. I thought voices were coming out of the walls. Or I couldn’t tell what was happening, but it was an amazing sound. And there were some of these songs that just seemed to lend themselves to their tones, so I called them. As I always do, I just turned them loose and said, “Do whatever you want to do.” And they did several tracks on every one of these songs, and then they said, “Well, just use whatever you want.” And we used every note that they sang because it all added up into what I think of as a magnificent orchestration.
The musicians you worked with are known within the community, sometimes for their work with you on other people’s albums.
Colin and I worked the whole thing out together, the two of us, and recorded most of it with just the two of us sitting around playing. And we added Dennis Crouch, who is the rhythm section unto himself, and gets the most beautiful bass tone of any string bass playerever since Roy Husky Jr., who was the greatest slap bass player of all time. When Roy Husky Jr. died at 42, I couldn’t put bass on a record for two years because I was grieving for him so much. But Dennis came along and filled that void, and he’s an extraordinary musician. When people in the studio are having trouble with the headphone balance, I often say, “Well, just turn off everything except Dennis and play with him, and you’ll be fine.” So it’s mostly the three of us.
Then there’s an extraordinary musician called Rory Hoffman, who plays many different instruments — clarinet, slide guitar, accordion. He whistles with symphonies all over the world. Stuart Duncan is maybe the best Appalachian-type country fiddle player ever. Certainly he’s the most adept; he can play any sort of music from classical to a Bill Monroe tune. So it’s mostly us. Jay Bellerose did some backbeats and did some clapping. There’s hardly any percussion except for Dennis playing slap bass, but I love Jay, and I had to include him a little bit.
Your voice sounds different on this. You’ve acknowledged that you were trying to sing in a different way, and you said that you were singing from your chest instead of your head. How is that a decision that you just make, this far into a career?
Well, I was writing for my chest rather than my head, too, so it seemed appropriate to sing from my chest. Some of that came from when I was doing a lot of voiceover. I was working with Audible on audio-only stuff, doing some things they call “Words + Music.” And in recording my voice, I dropped down into my chest to read the stories because I found it more listenable, so that was part of it. And then I was working on an Audible piece with Elvis Costello and Christopher Guest called “The True Story of the Coward Brothers,” and we recorded some songs; I was singing in that voice, and they were very encouraging, and then I just started doing that. I just started thinking, “I wonder why I used to sing the way I used to sing.” I wondered who I was trying to be.
And that’s one of the things I would always try to help other singers with: We all grow up imitating someone, and we all grow up with an idea of what singing is. And I’ve known for a great long time that singing is not about hitting pitch or using focal quirks. All singing about is generosity, about opening your hands and opening your arms, letting the story unfold for the listener. And there is no real such thing as pitch. Pitch is just made up of tone. Pitch is a description, but pitch is really irrelevant to the storytelling. Like, Ralph Stanley never sang a major third or a minor third, for instance. He always just sang a mountain.
So I’ve always tried to help singers strip away any affectations or habits they’ve picked up, and this time I just decided, I thought, OK, I’ll just do that for myself. I’ll just get rid of all the affectation. I don’t know how exactly it all came about that I ended up acting like I was singing in the way I did. There were too many other people in there.
The album is filled with love songs about partners separated and longing. In the press notes it said that these characters may not even be on the same plane.
Yeah, they may not. I don’t know. None of this stuff was conscious, by the way. This is all stuff that just landed on me. So yeah, I do see that now. If I wanted to analyze it in that way, the first song, “He Came Down,” would be a statement of intent, that this is a country-blues record and it sounds like this. And then all the rest of the songs are about yearning and dislocation in relationship, in one way or another. And they grow darker, especially through the second side. It gets darker until you come to the end and suddenly they’re together again. So there is a thread and there is a resolution. I suppose that’s a theme that was just part of the unconscious of what I was doing. Certainly I feel the separation that we all suffer with.
“Little Darling” is a pretty happy song to end on, given the uncertainty of some of the songs that precede it.
I think it is. It’s just suddenly, she’s there. How did this happen?
The opening song, “He Came Down,” sounds like it’s kind of partly a gospel song and partly not.
