Sound & Vision - June 1, 2006

30 Minutes With T Bone Burnett

By Mike Mettler

You want a Renaissance man? Look no further than T Bone Burnett, the producer behind the soundtracks to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Walk the Line. Now, after a 14-year break, Burnett re-dons his singer/songwriter and recording-artist hat to drop a gritty new album, The True False Identity (DMZ/Columbia, also available on DualDisc). And he gets feted with Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett (DMZ/Legacy), a tasty, two-CD, career-spanning collection of 40 tracks both rare and well done.

Some of the words I jotted down while listening to the new album were "rumble" and "shuffle."
I wanted to explore the low end on this record. I told my three drummers, Carla Azar, Jim Keltner, and Jay Bellarose, "We've already heard every beat, so let's not have any beats. Let's just rumble." That's the music I like best — the kind where the river meets the ocean, that brackish water where the salt water and the fresh water are all mixed up.

Recently, I went to a John Adams symphony at Disney Concert Hall [in Los Angeles], and it was interesting to hear the way he composed the tone. The high end was handled by xylophones and small instruments way in the back of the orchestra. They were very low in volume, but there's the phenomenon that if you sit at the top of a football stadium while a marching band's playing, the only thing you hear is the triangle, because those high tones travel much faster than the low tones.

Since I wanted to feel the pocket of the low end, I put that first, and everything else, all the higher stuff, comes later. Given the technology we have now, we're able to do that — we're able to compose an incredibly complex bottom end and still have it be distinct.

When I'm recording in analog, I make sure all the transients are there — the reverb, the sense of the room or the space. In digital, you lose that sense. When we edit tracks in digital, we add a lot of noise in — clicks and buzz and machines — and there's a tremendous amount of information behind the sound that you never hear out of the speakers. With tape and hiss and vinyl records and surface noise, you always had some kind of irritant behind the sound that was pushing it out at you. Your ear was focused more on the sound.

So you prefer analog to digital then?
Analog is to digital as film is to video. There's an infinite spectrum of colors you can store on film. With video, there may only be a few million colors. When you watch TV, your eye is constantly working to integrate different pieces of the image into one another. And it's the same with digital music. You're only getting pieces of each wave.

I think CDs are fairly difficult to listen to. Because they're sampling, your ear has to fill in the blanks, so to speak. It's taxing. It's stressful, actually. To me, vinyl sounds the best.

How come?
First of all, vocal cords vibrate back and forth. So do the diaphragm on a microphone, the strings on a guitar, the skins on a drum, and the needle in the groove. Music stored on analog tape is all following the same wave. When you get into the world of digital, it's all, "on off, on off." It's a different language.

ON THE DOWNLOAD

What do you think of downloading music?
I'm in favor of downloading. I think we'd be in trouble if people weren't listening to music on their computers, you know? But I'm also in favor of higher-quality reproductions than we now have in the download world. I push for that.

Digital copies don't feel incredibly valuable to me. The more facile we become at mechanical reproduction, the less valuable each reproduction becomes — and the more valuable the live experience becomes.

If CDs eventually go the way of the dinosaur, what's next?
I wouldn't take the disappearance of the CD as a bad sign. I doubt that we'll carry anything physical at all. Everything will be on servers. All you'll need is an IP address and a search engine. You won't even have a hard drive. There will be fewer cables. Broadband will be used much more for accessing servers, and downloading and streaming intellectual property or whatever you want. All of it will be in play: home theater, 5.1, every kind of media — every bit of it. That'll be a great thing. You'll be able to listen to music any way you want to.

What's in it for those of us who are hopelessly materialistic and love the feel of physically opening and handling an album or CD?
I don't know. I think vinyl will make a comeback. There are stores like Amoeba here in L.A. that still stock old vinyl and 78s. People who are interested in sound will still listen to music that way.

What we call albums have always been governed by the technology of the time. Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours [1954] was a complete piece with 16 songs because it ran as many minutes as would fit on a vinyl record. That version of what an "album" was held sway for 40-50 years. Then, with the CD, people started making longer records, but they weren't necessarily better, because 70-80 minutes is too much time.

I think digital has come a long way, but the CD is a transitory medium. The transfers we've had since the 1980s are all going to have to be redone. They're mostly pretty bad — low bit rates, low sampling rates. You know, the Library of Congress is going back to magnetic tape to store all of their music, which is a much more stable medium than digital at the moment.

How do you prefer to listen to music?
Vinyl sounds the best. I listen to vinyl most of the time. I enjoy it the most. There's a laser turntable now, so there's no friction on the vinyl, and you don't get scratches and pops, the stuff people always complained about with vinyl.

Are there any vinyl records you'd hold up as benchmarks of sound quality?
One I would point to would be [engineer] Al Schmitt's recording of Ray Charles and Betty Carter on Dedicated to You [1961], their duet album where they do "Baby, It's Cold Outside." I think it's the greatest live recording ever. That's one you can A-B the vinyl and the digital and really see what a tremendous loss there is.

Then there are things like those high notes in "A Day in the Life" on Sgt. Pepper's, where the orchestra goes into that, what do you call it, ascent. On the mono vinyl album, you can turn it up all the way, and the whole room you're in just sings. If you turn the digital version up that loud, you have to leave the room. It's just painful.

The Sgt. Pepper's CD came out June 1, 1987, and they've never gone back and remastered it.
Right. It's some kind of low bit rate.

