If producer T. Bone Burnett ever decided to retire, he could do so with the satisfaction of having shaped the music of legends like Robert Plant, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and, most recently, Ringo Starr.
However, it’s as a solo artist and composer that Burnett truly excelled in 2024, beginning with the strikingly bare, unexpectedly uplifting, and heartfelt narrative of ‘The Other Side‘, and now embarking on his first brief tour in over a decade, with a performance at World Café Live on Wednesday, Oct. 30.
“I’m still going to do scores for film and TV stuff, which often requires doing incredibly dark music – and I enjoy going dark like the first season of ‘True Detective’ knowing we were going to scare the pants off people,” Burnett says with a laugh when asked about finding something brighter and open for ‘The Other Side’. “But my life has changed. I have a happy marriage which I never thought was possible, and my life … everything is peaceful.”
With that, as a songwriter and singer, T. Bone Burnett has seen the light.
The bold success of ‘The Other Side’ — a much less lyrically dark and sonically lavish album than Burnett’s previous ‘Invisible Light’ solo works — is only part of his recent achievements. Along with penning songs for Starr’s January 2025 country album, ‘Look Up,’ Burnett also rekindled his professional partnership with Elvis Costello for this week’s box set ‘King of America & Other Realms’, the new Audible podcast program ‘The True Story of the Coward Brothers’ directed by Christopher Guest, and an even newer Costello-Burnett album soon to be released.
“We toured together in the 1980s, loved singing classics, and harmonizing,” says Burnett. “Back then, Elvis invented a whole comedic backstory for the fictional Coward Brothers, which we revisited during the pandemic.”
As for this week’s release of the ‘King of America’ box set, a celebration of Burnett’s production work on Costello’s 1986 Americana period, Burnett views the six-disc collection as a tribute to their 40-year friendship.
“King of America has aged beautifully… Elvis did what the Beatles did: he took American music and reinvented it.”
As for his own new music, the solo Burnett has certainly reinvented himself, moving from the struggles and religiosity of 1980’s ‘Truth Decay’ and the slipping into darkness of two 21st century ‘Invisible Light’ albums – the sound of forewarning – into something open and vulnerable on ‘The Other Side.’
“You’re right about that forewarning thing,” he says. “I remember reading about Pavlov and his work with dogs and bells, and felt as if there was behavior modification going on in my own life. Through television and radio of the 1950s, those experiments were being done on us – a recurring nightmare I had was that our right hands would be removed and replaced by electronic devices to control us.”
Writing about that dystopia for decades came crashing to a halt when, not so long ago, Burnett walked into a coffee-shop and realized that his nightmare had come true.
“They didn’t have to remove our hands, they just put phones in every one of them, ceaselessly.”
Burnett’s nightmare had come full circle. It was time for him to get out, go into ‘The Other Side’, and find love. To do this, he removed himself from most language (“if you don’t listen to words, no one can lie to you”) and moved into what he calls pure tone.
“I changed my tone,” says Burnett. “I changed the tone of the music. I changed the tone of the language. Because I don’t feel that anyone of us needs to be warned anymore. It’s all here. Did you read Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly’s thing where he said Trump was into Hitler and wanted his generals to be like Hitler’s generals – even though Hitler’s generals wanted to kill him – that’s how stupid Trump is.
“When we, in this country, are faced with straight-up fascism, it’s not up to me to warn people any longer. What I want to do is make music for people who see that, who found their way through the darkness now, and want only the light. I no longer write from a rebellious tone. I’m writing for an embracing tone. As a kid, all I wanted to do was raise hell. Now, all I want to do is bring heaven down to Earth.”
T. Bone Burnett wil play at World cafe Live on Wednesday, Oct. 30. For information and tickets, visit worldcafelive.org
