T Bone Burnett, architect of the Americana music revival, steps into the spotlight

“I’ve always been good at helping other people overcome their self-consciousness and their self-doubt,” says T Bone Burnett, the prolific Americana music producer, songwriter and soundtrack composer. But it was Bob Dylan who pushed him to overcome his own self-doubt.

Burnett was on tour with Dylan in the mid-1970s, playing guitar as part of his Rolling Thunder Revue, and wanted to stay in the shadows. But Dylan was having none of it: “He was just shoving me out in front of the audience in a way he knew I was completely uncomfortable with,” Burnett says. It’s one of the reasons he loves Dylan.

Since then, Burnett’s occasional star turns have come while guiding others’ projects. He chose the songs for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s acclaimed 2007 album Raising Sand and has helmed the soundtracks for The Hunger Games and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Depression-era satire widely credited for igniting a resurgence of Americana music in the early 2000s that continues today.

Now, nearly 50 years and 13 Grammy awards later, Burnett, 76, is again taking the spotlight with the release of his first solo album in 20 years.

The Other Side wasn’t supposed to happen. Burnett was writing songs for other performers and it was only after six of the tunes were recorded that he realised he had a loose concept about a mysterious couple who may or may not live on the same plane as us — and a solo record.

Lucius, the American indie folk group, contributed to five songs on The Other Side, having been invited by Burnett after he heard them sing at a get-together. Holly Laessig, one of Lucius’s lead vocalists, says it was a “Joni Jam” at Joni Mitchell’s house. Burnett was performing some of his own songs and it was, says Laessig, “the first time he was consciously writing happy music and loving every moment”.

Jess Wolfe, the other lead vocalist, says the album track “He Came Down” “was one of those songs you just naturally want to sing along to”. “I believe it was that night that Elton [John] told him, after hearing that song, that he had to make a record.”

A record of Burnett’s that is still resonating in the music industry is the O Brother soundtrack, which included performances by Emmylou Harris, bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley and Krauss playing traditional American country, gospel and Southern folk music. It won three Grammys, including for album of the year. More than a decade after its release, in 2011, All Songs Considered, US National Public Radio’s flagship music programme, said the album “kick-started an Americana music revival”.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m taking any credit for this, but here’s what I think the effect was: a lot of young people at the time, kids that were eight years old or 10 years old, heard that music for the first time in that movie,” Burnett says, “and it’s led to this extraordinary uprising of young musicians now, like Billy Strings, Sierra Ferrell and Molly Tuttle, extraordinary musicians that might not have ever thought that kind of music was viable as a way of life.”

He says O Brother wasn’t the only catalyst for the roots music revival that has gone on to boost commercially successful acts such as Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers and Old Crow Medicine Show. “We were surfing a wave that had already started. The significant part was that it popularised it; it brought into mass culture something that had been more coffee-house music at the time when that came out.”

Burnett’s recent credits include the HBO series True Detective, for which he earned two Emmy nominations, and he was executive music producer and composer for the ABC series Nashville, which was created by his wife Callie Khouri, the screenwriter, producer and director.

The most prominent project Burnett has been working on is Ionic Originals, sonically pristine, one-of-a-kind, physical recordings, through his company NeoFidelity. The first public result was Dylan’s re-recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which sold for nearly $1.8mn at auction in 2022.

“It’s a response to the commodification of music that’s taking place through technological innovations, if I may call them that, of the last couple of decades,” Burnett says. “We wanted to do something that wasn’t mass culture, that couldn’t be mass-produced and couldn’t be commodified to zero, as all other recorded music. The goal is to develop a space where well-recorded music is treated as a fine art.”

The steep price paid for the song didn’t bother Burnett. “The market spoke, so to speak, and it went for what it went for,” he says. “I would say the value has doubled already. My concern is not as much what it went for, as much as it went [at all], and that it continues to accrue value rather than to lose value.”

Others are much freer with their praise for Burnett than the man himself. Before a discussion at National Sawdust in New York this evening with Burnett about The Other Side and his career, hosted by the Grammy Museum, Jasen Emmons, the museum’s chief curator, in an email called Burnett “a bottomless well of musical knowledge, styles and experiences” with “great ears and a rare gift for helping artists find the essence of a song and convey it in the studio”.

Burnett’s evaluation of himself is decidedly less ebullient. When we spoke before the discussion and performance, he said: “I’m going to play a few songs and it’s going to be the first time I’ve tried to perform in 20 years or so. I’m curious as to how it’s all going to affect me now, because certainly my self-consciousness and self-doubt — I think I was able to overcome those things in writing these songs I was writing for other people.”

‘The Other Side’ is released on April 19