T Bone Burnett: Dystopia, Discovery and Dispatches from ‘The Other Side’
photo: Dan Winters
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“It was all a discovery process,” T Bone Burnett says of the means by which he created his new album, The Other Side. “The whole thing just came together as it did. It’s the same way that I’ve had to figure out whatever I’ve done. Some people make plans and pull them off. I just try to hang on for dear life.”
Burnett has certainly succeeded on these terms as a performer, producer and composer, winning multiple Grammy Awards and an Oscar. He has garnered acclaim for his solo records, his production work with Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Elton John, Gregg Allman, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch, Brandi Carlile and many others, as well as overseeing soundtracks such as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Crazy Heart and Walk the Line. On The Other Side, he reconnects with longtime friends Rosanne Cash and Steven Soles, while also drawing in new collaborators, including Lucius and Weyes Blood.
Burnett was two albums into his Invisible Light trio of records when he began work on what became The Other Side. He explains the nexus between the two projects in revealing, “When I was a kid, I learned about Ivan Pavlov and his experiments with dogs and bells and rats and the maze. It was immediately apparent to me, back then in the 1950s, that the experiments he was running on rats in 1905 were being run on us in 1955. I began to have a recurring nightmare of being in my Episcopal church in Fort Worth, Texas, where we were lined up around the walls and, at the far end, were these shadow men. They were dressed all in black and you couldn’t make out their faces. They were just dark forms and they were cutting off everyone’s right hand and replacing it with an automated hand—an electronic hand that would become our control mechanism. I was already playing guitar at that time, so I would wake up in a cold sweat screaming, ‘You can’t take my hand!’ I had that dream maybe 30 or 40 times when I was a teenager.
“All of my work really has grown out of that in one way or another,” he continues. “I began reading Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman and other people who were seeing this coming dystopia back in the 1950s and ‘60s. Then about 20 years ago, I was in a coffee shop one morning and I saw that everyone in the coffee shop was looking at their phones. That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, they didn’t have to cut our hands off. They just put it in our hands.’ At that point, I decided to wrap up this work. I’ve decided that we’re now in the dystopia—I don’t want to write about it or warn people about it anymore because it’s here. So I created some characters who found a way through the dystopia at the end of Invisible Light—I’m still writing the third Invisible Light record—and when they escaped the dystopia, I escaped the dystopia. That’s when all of these songs started rushing in from every direction. So my wanting to get out of the dystopia led to this record being written.”
Burnett takes a moment to consider McLuhan’s work as he states, “Our attention spans are being reduced significantly all the time by the distraction economy that we’re facing now. We’ve gone from art to entertainment to distraction, and each is a bigger fish, eating a smaller fish progressively.”
While Postman may be best known for writing Amusing Ourselves to Death, Burnett notes, “He’s also got a great book called Technopoly that everyone should read today because it’s prescient and sane.”
Burnett has produced over 100 records during his celebrated career, and he shares his perspective on the most impactful ways for audiences to receive music. “The best experience is to hear it live in the room with the person who’s playing it at the time,” he asserts. “That’s the most profound communication between people. The next is a high-fidelity recording on a high-end medium and a high-end system. Then you back off from that to more mass-distributed products, moving to vinyl, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3, where each one is stepping down in intimacy. Each one is getting further and further away from the musician when he played it, until now you have music being bounced off satellites and bounced back to us. That’s how far we are removed from the profound experience of hearing music played live. That’s why I still focus all my time on the high-fidelity recordings I’ve been learning to make my whole life.”
He also reflects on the origins and nature of his production endeavors. “I decided to become an independent record producer in 1965,” he says. “I had just heard about it. I heard that Phil Spector was an independent record producer, and I thought, ‘That sounds like a wonderful thing to be. I want to be independent and I want to make records.’ I had no idea what the job was or how to go about it, but I decided that’s what I wanted to be. I knew it had to do with going into the studio, which I was doing at that point. I loved going in and creating unobserved in private.
“I learned from every single musician I’ve worked with over the years,” Burnett adds. “I learned something about how to get the best out of a musician and how to get the worst out of a musician. I also learned how to hear with their ears. You have to be able to empathize, to help them in practical ways hear what they’re blending with and things like that. I also learned a lot of ways to contribute to a musical event without necessarily playing or being part of the band, but just by listening. So what I’ve learned from musicians is how to listen, and that’s been a constant process. I’m still learning.”
He Came Down
This song came out of a new guitar that I was playing one morning. My wife Callie [Khouri] came in and asked me something about Appalachian music. I said, “It’s just like this.” “He Came Down” is what I played, and she said, “Record that right now.” I didn’t play the whole song, but it was spontaneous air that started writing itself.
Come Back (When You Go Away)
Ringo had asked me to write a song for him. I love Ringo. I love his singing and his whole thing— his good humor and his whole outlook on life. I knew that he was called Ringo Starr because he wanted to be a country star when he was a kid. He wanted to be a cowboy star. So that’s why Ringo Starr sounds like the sheriff of Tombstone. I also knew that when he was a teenager, he had written to the Houston Chamber of Commerce to ask where Lightnin’ Hopkins lived because he wanted to get a house close to him. So I knew he liked country music and I decided to write him a Gene Autry-type song.
(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day
That’s a philosophy I’ve adopted that I think is a good way past the dystopia. I’m gonna get over this someday is an essential belief to make it out of the dystopia. I wrote that song a couple of years ago and I always thought of it as a Don Gibson song or maybe an Everly Brothers song. It had some of that about it. I was just thinking of it as an old ‘50s hillbilly song. Then there’s something about the chorus where I thought, “I should put a harmony on this.” It wasn’t a background part because I don’t think there are any background parts on this record. There are a lot of harmonies, but they’re all foreground or important. But Rosanne came immediately to mind as soon as I thought I should put on a harmony.
