T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

Back in Mississippi (fictionally speaking) with the Coens for their 2004 adaptation of The Ladykillers, the beloved British farce from the 1950s starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, Burnett shifted his focus to gospel. The remake stars Tom Hanks as the fancy-talking “professor” Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, leader of a misfit gang of bank robbers who plan on tunneling from the basement of a churchgoing widow into the vault of an adjacent riverboat casino. Taking his cue from her lively disdain for “hippity hop,” Burnett turns the film into an exercise of cultural activism. Merging gospel and hip-hop, he exposes the links between them while demonstrating how songs from decades ago can be every bit as vital and relevant as the hippest new sounds.

  The key number is “Trouble of This World,” which is heard in multiple versions: Bill Landford and the Landfordaires’ gorgeously harmonized 1949 recording; the southern rap group Nappy Roots’ sampling of that recording; a rousing live version performed by Rose Stone of Sly and the Family Stone; and a sprightly, faux-baroque take on “Trouble” by the Coens’ house composer, Carter Burwell, who seems to have in mind the guitarist Mason Williams’s hit instrumental from 1968, “Classical Gas.” If “O Death” expresses a down-and-out soul’s desperation to avoid the next life, “Trouble” bubbles over with acceptance: “There’ll be no more weeping and wailing / I’m going home to live with God my Lord / Soon I will be done with the trouble of this world.”

  “I’m Jonah,” Burnett told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m this guy who said he was going to follow God, but I wasn’t going to have anything to do with Christian music because it’s doctrinaire and a poor imitation of pop music. And I find myself all these years later, and everything I’m working on is gospel. The curtain has been ripped back from the tabernacle and we all are in the reality of the modern world. I no longer can recognize the distinction between secular and sacred.”

  Boasting a sixty-three-member Alabama church choir among its musical contributors, his next film, the Civil War epic Cold Mountain, eased that vision problem. His biggest challenge was living up to the expectations of the Miramax film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who had spent more money on this $80-million-plus Christmas release than on any of his other films and was looking for O Brother–like dollars in the soundtrack. Like O Brother, oddly enough, Cold Mountain (based on Charles Frazier’s best-selling, National Book Award–winning novel) was inspired by The Odyssey. But if the Coen Brothers film was the ultimate in shaggy Depression comedies, carried and ultimately outrun by its soundtrack, Weinstein’s expensive baby was an attempt by Miramax to create nothing less than a Gone with the Wind for the new millennium. The film starred the Hollywood actress of the moment, Nicole Kidman, as Ada, the love-struck North Carolina belle waiting for her Inman (Jude Law) to return from the shell-shocking atrocities of battle. It was adapted and directed by the classy British filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who deservedly won a Best Director Oscar for the Best Picture–winning The English Patient (1996)—another historical romantic epic based on a prized book.

  Burnett liked working with Minghella, who took a meticulous approach to film scoring. The English Patient is rich in popular music of the 1930s and 1940s. His 1999 film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, featured atmospheric 1950s jazz. For Cold Mountain, Minghella was determined to avoid making “a middle-aged record” by using young artists who could breathe new life into traditional songs.

  Burnett’s casting coup, on the face of it, was recruiting Jack White. Though the young singer and guitarist was best known as the leader of the enormously popular, garage-rocking White Stripes, he was passionate about roots forms. He grew up in Detroit, in a predominately Mexican neighborhood, but became involved in Delta blues and bluegrass at an early age. He first played “Sittin’ on Top of the World” (one of the tunes he recorded for Cold Mountain) when he was fifteen and covered “Wayfaring Stranger” (another of the film’s featured songs) in a previous band, 2 Star Tabernacle.

  Burnett spent hours discussing music with White and playing him old songs by Blind Willie Johnson, Dock Boggs, the Delta blues master Son House, and the early country legend Jimmie Rodgers. “Of all the young singers out there, he has done the most homework,” Burnett told me. “It’s not easy to do those songs, to make them new. You have to really metabolize them somehow. They have to mean something to you. Like all storytelling, you have to believe them, believe in what you’re singing.”

