A Conversation with T-Bone Burnett – HuffPost 9.29.10

Mike Ragogna: T-Bone, you and an entourage of pals are on tour in The Speaking Clock Revue in Boston and New York to benefit music and art education in public schools.

T-Bone Burnett: We are. We’ve partnered up with Participant Media which is a great film company started by this guy Jeff Skoll who drew up the first plan for eBay. He’s a lovely guy, and he’s started an entertainment company–or I guess you’d call it a production company–in Los Angeles. They have The Participant Foundation that champions various causes. It’s a very big foundation, and it’s a great outfit. They’ve put out a lot of big films likeCharlie Wilson’s War, The Informant, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Cove. I don’t know if you saw The Cove, but that was an incredible movie.

MR: Also, there’s one coming up called, Waiting For Superman, right?

TBB: Yeah, they’ve got this new picture coming out called Waiting For Superman. So, we’ve teamed up with them to do a couple of shows, see how it goes, and see if we can do one of these kind of shows because, if so, we would like to do it on an ongoing basis. We’d like to have a platform for new people, a great vibe running throughout the country, and to help champion the arts in public schools.

MR: Right, because the arts are the first things hit when there’s a budget crunch.

TBB: Well, it is. You know, Plato said that education stands on three legs–athletics, academics, and the arts. He said without any one of those, education would fall. The arts are incredibly important, and a lot of attention goes to athletics. You’re in Iowa, right?

MR: Right, of course, athletics.

TBB: There’s some athletics stuff going on around there, I know.

MR: Yup, football, football, and football.

TBB: The arts, and music in particular, was used throughout history to teach. We just rhyme things because it’s easier to remember. Music was used to teach history, mathematics, language, and rhythm. So, it’s an important part of our education, and it’s easy to cut it because it seems like it doesn’t pertain to going out and making a living. But never the less, it’s important to have well rounded people.

MR: Who are the folks that will be on the tour with you?

TBB: Elton John and Leon Russell are headlining, Elvis Costello is the master of ceremonies, and we also have John Mellencamp, Gregg Allman, Ralph Stanley, Jim James, Jeff Bridges, and The Punch Brothers. Do you know The Punch Brothers?

MR: The Punch Brothers are terrific, yes.

TBB: Yeah, they’re insanely great. We’ve also got a new group called The Secret Sisters who are fantastic from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I love these kinds of shows where each person sings three or four songs, and people collaborate with different people. I think it’s a good vibe.

MR: It seems like the singer-songwriter type of acts gravitate a little more to that kind of show than the more “produced” acts.

TBB: Well, all of this stuff is primarily done with people who do it. A lot of it is going to use the same band for all the different acts, you know? A lot of these guys have made albums with the band and with me. It’s the cats we work with all the time.

MR: Who’s in the house band?

TBB: Well, Jay Bellerose and Jim Keltner are playing drums, Dennis Crouch is playing bass, Marc Ribot is playing guitar, Russ Paul is playing steel, Mike Compton is coming to play mandolin, and Gerald Leonard is bring a horn section. Did I say Ralph Stanley? Isn’t that wild, Ralph is going to come to do this.

MR: Nice. You’ve been working with Ralph since O’ Brother…, right?

TBB: Yeah. I just love Ralph. I just think he’s a great cat. He’s the most amazing storyteller, really. So, I’m happy he’s coming along for this.

MR: You know, your stable of artists, other than worship you, regularly acknowledge how much you’ve added to their music, and how much you allow their music to breathe with your productions.

TBB: I have to say, I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done. I’m just trying to make honest recordings of people.

MR: Honest recordings, that’s really well put. Recently, you produced an Elvis Costello album?

TBB: I did, yeah.

MR: And you have a new one coming out soon?

TBB: Yeah, we just finished a new one that’s getting ready to come out. I think it’s one of the best records either one of us has ever done. I think you’ll love Elvis’ new record. It’s called, National Ransom, and it’s great. It goes from being very stripped down with just a guy on guitar, all the way to loud, punk rock music. And many other things–a lot of ’20s and ’30s kinds of music. It’s something else.

MR: You stated before that you just try to make honest records. Well, O’ Brother Where Art Thou is about the most honest record one could think of, isn’t it?

TBB: Yeah, the great thing about O’ Brother Where Art Thou? was when I discovered having a screen between you and the record companies gives you a great deal of freedom to create a different kind of sound or a different kind of record.

MR: And they benefited from it–that was one of the biggest records of that year.

TBB: Yeah, it was a crazy, insanely great time. I love that movie, and I love The Big Lebowski too which I also got to work on.

MR: You also got to work on Crazy Heart, didn’t you?

TBB: Yeah, I did. That was another magical experience. It’s a wild thing that happens. This kid Scott Cooper came over and had a script, and he just believed it into existence. It was just an amazing thing to watch. Then, Jeff Bridges breathed it into existence.

MR: Yeah, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, oh my God.

TBB: It’s beautiful, she’s so beautiful.

