Darah Hubbard
T Bone Burnett
The more prominent entertainers come and go with the tides of commercialized trend-worthiness — some, trend-shapers, and more of them, trend-chasers. The less one pictures oneself as an entertainer, then the likelier the staying power, and trends be damned. Not to drop any names, y’know: You get the picture.
Fort Worth’s T Bone Burnett has become a momentous eminénce grisé of the music industry by refusing to play the entertainer. He casts himself, rather, as a storyteller-in-song, the better to sustain a lifelong credential as a producer of the recordings of fellow artists. To know how to perform, to put a lyric across, is to know how to produce one’s affiliated artists for credibility and staying power. The music-making profession, an unlicensed trade, rewards those artists who deal in practical self-accreditation, rather than by pursuing the elusive commercial rewards.
“I’m no entertainer,” Burnett avers in a seeming paradox, even while winding down from a sold-out tour of listening rooms, coast-to-coast and points south, culminating with appearances in Dallas, Austin, and Houston. Audiences, ideally outnumbering a featured soloist, are a foregone conclusion with such performances. The engagements have traded as much upon Burnett’s solo album of 2024, The Other Side, as upon his genial, low-key presence, a whisper-soft melodic voice, and a natural ability to commune in song and story with an attuned crowd.
“I’ve never really known how to take applause in any regimented sense,” says Joseph Henry “T Bone” Burnett, 77. “I’m starting to understand that process by returning to the give-and-take approach of my old-time favorite way of making music — just sitting around on somebody’s floor with friends and instruments and listeners, everybody feeling the music and contributing spontaneous responses and handclapping. That clap-back effect gives a singer an immediate grasp of the connection — like getting an ‘Amen!’ A give-and-take situation.”
The approach, conversational and communal, has more to do with tone than with melodic notation or harmonies or rhythm, as Burnett explained last year to Geoffrey Himes of Pulse magazine: “We live on a hostile planet, and life has always been outrageous. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the tone of my response to life ... Before, my tone was too strict, too hard, not loving enough, for what I care about now.” The either/or choice between a lingering emotional tone of acceptance and one of confrontation depends upon the impression a singer cares to leave.
“I’ve had incredible experiences ...,” he adds, “... and all that experience goes into these songs. I feel I’ve come into a clearing ... where the songs don’t need to be anything but beautiful. People can say one thing with their words and another thing with their tone... [W]e invented spoken language to be able to lie, because when you sing, the tone lets everyone know what you mean.”
The Other Side achieves a tone of playful serenity in such moments as a hymn-like, myth-calibre, and wondrously nonsanctimonious “He Came Down” and a meditative “I’m Gonna Get Over This Someday.” This selection rides upon a loping reflection of Johnny Cash’s middle-1950s Memphis recordings, with a hummingbird harmony from Cash’s daughter, Rosanne. A soothing stringed-instruments accompaniment overall recalls Burnett’s preferred period of rock ’n’ roll (foreshadowing his youthful emergence during that 1950s-into-1960s transition), which often used a mellower rhythmic touch to lighten or even avoid the percussive onslaught of drums.
Burnett’s New Technology Reignites an Ancient Process
Darah Hubbard
Burnett’s docket of modern-day projects includes a composer-producer collaboration with Beatles alumnus Ringo Starr and a music-and-humor venture with Elvis Costello (in character as the Coward Bros., Henry and Howard). Unique among the newer activities is Burnett’s 2021 production of an analog recording by Bob Dylan of his career-defining civil rights anthem, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” (The lyric dates from 1961.)
This version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as Artnet News’ Sarah Cascole has reported, features a full accompanying instrumentation. The record is not destined for reproduction. A one-of-a-kind art object, in other words, as opposed to a conventional phonograph record or a digital disk or file. It is the only such disk, by the creators’ fiat.
This unduplicable condition places the NeoFidelity Ionic Original acetate disc of “Blowin’ in the Wind” on a par comparable with, for example, an original canvas by some acknowledged master painter of whatever historic period one might mention. The clincher of the recording’s larger significance is that it sold in 2022 for $1.77 million at Christie’s London. Burnett expressed hope the new owner (anonymous, per the auction house) “will consider it ... as a painting or any other singular work of art.”
“Not only is an Ionic Original the equivalent of a painting, it is a painting,” Burnett maintains. “It is lacquer, painted onto an aluminum disc, with a spiral etched into it by music. This painting, however, has the additional quality of containing that music, which can be heard by putting a stylus into the spiral and spinning it.”
