Advice To Graduates
By Zayne Reeves

An Imaginary Conversation with T-Bone Burnett

ZAYNE: Ladies and gentlemen, tonight on Advice To Graduates we have one of the greats.  Please give a warm welcome to the incomparable T-Bone Burnett!

T-Bone, how are you doing?

T-BONE: Doing good these days, Zayne.  Doing good. Thank you for having me on the show, it's a pleasure.

ZAYNE:  I first became aware of you in 1998 when I purchased Gillian Welch's second album, Hell Among The Yearlings. I remember buying that CD on the strength of a rave review in MOJO magazine.  They picked it for Americana Album of The Year or something like that and I want to say that they compared her singing on "Good Till Now" to Robert Johnson's, although I may have that confused with another publication's write-up.  It was one of those things where I can trace an evolution in my thought process to a single CD purchase; Before Gillian Welch and After Gillian Welch. Outside of Bob Dylan and John Prine, I really had very little use at that time for anything you might label as folk music, but then I listened to Hell Among The Yearlings and I'll be damned if something didn't just click for me. It gave me a greater appreciation for what folk music could be and it was thrilling to discover that in a contemporary artist.  It was the day after Christmas that I purchased that album, and right before New Year's I ponied up some more of my holiday stash to buy her first, Revival.  Those two albums really showcase some of your very best work as a producer which is no small feat, T-Bone. No small feat at all.

T-BONE: You're too kind. I loved working with Gillian and David. It's always a bright spot in my job when you can just collaborate with two such people who not only know exactly what they want as musicians but are also just good human beings. Very kind, funny and sincere people are David and Gillian.  I'm proud of my work with them and happy to see them in the position they are in today. They do as they like and simply don't bother with the inane hassle and hustle inherent in all major record labels. Few things can kill your creativity and focus like having to renegotiate a five year contract while trying to record a song cycle about the dissolution of your marriage or the death of a parent.

ZAYNE: Let's talk about O Brother and its aftermath.

T-BONE: (Sighs) I suppose it's what I'm best known for at this point in my career.

ZAYNE: The soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? was one of the wonderful little flukes in popular music where the right sound, the right songs and the right artists for them all converged and just captured the fuck out of the zeitgeist. The film itself is a great lot of fun but it's the soundtrack that will still matter in twenty years.  It was a perfect opportunity for country music lovers to protest the overwhelming mediocrity of what was being shoved down their throats by the Nashville beast. Not that the vast majority of what comes out of the country music mainstream hasn't been incredibly poor since the 1950s anyway but it seems like it's harder and harder for the good stuff to even get a token seat or two at the same table with the money men and opportunistic hacks. It was a cool moment to watch as so many mainstream and off-the-beaten-path fans came together to make that album's stunning success a vote of impeachment against homogenized country music. It didn't last and all the hat acts and pseudo VH1 divas are just as big, if not bigger, than they were before Dr. Ralph won a Grammy for "Oh Death."  Still, it was a proud moment. Also, massive cool points to you for rocking a Joyce reference in your acceptance speech and not sounding like a dick in the process.

T-BONE: You're bathing me in entirely too much praise. Please stop.

ZAYNE:  Following the O Brother phenomenon, you pretty much became the de facto producer for film soundtracks heavy on Americana. However, your post-O Brother soundtrack work has been a case of trying, with little success, to catch lightning in a bottle. Divine Secrets of The Ya Ya Sisterhood met with ten thousand decibels of crushing silence and while Elvis Costello and Sting both copped Oscar nominations for their contributions to Cold Mountain, "The Scarlet Tide" and "My Ain True Love" didn't exactly ingratiate themselves into the pop culture lexicon. You're easily smart enough to realize that a cultural event like O Brother cannot be repeated so why put your time into albums that can't help but provide the working definition of diminishing returns?

T-BONE: Well Zayne, what happens is that I get a phone call, ring-a-ding, and the voice on the other end is saying "T Bone, we want you to do the soundtrack for Minghella's Civil War epic." I respond with something like "How much money are we talking about here, Harvey?" Pause, beat; "Ok let's do it!" That's about how the process goes for me with these things.

ZAYNE: And that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Mr. T-Bone Burnett.  T-Bone, solid gold as always.

T-BONE: Keep on truckin'.

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