Well, it’s not a gospel song; it’s a mythological song. So it’s about coming down from the mountain. It’s about coming down from drugs. It’s about coming down from your own self-importance. It’s about coming down from heaven. It’s about coming down into hell. It’s about coming down into being.
Where have you landed at in terms of being out there as a solo artist with your own identity, apart from producing or bolstering other artists’ identities? Because you’ve been quite happy to stay out of the limelight. You didn’t love performing. You’re gonna do a few performances.
I don’t know either yet. I’m just gonna stay in Nashville. I’m gonna use the Willie Nelson model. You know, he used to just play Austin, and I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna play around Nashville for as long as people are interested. I’m 76 years old. I don’t know how much performing I have left in me at this point, but we’ll see. It’s always nerve wracking to perform in front of other people. I much prefer the privacy of the studio. So yeah, I’m playing three shows in Nashville and then, if they do well, if people like them and we can all keep playing, I’m gonna keep playing. I hope to play at least one festival this summer, you know? And then we’ll just see what happens.
You know, records these days come out and they come and go in a weekend, most often, almost all the time. Certainly very few people can make an album and have it mean anything other than a record that a few people get or something. But everything’s so shortened. TikTok videos just take the chorus of the song. Everything’s being further and further removed from performance, even. So we’ll see where it leads. I’m taking it a day at a time, for real, and I don’t have any expectations. I’m excited to get out and play these new songs for people and see how they work, see how we all feel when it is happening in the room.
Do you feel any kind of shift going forward, about being back in the mode where you feel comfortable making records and playing and you’re gonna do more of this, balanced against the fact that, not that many years ago, you were really just wanting to be behind the scenes?
Well, I still want to stay mostly behind the scenes. At least up to this point, that’s what I enjoy the most. I certainly don’t have the thing that Bono or Taylor Swift or people have … or Elton John. I saw Elton at Dodger Stadium and he held his arms out and embraced every person in the stadium. That’s some extraordinary gift from God I don’t have. I’ve always looked at the audience more as a mob coming to get me, you know. So I don’t in any way think I’m gonna transform into this other beacon of generosity and warmth and be able to embrace the audience in that way. But I think I will be able to embrace small groups of people and relate these songs to them, so I’m gonna give it a go. I’m gonna do my best impersonation of those people.
Well, these songs are so beautiful that you don’t necessarily have to be personally demonstrative in a big way in concert.
Yeah. Well, I won’t! That’s not in me. I’ve always been very guarded and even paranoid, you know. That’s part of my love of privacy. The internet is a foreign place to me, because I don’t want to be followed. You know, it’s like, somebody’s following me, oh my God… But I’m trying to embrace the idea of we’re all in this together; here we are, we’re in a room… I’ve tried to perform before, with relative success, and do that. There were times 40 years ago where I was playing live a lot, and there were times I enjoyed tremendously where I would be released from my own inhibitions and be able to be there with the crowd. I loved that. That was fun.
But so much of the time I was viewing art as a means of creating conscience. So I was always challenging myself and the audience to our preconceptions, because we all have been programmed with… You know, I’ve always been studying condition responses, electronic programming, behavioral modification. My entire working life was really a response to Ivan Pavlov, the Russian scientist who was doing experiments on rats and a maze and dogs and bells… So to be able to escape that idea — I do feel free of it now, and I hope to remain free of it. I want to if do everything I can to create calm and, instead of challenging people in that way, to be able to just embrace people we can experience these shows with, without it being behavioral modification.
You’ve mentioned that you and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have traded songs for a possible third album together. Is there anything else you’re working on?
I’m working on a few films, and a TV show with Jeff Bridges. I’m working on a film about Molly Russell, who’s this young woman in England who killed herself at 14, hung herself in her closet, and was programmed to do so by Facebook. It was a famous case in the United Kingdom, and we’re doing a documentary about that. I’m helping Brian Wilson complete a record he started in 1970, a country record. And I’m working with Ringo…
[Not hearing the name…] Who did you say?
Ringo Starr. The drummer for the Beatles.
