by Lloyd Sachs
From the start, though, there were behind-the-scenes power struggles between the production company in Nashville and the studio back in Los Angeles, and tensions between the cast and the producers. Chances of maintaining any kind of high standard faded. Four episodes in, the showrunner was replaced. After the strong early ratings slipped, things got a whole lot soapier: Characters got shot, crashed their cars, and overdosed. Couples uncoupled and recoupled. Clare Bowen’s poor, mother-abused character, Scarlet, melted down onstage. And the true identity of Rayna’s older daughter’s father was revealed, leading to fisticuffs and worse between Deacon and Eric Close’s character, Teddy. After his own run-ins with producers not named Callie, whom he derided for not treating her with respect, Burnett announced that the first season would be his last and that Buddy Miller would take over as primary music producer.
Dodging questions from the media about trouble on the set, Burnett initially said his exit was planned from the start, that he had only signed on to do thirteen episodes. Eventually, however, he opened up. “It was a knockdown, bloody, drag-out fight, every episode,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. He criticized the show’s sketchy approach to the music, calling for more complete performances of the songs and a fuller integration of them into the story: “It’s no good in a show like this to do what everybody already knows.”
“Network television really is about selling advertising,” he said. “I don’t hold that against them, it’s just the reality. So everything is driven by what’s gonna sell more advertising. Now, that’s a game I’m happy for them to play. But if that gets in the way of telling the truth, then I’m sorry, I’ve got to go with telling the truth. In the old days in the movie business when I was coming up, all the movie executives used to talk about the actors as if they were petulant babies. And these days, I’m seeing more and more it’s the executives who are the petulant babies.”
Despite its frustrations, Nashville proved rewarding for Burnett, who got a chance to develop potential stars in the Australia native Bowen (though her Burnett-produced debut, slated for 2015, didn’t appear by year’s end) and the British import Sam Palladio. And as someone who now divides his time between Nashville and Los Angeles, he developed an appreciation for the city as “the Alamo for the music business,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “All of the young writers, young musicians are all going there. I just signed [LA-based] Mini Mansions, and I’m talking to them about moving to Nashville. They’re a pop rock & roll band, but they can work out of there like crazy. It’s not country anymore. I mean, Jack White’s there, the Kings of Leon are there.” In the fall of 2014, Burnett parted with his longtime LA-based agent, Larry Jenkins, and signed with the Brooklyn-born, Nashville-based heavy Ken Levitan, founder of Vector Management.
The visibility Burnett gained from working on Nashville lifted his celebrity status another notch. And with his next, drastically different venture into television, True Detective, he made a slew of new fans. Along with the mesmerizing performance by the film star Matthew McConaughey, who rode a hot streak into the HBO series, Burnett’s eerie electronic score and ridiculously far-ranging soundtrack helped make the show the cable channel’s biggest hit in more than three years.
The series creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto’s plot recycled some familiar serial killer elements, including the bizarre ritualistic murder of a young woman. And women had other reasons to dislike the show. “While the male detectives of True Detective are avenging women and children and bro-bonding over ‘crazy pussy,’” wrote the New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum, “every live woman they meet is paper-thin.” But viewers had never been exposed to a character quite like McConaughey’s enigmatic Rust Cohle, a onetime Texas narcotics detective now serving up cosmic thoughts as a Louisiana state cop, or a soundtrack quite like Burnett’s, which in providing undercoating for the themes of sin and redemption shoehorns in everyone from the bluesman John Lee Hooker to Georgia’s spiritually charged McIntosh County Shouters to the psychedelic 13th Floor Elevators.
The songs, heard in barrooms and cars and out of thin air, frequently for no more than a few seconds, had the series’ more compulsive viewers mapping every title. If they weren’t familiar with artists like 1960s British folk singer Vashti Bunyan or the Canadian alt-country group Cuff the Duke before watching True Detective, rest assured they were afterward. Though the first season of True Detective was set and shot in Louisiana, Pizzolatto banned the use of Cajun music and swampy bayou sounds. Unlike HBO’s music-centric, New Orleans–set Treme, which was all about regional flavor, this series was after an other-regional reality. Beginning with Burnett’s inspired, out-of-left-field selection of the Handsome Family’s brooding “Far from Any Road” as the show’s theme song, the only place the musical elements point to is T Bone World.