THE SURROUND "DING" IDENTITY

Have you listened to surround sound music discs at all?
I haven't. I'm still hung up on mono. [chuckles] We do surround mixes for movies, so I'm familiar with the process. I like it a lot, too.

Just listening to The True False Identity, I feel like I'm in the middle of everything that's going on. It would be interesting to hear your production choices for doing this record in surround.
One of the things I told the band was that I wanted them to picture playing in a 1,500-seat auditorium where all the people became like beads in the maracas, just shaking the whole auditorium like a maraca. And we succeeded with that kind of boom, shake, and rattle.

Surround would be an extension of that way of thinking. I would try to arrange the surround in such a way that you would feel like you were in the maraca.

In your mind, where am I, the listener, in that 1,500-seat auditorium?
You'd be anywhere on the stage, singing or playing. I just wanted it to be one big rumble, one big boom. At this point, music has broken down for me where it's just "ring, boom, ding, chang" — those are the words I use now to describe notes.

YOU SAY YOU WANNA REVOLUTION?

You took a 13-year-plus break from recording. Can you describe your thought process during that time?
I was born in 1948. I got interested in music in the 1950s, when there was an explosion of music. It was all about freedom and resisting oppressive environments. And that exploded further in the 1960s with the Beatles, and all that. There was an incredible amount of music about freedom and moving forward into the future bravely. And that revolution was, without a doubt, flawed, and it created a lot of anxiety. A classic malice counterrevolution grew up in counter to it. And that counterrevolution has now run out of steam. And I feel that there's another explosion of music coming, and I want to be a part of that explosion.

I didn't feel there was a point to saying anything for a while because things were going so strongly in the opposite direction that I felt I would be running into a wall if I said anything.

I read in your bio that your dad gave you some advice when you were a kid: "Wait until you're older to write."
When I was about 8 years old, he said to wait until I was 50 to publish anything. [laughs]

Nothing wrong with sharing wisdom at that age.
They don't pay any less for Picasso's paintings from when he was 80 than from when he was 20.

BEATLEMANIA

You mentioned the Beatles. You've seen them play live, right?
Oh yes, I'd seen them three times in Texas — twice in Houston and once in Fort Worth.

Safe to say those were life-altering experiences?
Oh yeah. I had decided I wanted to play guitar when I was 12, which was about 1960, or something like that. I was listening to a lot of Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf — stuff like that. I already knew at 12 years old that I couldn't do that — Howlin' Wolf was a shaman. It was something I couldn't possibly do.

But then a few years later the Beatles came along, and it was something I could do. I was listening to a lot of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry at that time, too — and so were they. To see those guys play early on was, you know… it changed all of us, really.

You've worked with a few of them, right?
Yes. I worked with [Paul] McCartney, and I've worked with Ringo a few times. I love Ringo Starr. In my opinion, he's the greatest rock & roll drummer of all time.

He's so distinctive, so right. When you hear him in the pocket and on the groove, it's just so tasty.
And another thing: he was in the Beatles. That's a pretty serious recommendation.

B-52 PICKUP

I see that there's nothing from the [1972] B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks record on the Twenty Twenty compilation. How come?
You know, I couldn't find anything that... fit. [chuckles] That was a very experimental kind of record. I never did anything like it before or after.

Who owns the car you're leaning on on the cover?
That was a guy named Jim Meeker's car. It's really interesting that you ask that. Meeker was so generous. He was an oilman in Fort Worth who was also an art collector, and he used to have all the artists in town come hang out with us kids in town who were also artists. He'd have [Andy] Warhol, [Robert] Rauschenberg, Kenny Price, and Ed Ruscha. I met all those guys when we were twentysomethings.

We were out goofing around one day and he loaned us his car. There's also a B-52 in that shot. Stephen Bruton told me recently that we grew up in Fort Worth under the military-industrial complex, that B-52s used to circle the town all day long. And I just found out that they were going to Vietnam. They were leaving the Air Force base in Fort Worth, refueling over the Pacific, dropping their bombs on Vietnam, and coming back every day.

Whose house are you standing in front of on the back cover?
I don't know! It's some random house we found in Fort Worth. We used it because it had a rock yard. [laughs] That whole thing was a lark. So much of the stuff I did in the old days was a lark.

THE LIVE THING

Last line of questioning: Are you taking The True False Identity on the road, and, if so, how are you going to do it?
This a band I've been working with for a long time, so we've really become a band. I had three drummers in the studio, but I can't afford to take three drummers on the road, so I've got Jim Keltner, who's like three drummers himself. And we've got Marc Ribot on guitar, Dennis Crouch on bass, and Keefus Ciancia on keyboards.

And we're gonna play very quietly. We took Brother, O Where Art Thou? music out on the road with a show called "Down from the Mountain," and we played without monitors and with three Neumann U 47 condenser microphones, a couple of Altec ribbon microphones, and a couple of RCA 77s. Without monitors, you can use those kind of mics live, and you get a tremendous volume of tone without the raw volume we're used to, working with more direct sounds. We had nothing feeding back into the microphones, and the PA was used for sound reinforcement, the way it was originally designed and thought. So we're gonna try and do it with this music instead of having it be a loud rock show. We're gonna play it quietly onstage and turn it up loud in the audience.

I want to do it all with this record. I used to resist this kind of thing in the '80s. But today, all of those kinds of things seem like an extreme privilege. Anyplace people want me to come play I'll be happy to show up. I'm interested in taking what I've learned in 40 years of listening in the best studio environments possible to the live stage, to see if we could reproduce the kind of sound we get in the studio live and make it really incredibly great for people.