The Man Behind the Curtain

“I figured out early on what I wanted to do,” says T Bone Burnett. "I got out of high school, bought a recording studio and started operating it as an engineer and a producer. When I started out I wanted to be Burt Bacharach. Write tunes. Produce music. Be married to Angie Dickinson.”

At least he's two for four. During his 40 years in music, the 58-year-old, Texas-bred Joseph Henry Burnett (he’s been T Bone since he was knee-high) has worked with such artists as Roy Orbison, the Wallflowers, Elvis Costello, Counting Crows, Los Lobos and the bluegrass master Ralph Stanley. He toured with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and formed a band of his own with a couple Rolling Thunder colleagues. But he's better known for his work on film soundtracks: the sea-changing, five-time-Grammy-winning music from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"; the Civil War-era country music from “Cold Mountain.” Most recently, Burnett served as executive music producer on the Johnny Cash biopic, “Walk the Line.” For that picture, he tutored Joaquin Phoenix on his musical approximation of Cash, and coached Reese Witherspoon on how to sing like June Carter—which helped her to take home an Oscar. “My original idea was to produce and not make records myself,” Burnett says. “I made a few records here and there by default, but I wasn’t ever comfortable in that role. I wasn’t comfortable on stage. We’ll see how it goes this time.”

On May 16, Burnett will release a new album of his own—the first in 14 years—along with a generous anthology of his earlier work as a singer and songwriter. “The True False Identity” is an eclectic collection of new Burnett originals; "Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett," is a two-disc, 40-track retrospective that spans his career from 1976 to 1992. It includes such rarities as "The People's Limousine," his still-blistering 1985 collaboration with Elvis Costello, under the name the Coward Brothers. For those who can’t name a single T Bone Burnett song, you’ll want to go through both records to see what you’ve been missing. For the cognoscenti, you’ll want to listen to remember why you cared in the first place.

Perhaps surprisingly, Burnett is also going out on tour. “I want to write songs and play them for people—live,” he says. “Because in this age of mechanical reproduction, where we’re able to copy and distribute music on a moment’s notice, the less valuable the copy becomes, and the more valuable the live thing becomes. I’ve really begun to appreciate the extraordinary value of the fleeting live moment.”

A long-time resident of Los Angeles—which he calls “the Athens of the modern world”—Burnett may still be a country boy at heart, but he's learned what's going to work for an audience, and how to stay ahead of the curve. The 2000 "O Brother" soundtrack showed his prescience in recognizing that bluegrass music could appeal to a wider audience. (Unbelievably, Ralph Stanley's stark a cappella version of "O Death" later beat out performances by the likes of Tim McGraw and Willie Nelson to give him the Grammy for best male country vocal.) True, most of the competition was less like a longneck than like flat ginger ale. “O, Brother” sold nearly 9 million copies and introduced mainstream audiences not only to Stanley (whom Burnett calls “one of most important country musicians” out there) but such younger performers as Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. The record showed that a mass audience could recognize music of quality and integrity and not run the other way. It was a lesson Burnett applied to his own music. “That was the story of my life,” he says. "It gave a dimension of meaning to my life. It gave me the sense that this is the reason I was born. And if that was the reason that I was born, then I’m fine with that.”

The call he felt was strong enough to make him take leave of L.A. and head up the coast to Northern California, where he finished some songs he'd already started—and came up with about 30 more. From jangling roots rock to Lou Reed-like spoken-word songs, the 12 tracks on “The True False Identity” suggest why Burnett has been the lucky rabbit's foot for so many other performers—as he puts it, "I listen hard"—and why we should hope his apprehensions about performing live don’t get the best of him. He's a singer whose voice you instantly believe, and a songwriter with a wide range and a well-honed set of skills. He describes “Earlier Baghdad” as the Memphis version of "King Lear": “It’s the tragic fallen hero facing his own mortality and then not accepting his fate. The deceptively buoyant “Baby Don’t You Say You Love Me” manages to get across heartbreak without getting overwrought or cloying. "Shaken, Rattled and Rolled,” the album's closing song, is, as Burnett says, “a sort of bookend to an era of rock and roll.” It's all that, but it's not a nostalgic downer: when an era ends, it seems to suggest, there's a new one coming. And if you don't end up with Angie Dickinson, life might offer compensations you could never have predicted.

© 2006