MR: There’s something about her presence when she’s on screen, even when sharing the screen with a superstar like Jeff Bridges. Now, the two of them did kind of fight for focus, in a good way, to where you didn’t know where your attention should be going. I’m always amazed by how much she can command a screen.

TBB: That’s interesting. That’s a good observation, she’s fantastic.

MR: Thank you. Also, you produced an album by John Mellencamp recently that was recorded in mono. Can you go into the reasoning behind that?

TBB: Do you know the photographer (Mike) Disfarmer? I think he was in Arkansas, and he just took these photographs of people for like a dollar a photograph. People would come in from all over the place to this little town in Arkansas, and he would take their picture. I think John wanted to make a record like that. Look up Disfarmer and you’ll see what I mean–I’m sure there are websites for him. It’s just beautiful, regular, plain art. It’s sort of amateurish, in another way, although incredibly artful. This guy did that, that’s all he did. He just sat in his little store in Arkansas, and took pictures for thirty or forty years. So, John wanted to make a plain, honest, ethical, but very simple record. Of course, it complicated things enormously, but we bought an old reel-to-reel tape recorder from eBay, went out with a good mic and pre-amp, and recorded it. We listened to it back on the speaker that came with the tape machine. I think he would have rather done it straight to a lathe, really.

MR: (laughs) That’s great. It sounds like you guys were recording to one track, not multi-tracking with the intention of mixing the album down to one track.

TBB: We recorded to one track. When we went to Sun Records, their control room was filled with equipment, so we had to put a trailer out back to put our stuff in. John rented one of those little moving boxes, and we set up in there on about a one hundred and five degree evening in Memphis. We recorded it with one mic, and the band positioned themselves–Sam Phillips, when he recorded Elvis Presley, Howlin’ Wolf, and all those cats, put “X”s where each person should stand. I’m sure he spent hours and hours and nights and nights figuring out the best place for each person to stand. Then, we just put a mic in the middle, and that was it.

MR: That’s so cool.

TBB: I thought we could do it, and, of course, you can. If they could do it then, we can do it now.

MR: It’s really pretty funny. I was talking to Heart, and Ann and Nancy mentioned that they wanted to record as a band as opposed to layering their last album. I said, “Well, that’s certainly an unusual way to record.” Ann basically said, “Yeah, I never thought we would ever think of recording with the band in the same room as a bizarre or unique situation.”

TBB: The kids are doing that. There’s a whole new generation of musicians coming up that that’s all they want to do, you know? We try to get away from machines as much as we can.

MR: Do you stay analog to the last moment?

TBB: Yeah, we do. We use Pro Tools to edit, but we keep things incredibly analog. Certainly, every bit of equipment we use is class A, big time electronics. We try to make it sound as big and tough as we can.

MR: Where are you finding analog tape these days?

TBB: I don’t know, they’re getting it over here though. I think there are a couple of companies or maybe there’s just one company that makes it. Somebody’s got the formula.

MR: I forgot to ask when we were talking about John Mellencamp if there were any anomalies that had to be resolved like phasing which wouldn’t make sense, right?

TBB: No. With one mic, there’s no phasing. The phasing comes about because of one mic’s proximity to another mic. So, with one mic in mono, it’s absolutely in phase, and that’s part of what’s so attractive about it. There are always anomalies in stereo mixes, but we try to eliminate them, and I’d like to think we do. Just to hear pure signal is exciting.

MR: When you’re working with someone for the first time, do you size them up right off the bat to figure out what kind of mic to put on them or do you have to play around with that for a while.

TBB: You know, I’ve got guys who do that, but I think I’ve got a good intuition for that sort of thing too. You can hear whether someone sings in chest voice or head tones, and what parts of their voice need the most thorough examination, so to speak. Everybody has two or three octaves they’re singing in too. We hear one note primarily, but there are lower parts to it and higher parts to it.

MR: You mean notes that are resonating?

TBB: Yeah, notes that are there. If you look at it on a scope, you see there are notes in certain octaves that you didn’t even know were there. It’s just an overtone of the main tone or, sometimes, it’s the main tone. So, you can record that–you can record the lower octave, and then you can lay things back by doing that. Now we’re deep into it. (laughs)

MR: Hey, when you have T-Bone Burnett on the phone, you’ve got to talk about these topics, absolutely. So, since you stay analog as long as you possibly can, when you lay back your mixes, are they normally on two-track, stereo, analog tapes?

TBB: Yeah, usually fifteen IPS, which is kind of a slower speed. I like the slower speed as a rule. I also like tape hiss, and we add in all sorts of sounds–different layers, dimension, resonances, and different sounds. It’s just part of the world that the thing is in. When we were in Sun Studios, one of the great parts of that sound there was an air conditioner up on that wall that just ran all the time. It was just one of those old wall units, and all those Elvis Presley records were recorded with that going. So, that’s part of the world of sound.

MR: You’re actually recording “life” in addition to just recording some clean signal.

TBB: Yeah, that’s right, part of the time. It’s all part of having a sense of place.

