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Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before the onset of the wildfires in Los Angeles. The artist has since addressed the situation.
T Bone Burnett says he’s not doing much producing these days — a curious statement for a guy with current production projects involving multiple artistic giants. But the massively influential producer and 13-time GRAMMY winner has had such prolific periods of work that his recent efforts may seem like semi-retirement by comparison.
After all, Burnett shepherded the soundtracks to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I Walk the Line, The Big Lebowski, Crazy Heart, TV’s “Nashville,” and plenty more. And that’s when he wasn’t busy playing musical midwife to albums by Elvis Costello, B.B. King, Tony Bennett and k.d. lang, Counting Crows, Los Lobos, Willie Nelson, Diana Krall, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elton John, Gillian Welch, then-wife Sam Phillips, and scads of others. That’s how he racked up a GRAMMY Award for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical (among many others), a President’s Merit Award at the 2011 Producers & Engineers Wing GRAMMY Week celebration, and loads of other honors.
Burnett’s relative detachment from his superproducer status makes even more sense considering he’s recorded his own work since the early ‘70s and he states that he regards himself as a songwriter first and foremost. Besides his rich catalog, the fruits of those labors appeared on two 2024 albums: a self-titled, pseudonymous collaboration with Costello as the Coward Brothers and a solo release, The Other Side. The latter is nominated for Best Americana Album at the 2025 GRAMMYs.
Read more: 2025 GRAMMYs: See The OFFICIAL Full Nominations List
The Other Side is a quintessential example of Burnett’s signature rootsy, stripped-down production aesthetic that made the musician a kind of modern-day ambassador of American roots music. T Bone Burnett spoke with GRAMMY.com about his latest release, his other current efforts, and his heavy-duty history — revealing a lot about the uncompromising, innovative mind that made all that music possible.
You make your home in Nashville these days, but you lived and worked in L.A. for decades. How have the wildfires impacted your world?
Ringo Starr, Jack White, Sheryl Crow, Mickey Guyton, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, The War and Treaty, Sarah Jarosz, Jamey Johnson, Larkin Poe, Emmylou Harris, and I just finished playing two nights at the Ryman Auditorium. We are releasing the finale, “A Little Help from My Friends,” to benefit victims of California wildfires.
[My wife] Callie and I used to live on Radcliffe in Pacific Palisades. That house and our old neighborhood is gone. Solid gone. It looks like Tokyo after [WWII USAF General] Curtis LeMay got finished with it. I have many friends who have lost their homes and the lifetimes that were in them. I grieve deeply for all that has been lost.
You’ve just produced Ringo’s new album, Look Up, his first country record since 1971. What was that like for the teenager in you who was galvanized by the Beatles?
In many ways, it’s the culmination of a dream I’ve been living since 1964. It was a chance to give something back to Ringo for all I feel he’s given us. It was a way to say “Thank you.”
It’s a pretty deep record. I’m really proud of it, I have to say, even though I understand pride goes before a fall. I love the record. The last song on it is “Thankful,” it’s a song he wrote and it’s the most personal, honest song I think he’s ever recorded. And I think it became the warp and woof of the whole record; the whole record’s about gratitude.
It seems like some artists gain gravitas as they get older, have you felt that from people you’ve produced?
I have to say I’ve felt it from all of the people I’ve worked with. Right now, I’m working with five people all over 80 — Ringo, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Meredith Monk and Twyla Tharp — and they’re all doing extraordinary work. With Dylan and Willie, we’ve gone back and recorded classic songs that they wrote; in Dylan’s case 60 years ago and in Willie’s case 70 years ago. I feel the versions that we’ve done are the definitive versions of the songs, because every one has that 60 or 70 years of life in them.
When you’re working with people in their 20s and 30s there’s all this uncertainty about the endeavor, like, What will this mean to me, how will this affect my career? I don’t believe that artists have careers, I just believe that artists do the work that’s right under their noses every day. Careers, I believe, are for politicians and lawyers and educators, people like that, where there’s a ladder to climb. With artists, you’re just doing your work every day.
With artists in their 80s it’s all second nature, so there’s no real uncertainty. It’s just more, This is what I do, and that’s incredibly freeing. And as a collaborator it gives you a lot firmer ground to stand on.
Have you felt that for yourself with your own work too?
Most certainly, yes. Definitely.
You snuck out two albums this year, one under an alias. How did the idea of you and Elvis creating musical alter egos as the Coward Brothers come about?