Burnett’s history with Dylan dates from the “Rolling Thunder Revue” of the middle 1970s. Burnett’s collaborative, scientifically based development of the new analog-audio format, known as Ionic Originals via NeoFidelity, Inc., will persist in 2025 in a venture with Willie Nelson. Nelson’s involvement will advance the objective of capturing monumental voices at a prime of mature artistry.
“CDs are infinitely reproducible,” as Burnett explained to the show-business tradepaper Variety. “This [Ionic] is an actual one-of-one. [Dylan] hadn’t been on the road for a couple of years when we did these recordings, so his voice was clear and strong and beautiful.”
Burnett elaborated: “Analog sound has more depth, more harmonic complexity, more resonance, better imaging... Analog has more feel, more character, more touch. Digital sound is frozen. Analog sound is alive.”
The Ionic Originals process engraves the sound directly into an acetate record. (This is historically the first step in making a conventional test platter.) Conventional acetate, as used in times past, generates as pure a sound as can be captured, but the grooved surface deteriorates rapidly as the stylus, or needle, the warmth of friction, and environmental impurities (such as airborne dust) dig into the lacquer that has been painted onto an aluminum base.
The difference lies in Ionic Originals’ sapphire-and-quartz gradient coating — space-exploration technology, developed as a shield against cosmic radiation — that protects the physical record and improves playback, as Artnet describes the process. Needle-to-groove friction is eliminated, and the surface provides a resonance and a sonic fidelity that Burnett says cannot be achieved in conventional audio-playback formats.
The curatorial notes from Christie’s maintain that the hybrid technology “yields the ‘Holy Grail’ for recording artists and audiophiles — superior sound reproduction, foreign-particle resistance, durability, excellent signal-to-noise ratio, longevity, portability, and compatibility with existing playback equipment.” A conventional turntable, or record player, in other words.
Fabrication is expensive, but Burnett suggests that limited-edition runs — not mass production — are an eventual possibility.
Invoking the name of an influential communications theorist of the pre-digital 20th century, Burnett says, “Marshall McLuhan said a medium surrounds a previous medium and turns the previous medium into an art form, as film did with novels [and so forth] ... and as digital has done with analog... [Ionic Originals aims] to help develop a music space in the fine arts market.”
In a related session with the British Broadcasting Corp., Burnett added: “I don’t look at this as a replacement for anything ... just another arrow in the quiver for every musician in the world ... a whole new way of earning a living that we’ve never had before.”
The prior century’s hit-record industry — a matter of pennies paid per dollar earned, for even the top-selling singers — has long since been sacrificed to the fractions-of-a-cent compensation of the since-dominant music-streaming paradigm. The Ionic Originals method suggests the possibility of a more tangible, or achievable, revenue source for the artists responsible, assuming responsible accounting.
Ringo Starr Awaits
Darah Hubbard
Burnett often credits the Beatles, Great Britain’s upstart breakout band of the early 1960s, with “giving us Americans back our music” after a period of U.S. neglect and dilution in the field of pop music. Ringo Starr, at 84 a vigorous standard-bearer of the Beatles’ legacy, has marked the beginning of 2025 with a new album, called Look Up. Michael Gallucci of Ultimate Classic Rock, the web magazine, hails Look Up as “a country record consisting of 11 original songs, most of them co-written by the album’s producer, T Bone Burnett.”
Starr had begun hinting of the project during 2024. “In a way,” Gallucci writes, “it marks a return to the genre that started Starr’s solo career in 1970 when he released ... the country-leaning Beaucoup of Blues.” Not to mention that Starr had contributed C&W elements to the Beatles’ larger body of work — typified by his 1965 interpretation of the Johnny Russell composition “Act Naturally,” as introduced in 1963 by Buck Owens.
Says Burnett: “I’m very grateful to have gotten to do [Look Up]. I’ve had the good fortune of working with quite a few heritage artists, connecting with well-seasoned artists at important moments in their lives.” He cites such examples as the Southern banjoist Ralph Stanley, bluesmaster B.B. King, and Texas-bred rock balladeer Roy Orbison, as example. (A line from the East Texas novelist Joe R. Lansdale springs to mind: “It ain’t braggin’ if it’s the truth.”)
“And Ringo is as country as can be,” adds Burnett, who has been acquainted with Starr since the 1970s. He elaborated to Ultimate Classic Rock: “[While with the Beatles, Starr] changed the way every drummer after him played, with his inventive approach. And he has always sung killer rockabilly, as well as being a heartbreaking ballad singer.
“To get to make this [new] music with him was something like the realization of a 60-year dream I’ve been living.”
In announcing the completion of Look Up, Starr cited a recent turning-point encounter with Burnett: “When I asked T Bone to write me a song, I didn’t even think at the time that it would be a country song — but of course it was, and it was so beautiful.
“I had been making EPs at the time, and so I thought we would do a country EP,” added Starr. “But when [Burnett] brought me nine songs, I knew we had to make [a full-length] album.” Starr co-wrote one of the new songs in addition to playing drums and handling the vocals. Accompanists include Alison Krauss, Billy Strings, Larkin Poe, the harmonizing ensemble Lucius, and Molly Tuttle.
With Elvis Costello, alias the Coward Bros.
All during his meandering concert tour of 2024, Burnett showed up at intervals on network television with the English rock-country preservationist Elvis Costello.
Their 40-year affiliation is newly commemorated in two albums of recordings featuring their alter-ego duo act, the Coward Bros. The Cowards’ musically charged humor is dominant — hardly outright comedy, but rather a droll and character-driven wittiness that amplifies the personalities while indulging their musical inclinations.
The Coward Bros.’ act seems more closely akin to England’s long-running BBC-TV franchise of the last century, “The Two Ronnies.” There, the actor-singers Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett would unite not so much as a team, as rather a recurring combination of solo artists who happened to work well together, as if by humorous alchemy.
The newer Costello-Burnett projects include the 20-track The Coward Bros., and the dramatized, documentary-like “The True Story of the Coward Bros.,” directed by Christopher Guest from Costello’s script. Meanwhile, an expanded reissue of Costello’s King of America & Other Realms flashes back to projects involving Costello and Burnett over a 40-year span.
Music-as-Equalizer
Music is a powerful equalizer, especially in Fort Worth, which has spawned such diversified musical careers as those of Western swing’s Bob Wills, avant-garde jazz’s Ornette Coleman, blues-rockers Delbert McClinton and Ray Sharpe, and countrified gospel’s Chuck Wagon Gang. Not to mention T Bone Burnett.
“I’ve never really considered myself as having a career,” Burnett has maintained in conversations past. “I’ve taken whatever paths have seemed the most interesting at any given time, and I’ve always considered myself fortunate to have been able to find situations that have allowed me to indulge my interests.”
His rèsumé ranges as widely as the musical scoring for such celebrated motion pictures as the Coen Bros.’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and Anthony Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” — to the sonic production of artists as diversified as Los Lobos and Jimmie Dale Gilmore — to the present day’s renewed emphasis upon his original material and its interpretation. All roads point homeward.
“When you’re from Texas, y’know, you can’t ever really leave,” says Burnett, ties to Los Angeles and Nashville notwithstanding. “The place stays with you, within you. And the things I’d learned as a child in Fort Worth — well, they’re the things that have ... colored and affected all the work I’m doing.”
One broader such influence is evident in Burnett’s refusal to divide musical forms according to category.
“When I was a kid [during the 1950s-1960s], the great radio stations [in Fort Worth] — KFJZ, or maybe KXOL — would just play music,” as he has said. “There was no artificial separation according to whether a song was rock, or country, or blues — just music. Here’s the Beatles, then something by Peggy Lee. Then, a Hank Williams favorite, and then something from Little Tommy Tucker, four songs in a row, no categories.”
Burnett’s upbringing in Fort Worth found a lasting pivot in a school-days friendship with the stringed-instruments artist Stephen Bruton (1948-2009). Their alliance would span the distance from a 1973 live-in-person album — capturing Como-based blues singer Robert Ealey’s declamatory performances at the New Bluebird Nite Club — to the musical environment for Scott Cooper’s Oscar-anointed “Crazy Heart” (2009).
Burnett’s groundbreaking recordings of the 1980s seem ever more pertinent in light of the present-day activities. Such introspective early albums as Truth Decay and Trap Door seem two generations ahead of their time, in any event, given the introspective depth of their songwriting. Somebody once likened Burnett’s music to Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, owing to a shared fascination with the human condition and an antic sense of mingled humor and indignation.
A line from a Burnett composition, “The Kill Switch,” proves relevant: “There are those who play for money, babe, and there are those who play for fame... Yet there are still some who only play for the love of the game.”
During the past year of artistic outpourings and a renewed fondness for the life of a wandering troubadour, Burnett has refined this view of the State of the Union — the state of society as a class — in terms of music:
“If you want to know what’s good about the United States, listen to our music,” Burnett says. “In Texas alone, those proverbial Six Flags symbolize not only the shifting historical forms of government, but especially the musical contributions that all the settlers from all over the world have made.
“In our music, all the promise of the United States is realized. Because people from all nationalities, all countries, all languages, all religions, all ethnicities, have all gotten together and listened to each other and created harmony. That’s the promise, the melting pot. The promise of the United States.”
