Long before Chappell Roan was even born, T Bone Burnett was already your favorite artist’s favorite artist.
Across the span of 50-plus years, the prolific creator has worked with cultural movers and shakers in folk, roots, rock and country en masse. From gaining ground in Bob Dylan’s ’70s-era Rolling Thunder Revue to working with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on 2007’s “Raising Sand” to his brilliant 2000-era soundtrack work for “O Brother Where Art Thou?” and steering the sounds for HBO’s “True Detective” series, 13-time Grammy Award winner Burnett has been a huge contributor to our national songbook and a protector and provider of all things Americana.
But with his brilliant album “The Other Side,” released in April — on the same day as Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets Department” (yes, he’s worked with her too) — the admitted “reluctant rockstar” returns to his roots as a singer-songwriter. Written over a three-week period fueled by the purchase of a new fleet of guitars, “The Other Side” is Burnett’s first true solo album in 18 years. But it’s also a flip of the switch where his dystopic Southern gothic charm (that often made him good bedfellows with bleak bard Sam Shepard) has found the light.
At the heart of the 12-track acoustic stunner, with guest spots from Rosanne Cash, Lucius and Weyes Blood, is a love story embraced in a sense of gratitude for the human experience. To make it, the 76-year-old Burnett tapped into the key part of his talent he’s cultivated over so many years — he tuned in.
“I am a listener. I’ve spent my whole life learning to listen … to tone and paying attention to what the listeners are hearing,” Burnett shared during a call from his Nashville home that she shares with wife, screenwriter and director Callie Khouri. But making “The Other Side,” he said, “was a real shift for me. It was caring about [listeners] in a different way, less about being combative or confronting and about being more loving.” He admitted, “It’s a different responsibility that I hadn’t really considered before, and I’m sorry I didn’t figure this out when I was 20 years old.”
Part of the lightbulb effect came from reading the book “The Master and His Emissary” by psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist.
“In it he posits that human beings sang to each other for thousands of years before we innovated the technology of language, and the implications of that were immediately clear to me,” shared Burnett.
As someone who will die on the sword of analog methods, Burnett has admittedly always been cautious about advancements in technology and how it’s impacted humanity. Even as a teen, he had a prophetic recurring nightmare in which his church congregation all had their hands cut off by shadow figures, only to be replaced by automated appendages that acted as tracking devices.
“I don’t like the way the [tech world] has presumed to order society for all the rest of us,” he said.
So honing in on the basis of pure language became a huge focal point of his latest works, likewise spurred by an article he read that discussed how many No. 1 songs have the word “you” in them.
“The Beatles’ first four singles were ‘Love Me Do’ where the you is implied, ‘From Me to You,’ ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ” he said, providing examples. “It was interested in the way they used the power of that to infiltrate the unconscious of a whole generation who fell in love with them from those simple statements.”
‘If you want to know what’s good about [this country], listen to our music. It’s where all different nationalities, all different religions, all different ethnicities, philosophies and experiences have come together and listened to each other and created harmony.’
— T Bone Burnett
The communal idea of “you” is also front and center in Burnett’s new tour, his first in nearly 20 years. Rather than opt for large theaters, he was insistent on small, intimate listening rooms like the Old Town School of Folk Music, where he’ll perform this weekend.
“I really learned how to play music for people sitting around the living room with Bobby Neuwirth,” Burnett said, recalling the place the Bob Dylan band comrades had in Los Angeles’ Coldwater Canyon in the ’70s after Burnett relocated from Fort Worth, Texas, to further his music career.
“Every night we would go down to The Troubadour and see whoever was playing, and we would take people back to the house: Willie Nelson and Don Everly and Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne. We would be passing guitars around. … Bobby would force me to play … and that’s the way I know how to perform.”
Even in the midst of Burnett’s slew of current projects like creating soundtracks for Audible podcast series (the latest being “The Coward Brothers” with Elvis Costello) and some upcoming collaborations with Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson and Jack White, he harkens back to those early foundational days — dead set on preserving the works of his contemporaries. In 2022, Burnett and Bob Dylan teamed up for a re-recording of “Blowin’ In The Wind” that was preserved on an Ionic Originals disc, Burnett’s newly developed analog reproduction format. It sold at Christie’s auction house for over $1 million. But that’s not totally the point.
Burnett hopes to use the new development to preserve the legacy of music works in a way that digital can’t, with the goal to bring music into the fine arts world and start working with museums. The idea came out of conversations with staff at the Library of Congress who approached Burnett years ago about starting to digitize American music works, and he knew something had to be done.
“In the United States, our recorded music is our finest art [that] deserves to be treated with the same respect that a Cezanne painting is,” said Burnett. “If you want to know what’s good about [this country], listen to our music. It’s where all different nationalities, all different religions, all different ethnicities, philosophies and experiences have come together and listened to each other and created harmony.”