IT’S a chilly February afternoon in Nashville and T Bone Burnett is in the basement of the century-old house he shares with his wife, Callie Khouri, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter behind Thelma & Louise and the Nashville TV series. Burnett – born Joseph Henry Burnett III – of course, is no slouch himself: super-producer, solo act, film music guru, longtime Dylan collaborator. He has just come off a morning of meetings involving a series about the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which turned 50 in 2023. “It’s been an incredibly influential part of the music that is really ascendent right now,” he says, tacitly acknowledging the recent success of Beyoncé’s single “Texas Hold ’Em”, featuring Telluride veteran Rhiannon Giddens.
Among Burnett’s many projects is a new solo album, The Other Side – his first, strictly speaking, since 2008’s Tooth Of Crime – a remarkable set of folk-leaning songs that brings into focus his gifts for arresting arrangements, magnificent sonics and a feel for American music’s tangled history. It also showcases his under-appreciated skills as a lyricist; Burnett is a man comfortable addressing the spiritual, the political and the absurd, often in the same song. Unsurprisingly, The Other Side also features assistance from an A-list of friends, among them Rosanne Cash, Lucius, and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. The result is a quiet masterpiece, the most understated, and quite possibly the best, album of Burnett’s idiosyncratic solo career.
Critically, though, the album also pulls together many less-visible threads from Burnett’s life, including his ongoing obsession with, and research into, the dangers of technocracy, inspired by a recurring childhood dream: “I’ve lived and worked my whole life in the dystopia of that dream,” he says. The effect on T Bone, it transpires, has been profound.
But first, Burnett is giving a tour of his workspace, a warren of small rooms with art-covered walls. One large canvas is by Burnett’s 1970’s Newexpressionist painters,” Burnett notes). Another, featuring a primitivist figure with a sort of beehive headpiece, is by Burnett’s friend John Mellencamp, whose late-mid career highpoint benefitted from Burnett’s big ears and zen master guitar work.
