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.