Some legends are a bit allergic to the limelight.
It’s been 14 years since production mensch T Bone Burnett released a solo album, but he’s finally back with a new CD called The True False Identity.
Wait: It gets better.
Burnett, 58, has also released 20/20: The Essential T Bone Burnett, a double-CD retrospective outing. And he’s touring for the first time in 20 years. He might even get to Canada.
Burnett has been busy, pardon the understatement. He’s been in the studio creating the soundtracks for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for example, and Cold Mountain and Walk The Line. He also has been producing for a list of artists as long as your arm, among them Tony Bennett and K.D. Lang, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Marshall Crenshaw, the Bodeans, Bruce Cockburn and Sam Phillips, who is Burnett’s wife.
In his spare time he founded DMZ Records.
The soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou? is a story in itself, with 9 million in sales and offspring in the way of a documentary (Down From The Mountain) and a couple of major concerts. Not too surprisingly, Burnett won a Grammy as producer of the year in 2002.
And he (and co-writer Elvis Costello) got a best-song Oscar nomination for The Scarlet Tide, one of three songs Burnett wrote for Cold Mountain.
And now, with The True False Identity, he’s putting himself and his music back into the spotlight ...
“Gingerly,” Burnett adds, joking.
Over the phone, he sums up his comings and goings.
“For the last 15 years, I felt that I’d been living in a master class, with these artists who’ve asked me to work with them. My last record was 1992. I felt like I was at the end of something. There was no place left to go with where I was going. So I stopped.”
Shortly thereafter, Sam Shepard phoned him up and asked him to work on the play Tooth Of Crime.
“He’s an old friend and collaborator. So that led me down a path to several movies,” Burnett says.
Indeed it did — Joel and Ethan Coen came up to Burnett at the premiere of the play. The rest is soundtrack history, with Burnett producing the music for The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The Ladykillers. And DMZ Records is their joint venture with Columbia Records. Working with Joel and Ethan Coen seems like an enviable gig.
“Honest to God, if I could just work for the Coens full time, I would do it,” Burnett says, laughing.
Joseph Henry Burnett grew up in Forth Worth, Tex., and owned a recording studio with a couple of friends by the time he was 17. “We got a bank loan. It wasn’t that much money in those days. We didn’t need that much equipment then. I just decided to go into business.”
So where did he get such focus, so young?
“I haven’t been that focused, actually. What really happened was we had a band and I got interested in sound. First time I hit a guitar, I hit an E-string, it just did something to my entire chemistry,” he says, and he laughs. “I decided that’s what I wanted to do with my life. It was all about sound. It still is. The new record is sound experimentation, to my way of thinking.” (The new record is dark, rootsy and very witty, to our way of thinking.)
Burnett not only produced the soundtrack album for Walk The Line last year, he also coached Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in their singing roles as Johnny Cash and June Carter.
Wel, no, no, no, no, says Burnett — a man who can deflect a compliment faster than a speeding bullet.
“They figured it out themselves. They’re extraordinarily gifted artists. Joaquin did an incredible job of evoking John. Reese won an Oscar, but she couldn’t have done what she did if Joaquin hadn’t done what he did.”