“It’s all about the character,” Burnett told Mother Jones. “The depth of character is the breadth of music you get to use. So all I have to do is imagine what they’re listening to, and imagine the stories rattling around in their heads. How do you strengthen that? How do you make that resonate? It’s about having the songs become part of the storytelling.”
“He’s alone in a room, and he’s looking at photographs of dead women,” Burnett said, discussing a scene with Cohle. “What kind of music is he listening to? Well, he’s not going to be listening to music about his truck, or music about how tight his jeans are, or music about how much beer he’s had to drink before he gets in the truck! He’s gonna be listening to some Captain Beefheart.”
Or not. As with the Dude, Burnett’s assignation of the cult artist Beefheart to Cohle—“Clear Spot” in this case—has more to do with Burnett’s own strong identification with the artist’s blues sensibility, outsider status, and painterly visions (“The sun big brown / Mosquitos ’n moccasins steppin’ all around”) than the musical tastes of the character. But who knows what kind of far-out stuff is floating around in Cohle’s thoughts?
The Handsome Family—the Albuquerque-based husband-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks—were on tour in New Zealand when they got an e-mail from HBO informing them that the cable network was thinking of using their 2003 song for a series. “We considered it for two seconds and laughed for about 15 minutes,” Brett told the Washington Post. Only after the song became a minor sensation did they contemplate why it worked so well. “It’s really about things taking place in the middle of nowhere,” said Rennie. “It’s about tricks and death and something sinister, and I think they—the song and the show—live in the same emotional landscape.”
True Detective is hardly the first TV series in which soundtrack choices play an important role. In setting a dark but inviting tone, “Far from Any Road” had nothing on Gangstagrass’s “Long Hard Times to Come,” the theme of Justified, and Jace Everett’s “Bad Things,” the opening theme of True Blood. And shows ranging from The Sopranos (which spawned both a single and double CD of its songs) to Mad Men to The Americans have drawn emotional weight from keenly chosen end-credit tunes. But few TV themes have had the immediate impact of “Far from Any Road.” Said Rennie, “A few days after the first show aired, we got an e-mail from a guy from Tehran, Iran, about how he just put our song as his ringtone and we get e-mails from places like Kyrgyzstan and we’re actually charting in Ukraine right now, which is totally insane.”
True Detective went a step further with Burnett’s haunting score, which with its array of sci-fitones (tinnitus sufferers beware) imbues the scenes with surreal meaning. He said he approached the show not as eight hour-long episodes but as one eight-hour movie. To devise a coherent score, he wrote what he called “a big-time epic movie melody” for the final episode and worked backward from there. “I wrote a set of intervals that could be broken down into many different configurations, so the DNA of the melody is in all of the music,” he told Mix. “Parts of it will appear in a scene, and another one comes over here, but in the end, the whole thing is revealed.”
Though Burnett had fooled around with el
ectronic music in his teens, he had never taken it any further. To prepare himself for True Detective, he studied the works of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Debussy, among other modern classical composers. “People compose in tone now,” he told the Daily Beast. “There was a sense in classical music in the 1930s that everything had been done. Then Stockhausen and these composers started going off in different directions. John Cage started composing not in melody and pitch anymore, really, but in tone. So you started getting all those beautiful tone compositions.”
“I think melody exists in speech,” he said. “Melody exists in life. There’s a drone that’s going on around us all the time, and we’re all speaking and blending with it. But I think the reason that melody doesn’t get old is that tone is the essential reality of melody. Pitch is a way to refer to a melody, but the tone is what really forms the note. In their tones, people have hundreds of different pitches at all times.”
Burnett also studied Walter Schumann’s score for The Night of the Hunter, which made the creepiest noir of all time even creepier; Maurice Jarre’s music for Dr. Zhivago, which in integrating “Lara’s Theme” into the story was for him the apotheosis of film scoring; and Danny Elfman’s music for Tim Burton’s films, including Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Big Fish. Collaborating on the score for The Hunger Games with Elfman and the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, Burnett got to study movie composing on the job, but those lessons ended when Elfman was fired from the 2012 film.
“We had written several beautiful pieces,” Burnett told MTV News, “but the director [Gary Ross] for some reason wanted to take over the music. We were doing this kind of broken future that would have made a lot of sense, but the director couldn’t handle it.” (Though Burnett did not compose the film’s score, he did oversee the official companion album, The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond, which yielded the hit “Safe & Sound” by Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars, debuted in the top spot of the Billboard 200 and ranks among the most popular of franchise movie soundtracks.)
Burnett recorded the score for True Detective at his home studio with a cast of regulars including Patrick Warren on Mellotron and the Moog-like Swarmatron; Darrell Leonard on bass trumpet, didgeridoo (a long wind instrument of Australian origin), synthesizer, and conch shell; and the weird sound specialist Keefus Ciancia on keyboards. The recordings got passed around from musician to musician, additions were made, and, working with the engineer Jason Wormer, Burnett put his final stamp on the music.
For the disappointing second season of True Detective, set in a corrupt industrial city outside of Los Angeles, Burnett replaced “Far from Any Road” with Leonard Cohen’s brooding and unsparing “Nevermind”—a typically inspired choice by the producer, even if it made many Handsome Family fans unhappy. Burnett’s stealthy use of different lyrics from “Nevermind” (taken from Cohen’s 2014 album Popular Problems) for different episodes of the show matched up brilliantly with the obscured truths in Pizzolatto’s script. As Cohen sings, “The story’s told with facts and lies.”
Season 2 featured songs Burnett wrote with Rosanne Cash and the sultry folk-country singer Lera Lynn, whose recurring, ghostlike onscreen role boosted the young artist’s career. Cash provided a glimpse into their collaboration via e-mail:
The writing process with T Bone has been very natural and easy. He has given me themes, and I’ve sent the lyrics to him, and he’s written the music. He gave me the first theme (a woman’s lover turns into a bird) and I wrote the lyrics and he put it to a very dark, beautiful melody. He asked me if I wanted to write another, and I said sure—he gave me the theme, I wrote the lyrics, he put music to them.
Last week he casually asked if I wanted to write something on reunion and separation and I said I’d love to. Then I went on the road and as I landed at JFK today, I turned on my phone and had an e-mail from him saying “Are they finished? We’re recording tonight.” (!!) I had a verse, so I started working on it, finished it today and sent it to him. So I imagine it’s being recorded even as we speak.
For the sixth episode, “Church in Ruins,” Burnett told Entertainment Weekly, he had the noir writers John Fante and James M. Cain in mind: “I had the line ‘You were a loner, you were alive among the walking dead. He was a liar who would not atone, still he went to your head.’ I had that melody and verse and Lera finished it off from there.”
The second season soundtrack was less crowded than the first in terms of incidental tunes. But featured numbers like Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “I Pity the Fool,” heard in the tense moments leading up to the shotgunning of Colin Farrell’s disheveled cop character, Ray, packed a mighty wallop. Floating across the transom of heaven and hell, time and space, black and white, Bland’s gospel shouts dramatized the stubborn quest for glory in the face of abject failure, investing the scene with a rough-hewn grace that left it lingering in memory.
CHAPTER 28
Back to the Futurist
No less a roots authority than Hank Williams Jr. said the only artists anyone ever needed were his old man, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Burnett interrupted his 2014 session at Nashville’s House of Blues Studio with Striking Matches to play the young duo some Ol’ Blue Eyes—or actually some Young Blues Eyes, namely, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” Sarah Zimmermann wasn’t giving him what he wanted vocally on “When the Right One Comes Along,” an aching ballad she wrote with her fellow singer-guitarist Justin Davis. “Do that!” he said to her, referring to the 1955 recording. “Pretend you’re Frank!”
In pulling Striking Matches into the timeless orbit of Sinatra and his arranger, Nelson Riddle, Burnett succeeded in putting them in the right emotional frame of mind. “Wee Small Hours” is a masterpiece in tone and articulation, a disarming performance without a single overstated note. Letting their guard down, the duo nailed “When the Right One Comes Along” in one take (thinking they were rehearsing—a classic Burnett tactic). But in playing them what they called the “Frank track,” Burnett also fired a shot in his campaign to widen, and deepen, the context in which music’s future hears its past.
Striking Matches, who got on Burnett’s radar by writing “When the Right One Comes Along” and “Hanging on a Lie” for Sam Palladio and Clare Bowen’s Nashville characters, describe their music as “an amalgamation of everything that has influenced us over the course of our lives, which comes from rock and roll, country and blues.” In other words, like so many other artists in Nashville, Austin, New Orleans, and other hotbeds of American music, they are products of the Americana movement—a label that has vaulted past alt-country and roots music as the preferred catchall term.
There are plenty of reasons to disdain “Americana.” Like “world music,” which essentially umbrellas anything and everything that originates outside of the United States or the English-speaking world, it presumes to commodify artists and recordings of dramatically different stripes. What exactly is “the authentic voice of American roots music” that the Americana Music Association, a Nashville-based trade organization founded in 1999, claims to advocate for in its mission statement? It is not Frank Sinatra, as uber-American as his music is (though his protégé Tony Bennett might be able to cash in his duets with Willie Nelson, the Dixie Chicks, and Sheryl Crow, not to mention the big hit he had in 1951 with Hank Williams’s “Cold Cold Heart,” for a spot at the Ryman). It is not jazz (even if Cassandra Wilson did sneak in a performance at the AMA’s annual awards show in 2014). And because classical music is thought to exist in a separate galaxy, it is not the heartland music of Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, as quintessentially American as those composers are.
Those exclusions don’t sit well with Burnett, who has dedicated himself over a span of decades to opening this culture’s eyes to the essential oneness of American musical styles and the continuum on which they rest. But there is no denying the higher profile many blues, country, and folk artists have attained thanks to the American
a movement—and not just the younger set. Greats like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson have gotten a second or third wind from the renewed attention the Americana crowd has given them.
Not so long ago, the newly minted country icon Sturgill Simpson, the blue-eyed soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones, and the folk duo the Milk Carton Kids never would have crossed paths, let alone shared the same stage—as they did at the 2014 AMA event. And Burnett, who in the midst of O Brother madness accepted a lifetime AMA award for “executive achievement,” was excited to see such national treasures as the late Levon Helm, Mavis Staples, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, and Rodney Crowell honored by the Grammys, thanks to the Americana category established in 2009 (never mind that they were feted out of the full glare of the awards, as pre-broadcast side items).
The question is, how do you maximize whatever expanded awareness and appreciation there is for Americana-branded artists at a time when few record companies are willing to spend any money on them and few noncollegiate radio stations play them? Though Burnett said this has not been a conscious decision, he has refocused his attention on emerging talent as a producer. In 2013, he struck a deal with Capitol Music Group to take on his newly established label, Electromagnetic Recordings, which he told Variety would be “a base for which I can invest in some very good young artists” as well as Gregg Allman and other established favorites. According to the official announcement, he would also “serve as a producer and A&R resource for the CMG labels, and as a liaison for the company to the music, film and television communities.” In early 2015, he entered into an exclusive publishing arrangement with Spirit Music Group for his song catalog in North America, and a joint venture under which Burnett will sign and develop songwriters for the New York–based company.
As we saw with DMZ, ambitious plans have a way of getting run over by economic reality. But in 2015, four albums by emerging artists bore his imprimatur as producer: Striking Matches’ Nothing but the Silence, released on IRS Nashville, Capitol Music Group’s Nashville imprint; the New Wavey LA pop-rock band Mini Mansions’ The Great Pretenders, issued on Electromagnetic; and, most importantly, Rhiannon Giddens’s Tomorrow Is My Turn and the Punch Brothers’ The Phosphorescent Blues, both released on Nonesuch.