“I can tell how hard you’re listening,” T Bone Burnett recently said on the first of two evenings at The Barns of Wolf Trap. “It’s a great honor to be listened to.”
Though he’s not a household name, Burnett’s fingerprints are all over contemporary music. As a singer-songwriter in his own right, he’s a highly respected cult figure, but he has produced a vast number of albums for other artists and worked on numerous films and TV shows. He’s produced for many of my favorite artists and bands, including Los Lobos, John Mellencamp, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Adia Victoria, Rhiannon Gidden, The Secret Sisters, Amy Helm, The Counting Crows, and Elvis Costello — and this is just scratching the surface of his resume. (Speaking of Mellencamp, he collaborated with the songwriter and horror writer Stephen King on the southern gothic musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, which I find fascinating.) He’s won Grammy Awards for the soundtracks to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou and Crazy Heart, and for his work with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, as well as with blues legend B.B. King.
This tour is Burnett’s first in 20 years, and he was determined to make it a special experience. The use of cell phones was prohibited in his show at The Barns at Wolf Trap on Oct. 28. T Bone said, “We use our eyes too much,” and he talked about reading a book that argues that, for thousands of years, humans sang to each other, even before we had language. Tone, he said can’t lie; we had to invent words to lie. “Tone is everything,” he said. And he’s right: tone is always honest in the emotion it evokes. It’s an instinctual response, something that’s hardwired into our perceptual architecture.
Earlier this year, he released The Other Side, his first solo record since 2008’s Tooth of Crime, a set of songs for a play by Sam Shepard. The album emerged as something of a surprise to Burnett. In 2019, he released The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space, an experimental record made with multi-instrumentalist Keefus Ciancia and drummer Jay Bellerose. It was intended to be the first part of a trilogy serving as a capstone on his career. (The second part, Spells, came out in 2022.)
For his first set, Burnett played through The Other Side, gradually bringing out his band and sharing the stories behind the songs. He started by introducing guitarist Colin Linden, who he called “the best country-blues player in the world.” Linden, he noted, was playing with Howlin Wolf as a teenager. In addition to his work with T Bone, Linden also plays in the Canadian roots-rock band. They played “He Came Down,” a song full of biblical imagery, which is not unusual for Burnett, who is a Christian.
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Don’t get the wrong idea about T Bone from the fact that he’s a Christian. Introducing “First Light of Day,” a love song for his wife, screenwriter Callie Koury, he talked about the criticism she got for writing Thelma & Louise. People called her a manhater, but that’s far from the truth. She had, he explained, a very close relationship with her father, who suddenly passed away when she was 16. The movie was meant to tell men to “step up,” a message, T Bone said, we would do well to heed today. (Koury created and served as showrunner for the series Nashville, for which Burnett acted as the musical director.)
Burnett’s leanings were also evident when he talked about the inspiration for “The Race Is Won.” He’d been reading, he said, about how the concept of race — which, growing up in Texas, he’d believed always existed — was invented in the 18th century. “The most beautiful women in the world,” it was argued, were in Georgia. “That’s how I became a Caucasian,” said T Bone, “even though I’ve never been anywhere the Caucasus Mountains.” The United States, he said, codified racial categories into law and our Constitution, an innovation we exported to the rest of the world.
“Come Back (When You Go Away)” was written for Ringo Starr. T Bone ran into the ex-Beatle a poetry reading in Los Angeles by George Harrison’s widow, Olivia. Burnett described it as a cowboy song in the style of Gene Autry. Burnett ended up writing several more songs for Ringo, which appear on his album coming out early next year.
He brought out Dennis Crouch, who he called “the best slap bass player in the world,” and, later, David Mansfield, a multi-instrumentalist who he’s been playing with since they were in the Alpha Band together, 50 years ago. “Hawaiian Blue Song,” he explained, was written with the late Bob Neuwirth, whose most famous song is “Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz, popularized by Janis Joplin. (In the second set, he covered Neuwirth’s “Annabel Lee,” a song he recorded in the ’80s.) The first set included the remainder of The Other Side: “(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day,” “Waiting For You,” “The Pain of Love,” “Sometimes I Wonder,” “Everything and Nothing,” “The Town That Time Forgot,” and “Little Darling.”
After an intermission, T Bone and his band came for a second set made up of songs from “the good old days.” They started with “Humans From Earth,” from his excellent 1980 LP, Truth Decay, followed by “It’s Not Too Late.” After “Annabel Lee,” he continued with “Like A Songbird That Has Fallen,” “You Will Be My OWn True Love,” “Shake Yourself,” and “Shut It Tight.” He finished up with “River of Love,” a song I first heard covered by Amy Helm, and “Kill Switch,” which he wrote with Roy Orbison.
There was an amusing bit during the set when he asked if flat Earthers believe other celestial bodies are also flat. The moon, he said, looks quite visibly round. “People will believe any god damn thing,” he said.
Surrounded by a tight band of musicians he’s been developing chemistry with for decades, Burnett delivered some wonderful songs. He may be, as he said, “a professional listener,” but he’s a hell of an artist in his own right, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to catch him live.