Waiting for You
That’s one Colin Linden and I wrote, and Lucius made it beautiful. It’s one of the songs that came out of the new guitar. The boy and the girl in this are the same boy and girl that are in the Invisible Light story. This is where they escaped. This is them escaping the dystopia.
I had heard Lucius singing at a party one night in a friend’s living room, and they changed the air in the room. They made the most extraordinary sound. I fell in love with their sound that night. So I invited them in to sing, and I told them, “Do whatever you want to do.” So that’s what they did. They orchestrated every song they were on. That’s what I meant when I said there aren’t background parts. There are orchestrations.
The Pain of Love
I was writing for the Invisible Light, and I had those lyrics. When Colin and I were recording these songs together at his house, the lyrics fell out of the folder and fit this. It reminds me of a Lead Belly song.
I probably had 30 more couplets, but I narrowed them down. A number of them reference other songs or books and movies. “We can break rank, we can walk the line,” is a nod to Johnny Cash. “We can give thanks, we can I, me, mine” is a reference to George Harrison, who was a major influence on me when I was around 16 years old.
A lot of times, I’ll get a quick idea for a couplet, and I’ll write that down. Then later, when I’m writing a song and I’ve found a melody on a guitar, I’ll look through my lyrics and go, “Oh, there, that’s what this song is about.” It’s all a discovery process. The songs that are the most fun are the ones you discover as you go.
The Race Is Won
This album kind of stands alone for me, although it’s certainly related to the Dot [Records] album I made back in the 1980s—a stripped down, no drums, string band kind of record. But I’ve never written from this point of view before. Lucius sang so beautifully on this song. They turned it from a ‘50s kind of song and took it into this new century. They did a beautiful job with that.
Sometimes I Wonder
I’ve been listening to [Weyes Blood] for a while. She’s very good and I love her voice. Here, I wanted someone with a deep voice who could handle a blues R&B tune like that, which was the first kind of music I learned how to play. Then she came in and sang a great countermelody in the chorus. I like that chorus because it’s unusual for that sort of R&B tune.
The hand-clapping came in because we needed a backbeat feel. There wasn’t a backbeat anywhere, and what is the simplest method of getting a backbeat? Most of us have the ability to clap hands, so we got after it that way. The backbeat defines so much of what a feel is. We tried drums on a couple of tunes but they didn’t fit. The record just wanted to be this way.
Hawaiian Blue Song
That’s a song Bob Neuwirth, Steven Soles and I wrote on a vacation to Hawaii in 1976 down on Maui. We were hanging with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, playing music every night and having a great time. This song emerged from that trip, but it never had a bridge. We just kind of knocked out those three verses, and we always wanted to add a bridge, it’s just that we never found one.
Then while I was in the middle of this writing jag over a few weeks, that song came back to mind along with a bridge. I don’t know how it all came to me, it was just part of whatever was happening. It’s a process.
Bobby Neuwirth left us a year or so ago, and I must say I felt a visitation from him while writing that bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to hear his voice in my ear and even some of the lyrics sound like Bob. [Note: The Other Side is dedicated to Bob Neuwirth, who passed away in May 2022.]
Steven Soles and I were on the road together in the ‘70s. We had a band called the Alpha Band [with David Mansfield] that recorded three albums in about a year and a half. The Alpha Band was a short-lived band that never broke up. It sort of never got together and never broke up. We had all met on the Rolling Thunder Revue—the Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth revue. That happened around 1975. We’re all musicians, so you tend to be able to pick up a conversation where you left off, but it could be five years between conversations.
The First Light of Day
That’s the last song I wrote while we were recording this, and it certainly comes out of my life. That’s the way I’ve been experiencing life recently. I’ve been getting up every morning before sunrise and sitting outside. I have a bench in the garden that faces due east, and I can sit out there in the morning and watch the first light of day. It’s a really amazing phenomenon when the sun comes up and what the light does—the way your eyes change, the way the world changes, the way all the colors change. It’s an amazing time. So this song grew out of that feeling.
Everything and Nothing
Gary Nicholson and I wrote “Everything and Nothing.” I was working on a musical and I started studying Frank Loesser and how intense his language was in his songs—how every word counted. I started trying to write a song to that standard. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a wasted word.
The first line came out really quickly. Gary Nicholson said something like, “Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to get old.” Then immediately, this line came up: “Everybody wants to know the truth, but nobody wants to hear it.” That’s when we both thought, “Oh no, now we’re going to have to write 20 of these” because once you set up a vibe like that, you’ve got to follow through.
I’m still working on it, I’m sure, but we got it pretty far. The musical has been close a couple of times, but I’ve kind of put it on the back burner for the time being.
The Town That Time Forgot
That’s a song that Peter More and I wrote when I was working on a little movie with some friends called Downtown Owl. It was about a blizzard in a small town in North Dakota [based on a Chuck Klosterman novel].
It’s the moment of greatest dislocation for the man and the woman who thread through these songs. Then with the next song, suddenly, there they are together again. So it has a happy resolution.
Little Darling
The original working title for the record when we decided to call it a record was Fort Worth. That’s because it also grew out of where I grew up, the first things I started to play and the music I loved.
I loved Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart,” “Baby, Scratch My Back” and “I Got Love If You Want It.” I also loved Jimmy Reed, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. That was the early stuff for me.
We started out just putting these songs down, but at that point, there was never a moment where we said, “Let’s make an album.” I was writing a lot of songs, and I went over to my friend Colin’s house. He’s got a little setup back there, and we recorded a few things. I thought that would be it, but the songs kept coming, and we kept recording. Like I said, it’s all a process of discovery.