  Playing the character Georgia, a mandolin player who captures the fancy of Renée Zellweger’s mountain woman, White has a likable enough screen presence, in a poor man’s Johnny Depp kind of way, but there is something secondhand about his vocals, too. Fortunately, Burnett had plenty of other musical weapons at his disposal. With the help of the musicologist, filmmaker, and photographer John Cohen, a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, he recruited an expansive cast of brilliant young players specializing in early American music. They included the banjo virtuoso Dirk Powell, the Reeltime Travelers (Ralph Stanley’s bus driver tipped Burnett off to the Tennessee band), and Tim Eriksen, whose eclectic world music band Cordelia’s Dad had worked with the celebrated Chicago punk producer Steve Albini—just the kind of unlikely connection Burnett loves. Eriksen was an expert in shape-note, or “Sacred Harp,” vocals. A community-based form with deep roots in the South, this vocal style attains unusual power through full-throated, four-part harmonies that are at once earthy and otherworldly. Eriksen’s crucial contribution to the film was to turn Burnett on to the Sacred Harp Singers.

  The original plan was to record them at Sound Emporium. The Cold Mountain sessions there had a warmly glowing, churchlike feel, with the gathered artists feeding off one another’s presence, raptly watching one another when not performing. But it became obvious that to capture the Sacred Harp Singers’ soul-stirring essence, the chorus needed to be recorded at home, in the Liberty Baptist Church in Henagar, Alabama. There, Burnett and Minghella experienced firsthand the wonders of the massed voices, which anointed the film’s excruciating battle scenes. Among those voices was that of Cassie Franklin, a remarkable twenty-year-old who had never been in front of a microphone when she recorded her heart-stopping, unaccompanied version of the traditional tune “Lady Margret.” Had the recording not been left out of the film, relegated to the soundtrack album, it might have served as an emotional center for Cold Mountain the way “O Death” did for O Brother. (Burnett and Frazier, in whose novel music plays a major role, fought with limited success to get more songs into the film.)

  In the end, two British rock veterans who seemed out of place on the soundtrack gave Cold Mountain its greatest musical boost: Sting, who composed the string-sweetened “You Will Be My Ain True Love,” on which Alison Krauss sings backup; and Elvis Costello, with whom Burnett co-wrote “The Scarlet Tide,” which Krauss sings over the end credits in a cello arrangement. Both songs were nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar and the Best Song Written for the Visual Media Grammy. The Sting song also was nominated for a Golden Globe. And Burnett and Gabriel Yared won for Best Film Music at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards.

  For all that, most reviews of Cold Mountain, which were not great—“I can’t say I was deeply moved by one minute of it,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly—didn’t even mention the music. And the soundtrack album, which was bottom-loaded with orchestral excerpts, peaked at No. 51 on the Billboard 200. A concert documentary featuring most of the contributing musicians that was shot around the time of the film’s release was included as an extra on the Cold Mountain DVD, but unlike the O Brother doc Down from the Mountain, it was not shown in theaters. For all that, Burnett told me, overseeing the music for Cold Mountain “taught me a tremendous amount. I learned that a good song doesn’t need anything, not even drums or chords or a beat. A great song is a great song.”

  A decade later, he returned to the Civil War battlefield as a singer when he recorded the old classic “The Battle of Antietam” for Divided & United: Songs of the American Civil War. Supervised by Ra
ndall Poster, best known as the film director Wes Anderson’s musical right-hand man, the two-disc set, released in late 2013 to mark the 150th anniversary of the war, featured Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Sam Amidon, Jamey Johnson, Vince Gill, Shovels & Rope, and Chris Thile among its contributors.

  Singing about the single bloodiest day of the war like a man scorched by fate—“And as I lay there musing, I heard a bitter cry / It was, ‘Lord Jesus, save me, and take me home to die’”—Burnett turns in his rawest and most powerful vocal ever. “The darkness of that story, the brokenness, the sadness, the violence, it’s all in that track,” said Joe Henry, who produced “The Battle of Antietam” and several other songs for the album in his home studio. What made the session especially meaningful for Burnett was the presence of Henry’s son Levon, whose free-spirited clarinet playing gives “The Battle of Antietam” an up-to-the-minute chill. As friends of Henry and his wife, Melanie, Burnett and Sam Phillips raced to the hospital the night Levon was born. “To sit there on the floor of the studio, with T Bone in my booth looking out watching Levon getting wilder and wilder in an Ornetteish way—T Bone had a look of delight you rarely see in a person,” said Henry. (In early 2015 at the hip LA club Largo, he and Phillips performed a special show that featured appearances by both Levon Henry and the budding rocker Simone Burnett, a fan of punk and industrial music. “I don’t have much use for Nashville or the neo-folk thing,” she told me.)

  If Cold Mountain was right up Burnett’s alley, a subsequent pair of movies about country singers, Walk the Line (2005) and Crazy Heart (2009), put him in the driver’s seat. Burnett said he took on Walk the Line, James Mangold’s disappointingly formulaic film about Johnny Cash, to ensure that the Man in Black wouldn’t get “Hollywoodized”—like Hank Williams was in Your Cheatin’ Heart, the 1964 film starring George Hamilton. No less an authority than Rosanne Cash, Johnny’s daughter, said that Walk the Line did, in fact, give her father the Hollywood treatment. Without casting any aspersions on the filmmakers, she told me that Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, and Ginnifer Goodwin—as her father, stepmother June Carter Cash, and mother Vivian Liberto, respectively—“were not recognizable to me as my parents in any way.”

  That said, Burnett got more out of Phoenix and Witherspoon than could have been expected, especially considering these were their first-ever singing performances on film—and considering the close scrutiny they knew their impersonations would be given. During weeks of practice and rehearsal in Burnett’s home studio in Los Angeles, both stars struggled with the music. Witherspoon had an especially rough time with “Wildwood Flower,” the Carter Family classic. But Burnett got her on the right track by sitting with her in the quiet living room setting and accompanying her on the song. Vocally, Reese is no June and Joaquin is no Johnny, but backed by such players as the picker extraordinaire Norman Blake, who had appeared with Cash on record and played on his TV show, and Jack Clement, whose most famous move as a producer was adding the mariachi horns to Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” the actors were close enough to impress most critics. “Knowing Cash’s albums more or less by heart, I closed my eyes to focus on the soundtrack and decided that, yes, that was the voice of Johnny Cash I was listening to,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, pointing out that the preview audience he was in had not been informed about who did what. “The closing credits make it clear it’s Joaquin Phoenix doing the singing, and I was gob-smacked.”

  Jeff Bridges, who did his own singing in Crazy Heart as the scuffling, boozing, vocally spent country singer Bad Blake—a made-up character—didn’t have to worry about measuring up to anyone as a vocalist. His challenge was doing justice to the real-life artists whose stories he drew on in creating Blake. While Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson were mentioned as likely inspirations, no one contributed more to the character than the hard-living road warrior par excellence Stephen Bruton, whose participation in Crazy Heart proved to be a crowning moment in his shortened life. He was on a downward swing in his long battle with throat cancer when Burnett, one of the producers of the $7 million film, sensing an opportunity to improve his friend’s spirits and possibly his physical state, had him flown with a nurse from Texas to Los Angeles to work on the independent production (which was released by Fox Searchlight Pictures). For several months, Burnett and Bruton listened to old recordings and, with Bridges and the writer-director Scott Cooper, figured out who Bad Blake was—and had been. “I used to be somebody, now I’m somebody else,” Bridges/Blake sings.

  Crazy Heart has its soft spots, but it exposes the underside of the country music life with more gritty insight than any work since Tender Mercies, the 1983 film for which Robert Duvall won an Oscar. It was disappointing to see “The Weary Kind,” a so-so tune written by Ryan Bingham and Burnett and sung by Bingham, get nominated for an Oscar over Bruton’s superior songs—and win. But awards can’t measure what Crazy Heart did for Bruton, who died just before its release. Burnett called his friend “the soul of Texas music.” Crazy Heart is a testament to how close Texas soul brothers can be.

  CHAPTER 19

  Minimalist

  Had T Bone Burnett retired from music following O Brother, he would have earned serious consideration as one of the most formidable contributors to post-1960s culture. While not attaining the prominence he wanted to as a recording artist, his body of work as a singer and songwriter was strikingly original (there haven’t been all that many covers of his songs, but one of the best was Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison’s treatment of “Shake Yourself Loose” on their 2014 album Our Year). Burnett’s success rate as a producer established him as the go-to man for artists in search of roots (and other kinds of) authenticity. In reviving and returning Roy Orbison to a place of honor, he set a high standard for such tributes. And with his soundtrack for O Brother, he opened a window on tradition that had been frozen shut.

  But as he moved forward, Burnett wasn’t out of ideas—or, as worn out as he was by the production wars, the energy to pursue them. And in Sam Phillips he had someone who was equally attuned to taking challenging next steps. During the five years since she recorded Omnipop, she had pulled back from the recording world to raise her daughter and recharge her creative battery. An inveterate reader who had turned Burnett on to Pablo Neruda (a fair exchange for him turning her on to Rainer Maria Rilke), she was reading a lot of books about performers, such as Colette’s Vagabond and a biography of Louise Brooks. When she started writing songs again, she was in a different place than she had been. Tersely lyrical and sharply focused, the tunes owed as much to poetry as pop.

  Burnett urged her to get the songs on tape. The couple invited musician friends over to their home and, over a period of time, recorded the new compositions in their comfy Electromagnetic Studio, surrounded by Larry Poons paintings and sound baffles designed by baby Simone (at some point, a life-size cardboard replica of Ralph Stanley became part of the décor). Phillips told me she initially had no thoughts of releasing the music, on which she experimented (and fell in love) with a brusque dual drum sound. But after Burnett gave several of the song demos to their friend David Bither, an executive at Nonesuch, Bither liked them so much that he signed Phillips to the boutique label, which boasted such artists as the jazz pianist Fred Hersch, the new music luminary Steve Reich, and the Brazilian pop superstar Caetano Veloso. She wrote more songs to fill out an album and, with Burnett producing and “Mikey” Piersante engineering, recorded Fan Dance.

  Released in 2001, the album proved to be a breakthrough for both Phillips and Burnett. It reintroduced Phillips as a kind of lo-fipop chanteuse who breathed hard-won wisdom through spare melodies and arrangements that made a strength of her essential shyness. Existentialism has never been catchier than in lines such as “I’m not falling going down / Dreaming and singing without a sound” and “When we open our eyes and dream we open our eyes.” The words hang in the air, held adrift by the angularity of a guitar or the shimmer of the drums, waiting for resoluti
on.

  The album was just as much of a milestone for Burnett, who does wonders with its austere setting. You can listen to these songs a thousand times and still not quite figure out how they achieve such immediacy. (Was it the Palo Santo wood sticks?) “He was fatigued making records, working so hard to come up with new sounds, layering things,” Phillips told me. “He was tired, I was tired, so he made a turn toward a little more performance-oriented, sonically different thing. This is when he began getting into the bottom end, the big bass drums and bass heavy sound.”

  Nowhere else in his work has Burnett revealed his painterly sensibility as boldly as he does here. The album opener, “The Fan Dance,” is tantamount to musical cubism, with Phillips’s assertive folk-style strumming occupying one plane; avant-garde rocker Carla Azar’s trap drumming and Jim Keltner’s hand drumming staking out another; and Marc Ribot’s specially designed banjo guitar practicing an exotic math on yet another. The effect is heightened by the addition of Keltner’s mild distortions on banjo and various twanging, scratching, swooshing, and tinkling sounds. “I’m firecracker lightning / I burn with no trace up in the cold sky,” sings Phillips, floating through space. Exactly.

  On other songs, Burnett engages in manipulated light: refracted tones on “Taking Pictures,” which finds him on piano and Van Dyke Parks on harpsichord; chiaroscuro effects on “Wasting My Time,” with Martin Tillman’s charged lines on cello providing the heavy shadows; and action painting on “Edge of the World,” with its splashy piano chords and eerily cool sustaining tone. Fan Dance validates Burnett’s efforts to get Phillips to play guitar. “My guitar playing is very crude, I don’t even play with a pick,” she told me. “But he says he loves the way my hand dances on the strings. It does give the music a certain heart.”

  During the making of their next album, A Boot and a Shoe (2004), their hearts were hurting—they were in the process of breaking up. “It was a fiery relationship, I guess,” Phillips said when I asked about the fire images in so many of her recent songs. “It was one of those things where you love who you love and you do the best you can at the time. It was tumultuous in the sense that we were constantly on the road, always around a lot of people. He didn’t get married to settle down. That is coming more now to him.”