It started in probably 1984, 1985. We went all over the world together, just the two of us solo, so we spent a tremendous amount of time together. Very soon after we started doing those shows, I think Elvis invited me to do a series of songs with him in the middle of his show. He thought, “Let’s have a context or a pretext of why we’re doing these songs together,” so we invented a group act called the Coward Brothers. It was really just an excuse for us to do a lot of songs we really loved: “Baby’s in Black” by the Beatles, Doc Watson’s version of “Tom Dooley.”
Over the decades the Coward Brothers have come up several times. Eventually, I think during the pandemic, he sat down and wrote a three-act play that we decided to do as an audio-only play with Audible. We invited Chris Guest to direct it because there’s nobody better at directing improvisational-type faux histories, inventing worlds like Best in Show or A Mighty Wind or Spinal Tap.
When we went in to start recording the play we started writing songs as we needed them for the story. So, we ended up with an album and this Audible Original.
Some of the songs you wrote for The Other Side feel like they could be country or folk songs from the ‘50s.
I think that’s right. I look at American music as a continuum that’s being reinvented every few years. For instance, there’s a famous American air [traditional melody] that appeared most recently as “Blowin’ in the Wind” like 60 years ago. But “Blowin’ in the Wind” before that was a civil rights song called “We Shall Overcome.” And before that, in the mid-1800s, it was a song about the end of slavery called “No More Auction Block.” And before that in, like, 1843, the first time the song was ever recorded — and I don’t mean audio recording — it was called “Nearer My God to Thee.”
If you listen to that song, it’s all this same air that’s been repurposed as the times change in the country. That’s how I see all of our music.
Along those lines, one of my favorites on the album, “Everything and Nothing,” feels like a distillation of the ideas in Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” and Mose Allison’s “Everybody Cryin’ Mercy.”
Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s [also] got an Irishness about it. And yeah, lyrically it certainly reflects those two pieces.
The lyrics to “Sometimes I Wonder” are great too. I laughed out loud at “When he said to her, ‘Judge, I am my own worst enemy’/She responded, ‘Not as long as I’m alive.’”
That’s probably a [playwright] George S. Kaufman line or something like that. But that’s another one that’s a very ‘50s kind of Jimmy Reed rock ‘n’ roll song, blues song, whatever you want to call it. Country blues you could call it, but it’s sort of neither at the same time. I don’t think there’s ever been a blues song that had that sort of bridge in it. That bridge takes us into pop music. By the way, you know, all those guys — Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson, all those guys were trying to play pop music.
An interesting thing that’s going on now is that there’s a reexamination of the African American contribution to country music. The history of country music has been told that it started with Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family….and anytime Black people were mentioned they were always called influences. You know, Hank Williams learned to play from Rufus Payne, a guy they called Tee Tot. And Bill Monroe and Ike Everly and Merle Travis learned to play from a guy called Arnold Schultz ,who was a fiddle and guitar player up in Kentucky. And the Carter Family learned to play from Lesley Riddle.
All of those people were Black. They weren’t influences; they were really originators. And I think it’s good that a fuller story of country music is beginning to be told.
Learn more: A Brief History Of Black Country Music: 11 Important Tracks From DeFord Bailey, Kane Brown & More
In both your writing and production, it’s always seemed like minimalism has been a watchword; you strive towards an economy of words and music.
I feel like the longer I go, the more it’s true. I never set out to be a minimalist, I was just trying to be as true as possible, but the further I’ve gone, the more I like to hear the person. Hip-hop brought back this idea of minimalism I think, where there’s just a beat and one instrument and the song. In that case you hear the person, you hear the story.
The other thing that’s been really important to me through all this is diction. Allen Ginsberg used to talk about how important it is for a poet or a singer to have good diction, that you should be able to hear every consonant and every syllable of every word. And that’s something I’m really working with younger artists with.
I think part of the insecurity I was talking to you about before is not having the conviction of the word. That’s one of the beautiful things about Dylan, he always just laid down the law. He would just sing what it was he was saying really clearly. Minimalism is more about what’s crucial, what’s central to the message, the story that’s being told. Why write [lyrics] if you don’t put them out there? It’s a function of trying to impart emotion over meaning. And part of it is just not having the conviction to just say the thing you’re saying. I think self-doubt is probably part of that reticence to enunciate.
On your new album, the idea of retaining only what’s crucial comes into play. Like a sculptor would say: chip away everything that isn’t the sculpture.
We’ve worked very much with that kind of principle. Like, not having drums was interesting. Because one of the other things I believe, and the way I work, is that all instruments are drums. All instruments are resonating chambers that you attack either with your hand or a bow or a pick…but they’re all essentially drums.
In the kind of folk/country blues record that The Other Side is, it wasn’t necessary at all to have drums, because I was playing rhythm guitar and I was basically functioning as the drummer. And then Dennis Crouch is playing those big bass notes, the bass just allows you to change tonality more frequently than a bass drum. A double bass is a version of a bass drum that you can change tones with quickly and easily.
Production-wise you’ve earned a reputation as the go-to guy for a kind of musical traditionalism, as the back-to-basics roots kind of guy. How intentional was that?
I’ve just always been trying to tell the truth. I guess it’s just my taste. I’ve never been a follower of mass culture, with the exception of the Beatles. The things I’ve been interested in were always the off-the-beaten-path things: I love the Louvin Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys and Ralph Stanley, things that felt like they were coming from another world.
When you’re dealing with mass culture there’s a tendency to round all the edges off so it doesn’t offend anyone. Whereas something like the Stanley Brothers would offend a lot of people because there was a harshness to it sometimes…. I think it’s the same thing for me. I would love to be good enough to make a Stanley Brothers record. I did get to make two or three records with Ralph Stanley, and I think they’re pretty good. I think they stay true to the spirit of the Stanley Brothers.
You’ve always tried to stay true to the artists you were working with.
I made a record with B.B. King, I produced his last record. We won a GRAMMY for it, and it’s a beautiful record called One Kind Favor. I think there’s a tendency with heritage artists like that to try to update them. The stuff I like the most of B.B.’s is the stuff he did in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s with [saxophonist/bandleader] Maxwell Davis in Los Angeles, like “Rock Me Baby” and “Sweet Little Angel” and “Further on Down the Road.”
When I got the call to produce him, I went back and listened to those records, and listened to stuff I knew he loved, like T-Bone Walker and Lonnie Johnson, and tried to find things we could do in that same mode. Rather than trying to update him, I was trying to record the follow up to the Maxwell Davis records.
And yet with Elvis, on the one hand you helped him go back to a rootsy feeling with King of America, but a few years later you helped him do the opposite on Spike.
And both were equally fun. When we were doing King of America, he had just come out of doing a record called Goodbye Cruel World that he really didn’t like when he finished it. That’s when we went on the road together. We went on the road solo because he wanted to go back and find out why he wrote these songs in the first place before they started becoming affected by the demands of mass culture.
We went back to playing as if we were playing songs for each other in a living room, and that was the beginning of King of America. Then with Spike, he had been writing with McCartney…it was all about freedom, just, Let’s do whatever we can think of, which was a tremendous amount of fun. I think he had his biggest single on that record with “Veronica,” a song he wrote with McCartney.
Spirituality has been a presence in your songwriting to varying degrees over the years. What’s your long view on that?
For me, songwriting is a holy endeavor. It’s a spiritual endeavor, like, Where do these songs come from? You have to hope they’re inspired, and what is inspiration? Inspiration is a spiritual quest. Music is my religion, and shows to me are religious experiences, or at least should be. A community comes together like a church and celebrates life.
In fact, this wonderful friend named Tom Willett brought a woman named Lesley [aka Sam] Phillips to me to produce, and she was being billed as the Christian Cyndi Lauper. She wanted to transition out of that whole world, and we made a beautiful record called The Turning that sort of ended her run as a Christian artist. The people in that world said, “Why’d you call it The Turning? It sounds like you’re turning away from God.” She said, “Well, what about I’m turning toward God?” That stuff never meant much to me, but certainly music as a holy expression means everything to me.
On the other side of the fence, having won 13 GRAMMYs, at some point did that start to feel sort of unreal to you, like having a wallet full of Monopoly money or something?
When I lived in Los Angeles there was a period of time when we won award after award. GRAMMYs and Oscars and BAFTAs and American Music or CMA. And I had them all put in a closet because the last thing you want to think about when you’re making music is whether you’re gonna get a trophy for it.
But since I moved to Nashville, I actually brought them out. I have a shelf for the GRAMMYs. I’m enjoying them now. In Los Angeles, to me it felt gauche to display a bunch of trophies. And I still only have a few of them out because there are way too many, but I like seeing them. I’m old now, I’m 76, so it’s good to remember I used to do that. [Laughs.]
Are there any albums you’ve produced that you knew from the start would make a major impact?
