The future is always right now for T Bone Burnett
T Bone Burnett has a few stories to tell, songs to play and movies to show about “this thing that happened to me.” He’s referring to a lifetime of collaboration with other artists, and to do it justice, Burnett would need a few weeks instead of a few hours.
But for Burnett the idea of summing up anything, let alone something that others might call a “career,” isn’t the point. For him, it’s about process, a series of occurrences that were meant to be. “Looking back on it, everything was completely apparent,” he says. “As William Gibson said, ‘The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ There are people living in 2018, and some in prehistoric times.”
Burnett is very much living in the present, with no less than three new recordings nearing release. He started getting up at 4 a.m. a few years ago so that he could spend a few quiet hours at the start of each day writing music. He cranked out 20 songs for a forthcoming Broadway musical about Hollywood cowboy stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, “Happy Trails,” and is also wrapping up a solo recording, “The Invisible Light,” as well as music for a movie and the third season of the HBO series “True Detective.”
At 70, he says, he isn’t slowing down because “there are no laurels to rest on.” Instead, he’s still figuring things out. “I felt a real need to do something personal.”
In the same way, Burnett’s audience may still be trying to figure him out.
It’s not a bad place to be for an artist who has traveled through many worlds without really taking up long-term residence in any one of them.
From one perspective, Burnett is the ultimate insider, a producer-songwriter-singer-musician who has worked with rock giants (Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello) and Hollywood royalty
(the Coen Brothers, Jeff Bridges) while winning Oscars and Grammys for projects such as the “O Brother, Where Art
Thou?” soundtrack and the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss album “Raising Sand.” From another vantage point, he could be perceived as an outsider, one of the original punk surrealists.
“A punk rocker? I was, and certainly am,” he says with a laugh. While living in Texas in the ’60s, he gravitated toward arthouse movies and outsider artists. He recorded the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and played drums like he was falling down a flight of stairs on the singer’s garage-rock cult classic “Paralyzed.”
Burnett’s unconventional perspective prompted Dylan to hire the relatively unknown musician. After touring with Dylan, Burnett’s solo recordings helped shaped what became known as Americana music, though the genre didn’t have a name when he released the “Truth Decay” album in 1980.
“It was part of a renegade movement, and the first time I heard that term ‘Americana’ applied to music was when (talent scout) Lenny Waronker talked about it in the ’80s,” Burnett says. “I never cottoned to it myself. I never cottoned to any label, actually. But there is some extraordinary music in that space — I’d put Louis Armstrong, B.B. King, Miles Davis in there too. It all grows out of the same mud. I would just call it American music, and I think we’re the best ever at this because it has so many different influences. Music is the honest-to-God truth of the melting pot of the United States. It’s not purebred, it’s a mongrel, which is the best kind of dog.”
His search, conscious or not, for collaborators – whether it’s Elton John or Sam Phillips — is woven through that belief.