MR: Are you working on anything else? I know we just mentioned a couple of projects, but isn’t there also a Gregg Allman project coming,?

TBB: We made a really beautiful record with Gregg that’s going to come out next year. It’s, once again, completely live. He’s so tough, man. Gregg is absolutely one of the best blues singers of all times. He really is a mind-blowing singer. He calls it low country blues and it is, man, it is tough. I love that record. I love that record, the Elvis Costello record is beautiful, and the Elton and Leon record is beautiful. I’ve been getting to work with some incredibly great people lately, and this band is so great too. I’ve been working my whole life to put this band together. (laughs)

MR: You’re one of those people whose name everybody wants to have on their album. Also, you are so associated with the term “Americana,” but as you said before, you’re really just trying to make honest records. Do you feel an affinity towards what one would identify as Americana?

TBB: Well, in one sense, Americana was Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Skip James, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Ralph Stanley, and Jimmy Reed. If that’s what Americana is, guys with guitars, playing and singing…the stuff I work on has a lot more of an American influence of rhythm, vibe, and the way to go about it. I’d say Miles Davis was Americana. Certainly John Lee Hooker is. So, that way of going about making music is certainly very American, but I don’t feel that split exactly.

MR: Well, you know, the magazine No Depression‘s depiction of Americana…

TBB: I’m just saying I don’t feel that exactly. I don’t feel it that way, but I know there’s something there because they’ve done such a tremendous amount of work on so many people, don’t you think? They’ve put together an incredible archive.

MR: Oh, yeah. Also, the field isn’t as narrow when you add artists that associate themselves with that genre, including The Jayhawks, Son Volt, and a lot of singer-songwriters.

TBB: Right.

MR: It seems like it became a melting pot when there wasn’t a home. I mean, one of my favorite artists, John Hiatt, easily falls into that category too.

TBB: Even Springsteen. Everybody does when you look at it. There’s something else that happened across the Atlantic and across the Pacific, but there’s a specific thing that just happened here, and it obviously happened in this incredible hybrid we live in. So, yeah, I love that stuff. I love where the fresh water meets the salt water and it gets all mixed-up.

MR: That’s so wonderfully put.

TBB: You don’t get a lot of that in Iowa, though, do you?

MR: (laughs) Not so much salt water, no. But we do have Americana out here. Actually, in Fairfield, the place you’re talking to now, we have a lot of musicians and a lot of artists. You can’t throw a stone without it hitting an artist or musician. It’s that kind of town.

TBB: Yeah, that’s right, it’s a great music town.

MR: So, let me ask you about your music. There have been T-Bone Burnett records in the past. Don’t you ever want to do another one? Aren’t you ever going to record that guy T-Bone again?

TBB: You know, I still write all the time. I might do that at some point…I don’t know. I have some good titles, you know? So, it makes me want to make a record. They’re so good that I don’t want to give them away.

MR: I get it. Getting back to The Speaking Clock Revue, do you know the dates and where you’ll be performing?

TBB: Yeah, October 16th we’ll be at the Wang Center in Boston, and October 20th we’ll be at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. And we’re going to do an abridged version at Neil Young’s Bridge School show in San Francisco.

MR: Nice. Do you have any advice for new artists coming into the field right now?

TBB: You know what I would say? This might sound counter-intuitive, but I would say–if I were a new artist, coming in right now–I wouldn’t do anything on the Internet at all. I would stay completely off the Internet and go total privateer. Just make your own records, or if you need money to make records, get a partner. Don’t worry about CDs and all that stuff. Just make whatever you want, put it on whatever form you want to, and sell it for anything you want to. That would be my advice.

MR: I love how you said “counter-intuitive” because everybody has been gravitating towards finding the latest online tool or social site in an almost frantic, panicked way.

TBB: Yeah, you can do that, but how many Facebook bands are there? How many MySpace bands are there? And where’s the story in that? There is a story if you go out and blow people’s minds. There are so many great, different mediums available to store analog data. Vinyl still sounds killer, and there’s no reason not to make vinyl records. There’s no reason to make anything but vinyl records for that matter.

MR: (laughs)

TBB: (laughs) You can give things away. MP3s are about valuable enough to give away. That’s about how good they sound, you should give them away. Compressed audio is just bad for us in every way. It’s physically bad for us, it’s emotionally bad for us, and it just sounds terrible. You’ll forgive me for saying so.

MR: A lot of people are in your camp. To be perfectly honest, there has always been the digital versus analog argument, and analog has to win in every case because how long can the mind listen to zeroes and ones without getting fatigued?

TBB: Right, and there will be new analog storage mediums coming that will be better than what we have now. Digital is great for passing information, but for music, it doesn’t work as well. Music doesn’t break down the same way words do, you know?

MR: Interesting. As you know, this interview is being recorded for both The Huffington Postand for KRUU-FM, the Midwest’s only solar-powered radio station. Do you have any thoughts about solar power?

TBB: I think about it. That’s fantastic that it’s a solar-powered station, that’s beautiful. As we go forward, we want to find the greenest way forward, that’s for certain.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney