Burnett’s new album achieves authenticity

The news release for T Bone Burnett’s “The Other Side,” out today on Verve Forecast records, says it is his first solo album in nearly 20 years. As I count it, and I think I’m qualified, it’s Burnett’s first solo album since 2008’s “Tooth of Crime,” a collection of songs he’d written for the 1996 production of Sam Shepard’s play “The Tooth of Crime.”

Since then, he has been busy — he put out a live album featuring artists he’d worked with (Elton John, Leon Russell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello, Gregg Allman, Ralph Stanley and Jeff Bridges); a soundtrack album for the documentary “A Place at the Table” he’d done with The Civil Wars, and two albums of experimental electronica with drummer Jay Bellerose and producer Keefus Ciancia. So it has only been 16 years since the last T Bone Burnett record. If he’s not exactly at the white-hot center of the Americana movement he helped birth, he hasn’t been a recluse either.

For the last 50 years Burnett been near the center of what we might call the authentic music movement. He’s been a key producer of other artists, a collaborator with Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello, and the behind-thescenes shaper of soundtracks, winning 10 Grammys, mostly for his work on films such as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000), “Cold Mountain” (2004),

“Walk the Line” (2005) and “Crazy Heart” (2010). He paired Alison Krause with Robert Plant; he brought Elton John into the studio with Leon Russell.

PROLIFIC PRODUCER

He had a hand in starting the careers of Los Lobos, Counting Crows, Gillian Welch and Sam Phillips. He was the musical director of “Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night,” a television special that helped revitalize Orbison’s career. He produced the last great Gregg Allman album, 2011’s “Low Country Blues.”

Since the late ’70s, he has released a few records of his own; he was a fairly prolific singer-songwriter, releasing six albums and one remarkable EP, 1982’s “Trap Door,” which belongs on any list of important recordings of the ’80s. His 1983 album “Proof Through the Night” is for me, a landmark album, even though Burnett dislikes the way it was produced.

(He conceived the album as an organic acoustic live-in-the studio affair; instead producer Jeff Eyrich used some echo-y effects and a bombastic drum sound. Burnett later tried to correct what he heard as a mistake when he re-recorded the “PTTN” tracks on his 2006 album “Twenty Twenty — The Essential T Bone Burnett.”)

On the other hand, it does feel like we’ve been waiting a long time for the next real T Bone album, and nothing the songwriter/producer/connector has done in the past 20 years much resembles the organic beauty of “The Other Side.” It’s genuinely gorgeous in an understated, singer-songwriterly way, with Burnett collaborating with Lucius (the indie pop band that includes vocalist sisters Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig) on five songs with singer-songwriter Weyes Blood and Rosanne Cash on a couple more. It’s decidedly upbeat, which might surprise those who think of Burnett as John Brown with a guitar, an Old Testament prophet calling down God’s judgment on the hypocrites and money-changers who have polluted the world. Co-produced by Colin Linden (in whose Nashville studio the album was recorded), Mike Piersante and Burnett, “The Other Side” is a cycle of songs telling a vague story about longtime lovers who may have crossed over to another plane of existence.

SONGS FROM GUITARS

In an artist statement, Burnett writes that he began writing songs for the album after acquiring a few new (to him) guitars. He describes a phenomenon familiar to a lot of songwriters:“Every time I picked one up, a song would pour out of it. ”

At the same time, he took on a new approach to singing.

“I shifted from writing in my head to writing in my chest, and I shifted from singing in my head to singing in my chest because I realized my tone had been in service of this complete other drama that I was living in,” he says. “But now that I had escaped the dystopia” — Burnett’s term for the modern world of AI and cellphone addicts — “a whole other world opened up to me and it was thrilling to just have a melody come out of a guitar. There were all these songs in these guitars. And they just came all at once, over probably a three-week period.”

The songs are simple folk-country ballads, in comfortable keys, with genuinely poignant lyrics that don’t stray too far from Burnett’s wheelhouse. The opening track, “He Came Down,” is a lovely acoustic guitar ballad with obvious biblical imagery, a quasi-hymn:

After he met a shadow man He came down He came down

He left with lightning in his

hand

He came down He came down

With the second song, “Come Back (When You Go Away),” the theme begins to emerge, but if this was the sort of project where an A&R person would be focusing on finding a single, they would turn attention to the third track, “(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day,” on which Burnett’s purer voice is supported by Rosanne Cash and Dennis Crouch’s gently bumping bass line. It sounds like ’60s Nashville, with the countrypolitian elements stripped away.

The Lucius sisters join him for the next three tracks; with Weyes Blood joining for the bluesy “Sometimes I Wonder.” Burnett steps out a bit with “Hawaiian Blue Song,” written with old cohorts Bob Neuwirth and Steven Soles. It’s a Orbison-esque ballad highlighted by Soles’ work on what is styled “hi-strung acoustic guitar” and Linden on dobro. (Burnett dates the song to the mid-’70s, when he and Soles formed The Alpha Band.) It’s certainly the most outré song on the album.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

People write about popular music like it is a commodity because music is a commodity; because transposing the musical experience into units sold and dollars generated is one way we have of understanding that experience. While it’s unfortunate consumer culture tends to reduce every aspect of human life and culture to economically parsable terms, it does mean something to sell millions of albums and reach millions of people. The Taylor Swifts and Jimmy Buffetts of the world can be both artists and business people; a popular artist can be just that.

Still, one of the reasons people who write about pop music write about it in the way they do — by noting chart positions and platinum statuses and sold-out tours — is because it is difficult to write about music as music. It is difficult to write about how a particular note shimmers in a field or how the human bent of a voice can carry that note just a few cents sharp or flat to unlock some chord that resonates not only in the wooden vault of a guitar but in the heart. To write about music this way is to write about voodoo, to risk smirks and rolled eyes.

Music journalism that deeply explores music itself is impossible not only because adjectives are the enemy of journalism (“Who says the wall is ‘high’?”) but because music is a language that transcends, and so much is lost in translation when it’s set down on paper. It’s almost impossible to convey what something sounds like in straight words — “The Other Side” is a concerto by (and for) hillbilly ghosts.

‘THE DOT ALBUM’

The most immediate point of reference for “The Other Side” may be Burnett’s 1986 album “T Bone Burnett,” known to dozens of fans as “the Dot album” because it was the only record Burnett ever released on that label.

And the Dot album, which many of Burnett’s followers count as their favorite, is an unalloyed country and western music album, an unalloyed valentine to an imagined time when the Louvin Brothers were afforded first-call Nashville session players. (That the Dot album was recorded and mixed in a mere four days feels like a flex; Burnett and a band that included Los Lobos’ guitarist and accordionist David Hidalgo, dobro and steel guitar player Jerry Douglas, fiddler Byron Berline and drummer Jerry Scheff achieve a remarkably delicate, ethereal sound that feels if not timeless, at least impossible to date.)

Part of the Dot album is that it is half covers; old songs recycled as shorthand. This helps it be accessible to listeners, something he admits his solo work has not always been.

‘WORLD OF CONSCIENCE’

“I view the purpose of art as creating conscience, so I was constantly appealing to people’s consciences,” Burnett writes. “But I realized when a songwriter uses the word you, he is, of course, in the world of conscience, but he’s also in the world of people’s dreams. And when you enter into people’s dreams, you have to be very careful with them …

“With this record, I tried to treat myself as kindly as I would try to treat other people,” says Burnett, who likens his producing approach to that of a photographer. “I try to find the person’s best angle and light them so they look the most like themselves or the best version of themselves. And this time, rather than staying in the romantic notion I previously had of myself — of a rebellious artist, a firebrand or whatever I thought I was trying to be — I just tried to be kind to myself.”

Another way of describing “The Other Side”: This is what authenticity sounds like.