Q&A: T Bone Burnett takes center stage to cut "Tooth"

By Gary Graff

DETROIT (Billboard) - Music fans are not imagining it -- T Bone Burnett is just about everywhere they look these days.

The singer/songwriter/musician/producer is on the road with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss after producing their Grammy Award-winning 2007 release, "Raising Sand." He also has production credits on upcoming albums by John Mellencamp and B.B. King, and he was just tapped by the Who to produce an album of covers expected to be released in 2009.

Amidst all these projects, he still finds time to make his own music. After breaking a 14-year recording hiatus, Burnett released "The True False Identity" in 2006, along with the compilation set "Twenty Twenty -- The Essential T Bone Burnett." And this month he emerges with "Tooth of Crime," a companion album to Sam Shepard's revision of his 1972 play of the same name (now called "Tooth of Crime (Second Dance)") 10 years after the two began collaborating on it.

The album features the same dry, hollow sound that's become associated with the Texas-born Burnett in recent years, along with the same corps of musicians -- including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Jim Keltner -- that Burnett considers his team. One song, "Kill Zone," hails from a late-'80s collaboration with Roy Orbison.

These are all welcome additions to a career that includes such landmark works as Los Lobos' "How Will the Wolf Survive?," Elvis Costello's "King of America" and the Grammy-winning soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Q: You're on tour now with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Did you feel a need to personally shepherd "Raising Sand" onto the road -- and will there be a sequel?

T Bone Burnett: Well, yeah. When Robert first talked about this, he said he wanted to do it as a band rather than as a duet album. And it really turned into a band -- and this is an incredible band. Every musician is great, and the two singers are just ridiculous, so it was an irresistible project. And once again I'm the worst player in the band, keeping with my standard operating procedure. (laughs)

(As for a sequel), I hope so. I really do, because I feel like we're just starting to know what we can do with this thing. The two of them are so incredibly good that I would hate to not continue to work with both of them.

Q: You're reactivating your label, DMZ.

Burnett: It's morphing into a new company called Code, which is spelled X-O-Delta-E. We'll be able to function as a record company if we want to, but first of all it's an artist-driven initiative.

There's going to be a fairly large group of artists who have already signed on and who are going to say, "This is the way we want our music heard now." We're going to put out high-resolution audio, and we can come in at any point of the process; there's production, manufacturing and distribution -- only now it's "delivery" -- and we can do all three of those things. We don't need record companies at all anymore -- that's the reality. They've just done themselves out of business with their own greed. They've taken themselves out of the game, and they don't know how to do it anymore, so we're just going to take control of our own work and deliver it to people the way we want it delivered.

Q: What do you have planned for the Who covers album?

Burnett: Well, that is exciting. I've been a High Numbers fan (a name the Who took during its mod phase) for some time because I love that (song) "I'm the Face"; I love the Slim Harpo song "Got Love If You Want It" that it came from -- but I loved the way they did it. Roger (Daltrey) is a really great singer, and we've started going through material. We've picked out about five or six (songs) that we've all said, "Yeah, let's do these" -- I'm not going to say what they are because that might take some of the fun out of it. And I'm sure we'll find more as we go on. We'll probably do about 15 (songs).

Q: What did you want to accomplish with B.B. King on his album?

Burnett: I saw B.B. at the Central Forest Ballroom in Dallas in '65 or something like that. I remembered exactly how that felt and how that sounded, so I wanted to go back and sort of re-create that very live sound. We all cut it just sitting around in a circle. I tried to be very true to who (King) was when I first heard him and that energy -- in other words, not try to update him in any way.

Q: How did you find working with John Mellencamp?

Burnett: I love John Mellencamp. He is a powerful musician and he rocks like crazy and he's a really great singer. He's salty as all get-out, there's no doubt about that, but I enjoy that. I'm at a great time in my life now where everybody I work with is so good you just sort of turn on the tape and they do it -- and that's how it was with him, too.

He's a great storyteller and a great artist. I didn't offer much direction, really, but he was certainly open. He encouraged me to play guitar a lot on the record, which I enjoyed. For years and years I stayed away from playing on the records I produced because I wanted to stay outside of the songs; I just wanted to be able to absorb them. But he wanted me to play, so I did, and he's got a great band. It was a terrific experience.

Q: You're an artist, songwriter, producer, musical director -- do you like any one better than the other?

Burnett: The best job in show business is a free-standing artist. I shied away from it because I was, I don't know ... embarrassed? Kind of, "I know I'm not good enough in the face of Ray Charles," you know? I wasn't good enough for myself. And for a long time I haven't known what I wanted to say, at least on my own records.

I didn't really feel like I had to be a record artist. I had to learn to accept who I am and let it be that ... I have things I want to say now. I've got a whole bunch of songs I've written, and I'm going to just keep working as much as I can to get this stuff down.

Reuters/Billboard