T Bone Burnett offers quiet, thoughtful and reassuring meditations for this time of doubt. Photo / Alamy
T Bone Burnett offers quiet, thoughtful and reassuring meditations for this time of doubt. Photo / Alamy
Texas-raised singer-songwriter and producer T Bone Burnett is well known to those who read the fine print: he produced albums for Elvis Costello (they performed as the Coward Brothers) and Roy Orbison, did Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand and Raise the Roof, Elton John and Leon Russell’s TheUnion, and many more.
His name is a hallmark of quality. He was on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, a decade ago produced a roll call of famous names for Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes based on Dylan’s unrecorded lyrics from 1967 and produced soundtracks, including the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart.
He has a shelf of Grammys but his own output has usually been overlooked, although albums like his Grammy-winning The Criminal Under My Own Hat and Tooth of Crime in 2008 (music for a Sam Shepard play) are in sensible collections.
Photo / supplied
The Other Side is a refined, understated folk-blues and country collection of originals which sound a century old. There’s Rosanne Cash on the easy roll of I’m Gonna Get Over This Some Day (where he sounds like a young Paul Simon), the indie band Lucius on harmonies and old friend Steve Soles from the Thunder Revue and their subsequent Alpha Band on the tropical balminess of Hawaiian Blue Song.
Opening with the lyrical simplicity of He Came Down, which betrays his upbringing in the Baptist tradition and Christ as the redeemer, the album moves through low-key back-porch country blues for Come Back (When You Go Away) and Sometimes I Wonder, the aching Pain of Love (“we are like God but we are not God”), The First Light Day, which also alludes to matters of faith, then to the existential musing of Everything and Nothing: “Everybody wants to be forgiven but nobody wants to confess … everyone wants to be heard but no one has got good advice.”
Quiet, thoughtful and reassuring meditations for this time of doubt.
The Other Side by T Bone Burnett is available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