Weirdly, I thought that O Brother, Where Art Thou? was going to. Because folk music like that has been around my whole life, and there have been times when it was more part of the mainstream and less part of the mainstream. But I knew we had this extraordinary group of musicians who were really underappreciated, and then we had a George Clooney/Coen brothers movie to shine a light on them. And it just felt to me like, this is a good time for this music, this is a good time for these people.
And when we finished the record, even when we were doing the record — I had made a couple of pop records, I made August and Everything After by Counting Crows and then Bringing Down the Horse by the Wallflowers — and the music didn’t sound very different in the three records. So, I thought there was a really good chance the record would penetrate the zeitgeist. So, we won several GRAMMYs for that. And we won several GRAMMYs for the [Robert Plant/Alison Krauss] Raising Sand record, which I also thought would appeal to a lot of people because of how good everybody involved was and how interesting the songs were.
What do you feel are the challenges and benefits of producing a film soundtrack vs. an artist’s album?
I’m not producing that much anymore. I wrote and produced this Ringo record because I love Ringo and he’s an extraordinary human being. He’s made an extraordinary contribution to our culture. As a producer, unless you’re working with a handful of artists, there’s not really the back end [of making much money] anymore.
I am completely out of touch with how anybody makes money at all anymore. I’ve been reading these articles about what a nightmare Spotify is. [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek is worth several hundred million dollars more than any artist I’ve ever heard of is worth. Spotify is worth over twice as much as the biggest record company; I think Spotify is worth 93 billion dollars and Universal Music Group is like 45 billion. There’s a complete imbalance that’s taken place and I don’t know how that’s gonna get resolved.
There was a time when I thought I would produce soundtrack records because the movie theater was a pretty good radio station, you know? So that music would get played in the movie theater and at that time there were record stores that were often within several feet of the movie theater, and people would leave the theater and go buy the record. Now I don’t know what happens; people see something on streaming and listen to it once and that’s it. There are a few artists like Taylor Swift and Drake and Ed Sheeran that the audience listens to repeatedly, and they rack up hundreds of billions of streams. I don’t know how that would ever happen with a soundtrack album for instance.
I’d like to throw out a few titles of albums you’ve produced and have you just tell me the first thing that comes to mind about them. First, Los Lobos – How Will the Wolf Survive?
That’s a beautiful record. “I Got Loaded” is on that record, and I remember one night I was walking into The Roxy and Robin Williams was on the street outside, I guess he was at the box office. And when I walked in, he turned around and sang “I Got Loaded” to me, and I thought, Okay, that record is a success. And also, that song “Will the Wolf Survive” is a beautiful song. I think that record went a long way toward setting up Los Lobos for a long life in music.
Orbison was to me the most beautiful of all the rock ‘n’ roll singers. He sang very, very quietly — like, if you stood 10 feet away from him you couldn’t hear him. And from him I learned that it’s not about volume, it’s about tone. Because when you put a mic in front of him and he sang with that intense tone, and you turned it up, he sounded like an opera singer or something. But in fact, he was a very, very sensitive, personal, intimate singer.
When he recorded, he would have the band in his headphones but he wouldn’t have his own voice in the headphones, because he said he had sung so long in rock ‘n’ roll shows without monitors that he had learned how to feel the notes in his jaw. Isn’t that wild?
Counting Crows – August and Everything After
Adam Duritz was on fire, and is an extraordinary singer and writer. And as soon as I heard the demo of that I thought, I know exactly what to do with this; I see exactly where this fits in the culture, the zeitgeist. And we rented a house up the street from my house in Brentwood, and I think we were up there five or six months, just recording every day. It wasn’t even a [working] band at the time, they had only played two gigs. So, we had to invent the band as we were inventing the record.
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand
That album was one of those rare experiences where you get to put your whole being into it. And I’m grateful to both Robert and Alison for their generosity in allowing me into that in that profound way. I hope to only write songs for the rest of my life and make my own records, but in a record like that, it almost becomes your own record because the principals allow you a free hand to collaborate with them.
I’ve just gone in with Willie and we’ve recorded six of his most classic songs — [including] “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “The Party’s Over” and “Crazy” — and they’re some of the most beautiful recordings I’ve ever done.
I loved working with Willie with all of those extraordinary musicians [on Country Music]. We went in not with his band, but with what I would call mountain music musicians in Nashville and made a very resonant, beautiful country record. I think that [album] was a response, the idea of it as “country music,” to a transition that was taking place in country music, where it was getting more and more rock and had less and less to do with Jimmie Rodgers and more to do with Jimmy Page.
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