Oh, that Ringo.
And we’re doing a country album.
Yes, he mentioned that in an interview with us…
He cut “Come Back (When You Go Away),” the second song on “The Other Side,” my record. It’s beautiful. He’s such a beautiful singer. Ringo was in a band with two of the best singers in rock ‘n’ roll history, so people never took him as seriously as a singer as they should. If you listen to all the country stuff he did, “What Goes On” and “Act Naturally” and “Honey Don’t,” he did so much great country music, even in the Beatles. And, you know, he’s called Ringo Starr because that’s a cowboy name, and he wanted to be a cowboy when he was a kid. As we all did back in those days; we always all wanted to be Gene Autry. He asked me to write a song for him, and I wrote that song “Come Back” in a Gene Autry style for him, and it kind of kicked off this whole songwriting binge I’ve been on. And now I’m still writing all the time.
I have been thinking I need to go back to the album of country covers he did in Nashville in 1970, “Beaucoups of Blues,” and see how it sounds now.
Yeah, it’s pretty good. I mean, they whipped it out really quickly; I think they did it in two days or so. And we’re gonna do somethiing a little more thorough. I mean, Ringo in his third act is deserving of a serious album… I want to make a classic Ringo Starr country record. I think we can.
They were a country-blues band, the Beatles, until they got high and started doing “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” and all that. “Dr. Robert” was a country-blues song; that was on, what, “Revolver”? They loved the Everly Brothers; they loved Buddy Holly. The Beatles had taste like crazy. … You know, I saw Ringo play at the Ryman a few months ago with the All-Starr Band. He took a break in the middle, and his dressing room was upstairs. and he ran up the stairs. I mean, he’s 80 years old and he ran upstairs. So I think he’s got plenty of miles left in him.
You know, I’ve had great luck with people in their third acts. It started with Roy Orbison, but also with B.B. King and Gregg Allman and Elton John, even, and there’s a few others in there I can’t even think of the moment. Occasionally you catch a glimpse of what somebody who had an illustrious past can mean now, and something that doesn’t have to do with the charts and all that stuff but just has to do with the timelessness of who they are. There’s a great reward in doing that. And nobody means more to me than the Beatles and Ringo. So I hope I’m able to come through for him in that way. He’s got it in him, for sure.
And you’re still spearheading Ionic recordings, and the possibilities for that.
we’re continuing research and development to see if we can actually press vinyl records from an Ionic disc. Because if we could, that would green up the process quite a bit and take a couple of steps out of the pressing process. The thing about Ionic discs that I don’t think has ever been clear is that they’re not copies, and they’re not pressed, they’re handmade, hand-cut, one-of-one discs — reproductions, but not copies. It’s a transcription of a musical event. So we’re seeing if we can make vinyl a couple of steps higher-fidelity, and save all the pressing plants money and a lot of the toxic parts of pressing a record.
As far as the audio quality goes, , the most profound experience of hearing music is to be sitting across from a musician when he’s playing it. And the next most profound experience of hearing music is to hear a high-fidelity recording on a great system, on a good format, so that you can close your eyes and think you’re sitting in the room with the person playing it. What’s happened to us now is we’ve gone from sitting in the room hearing people playing it to high-fidelity recordings of people playing it — the most high-fidelity recording is an acetate, which is what our Ionic discs are; they’re treated acetates so they don’t wear out. Then vinyl, which is about five generations down from an acetate. Then you step way down to digital, which is not a sound wave, but a sample of a sound wave. So you’re just getting a piece of the high fidelity, and they call it high definition. I guess it’s better defined, but you’re still only getting a percentage of the recording of the experience.
And then you go from CDs to MP3s… to, now, we’re listening to music being bounced off satellites in space and coming back to us. That’s how far we’ve been removed from the profound experience of actually hearing somebody play a song in the living room, like was happening in all of time before the last century. So, the experience of listening has been degraded steadily. My quest is to help the audience be as close to the musician as he possibly can. Sonically — not through social media or some false, counterfeit relationship, but a real relationship of the experience of feeling the vibrations of the musician as he does what he does.
