T-BONE BURNETT — “WANNA HEAR A TUNE?”

Photography DAN WINTERS

Story JAMES HUGHES

T-Bone Burnett unfolds his towering frame from a small chair in a live room inside Studio Z, his own corner of the historic Village studio complex in Los Angeles, and reassumes his post at the mixing board next door.

We’d already cased out most of the building, dodging scores of musicians milling on-break—all eight studios were booked on this early February afternoon—in search of a quiet spot to talk movies and a life in music. A booth filled with mic stands but no microphones suited us fine. Legs crossed, his white wingtips surrounded by Gretsch guitar cases covered in gaffers tape marked “T BONE”—a nickname that stuck since childhood—the 75-year-old Grammy- and Oscar-winning producer didn’t remain seated for long. 

In the control room next door, while waiting for playback on his latest recording, a breeze blew open a window, scattering papers and production notes across the room, just as a Corgi of unknown origin wandered in from another studio. 

The dog was circled by curious engineers, who welcomed him to the session. Soon, music filled the room. Throughout the two-minute track, T Bone was effusive in his praise for the singer, the West Virginia-born Sierra Ferrell. But the first snare hit didn’t sound right. Swap the second hit for the first one, T Bone suggests. His longtime engineer, Mike Piersante, nods. He’d added reverb to that first snare, tried everything. “Just replace it, that’s easier,” T Bone says casually with one foot out the door, signaling it was time once again to swap rooms. 

The song sounded like it had always been there, like it could slot into any era. The combination of raw talent in a relaxed environment, captured with technical precision, is a hallmark of T Bone’s body of work. Settling back into his seat, he marveled at the opportunities for young musicians today and their accessibility to recordings that predate them by a century. “When we were starting out, you couldn’t find a Skip James record,” he says of the fingerpicking master of Delta blues, born in 1902. 

“A lot of that music from the 1930s—the era of 78s—was wiped out in the second world war, because all the shellac was melted down to make paint for tanks and battleships. A whole library of music was shredded. There were only copies left around in people’s houses, that’s it. People have spent 90 years trying to resurrect that library as best they can. And now it’s all online. That’s good. The part that’s not good is that the most profound experience of music is to be in the room with the musician when he’s making it. And every step you get away from that, the less profound, the less intimate the experience gets.” 

T Bone’s institutional memory of American music and his own contributions— beginning with his Texas rock group The Loose Ends in the mid-60s, later a tenure in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and decades of production for bold-faced names like The Who, Robert Plant, Willie Dixon, and Elton John—has made him an invaluable resource for filmmakers, as well. 

T Bone’s been recruited to lend his authenticity to the creative industry in many different capacities. He has coached actors in their depiction of established musicians, as seen in Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter and Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (2005), curated standards and lost hymnals that evoke a far-gone past in the Cold Mountain (2003) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) soundtracks , disoriented viewers with the atmospheric score of HBO’s True Detective (2014-), and created a fictional character’s entire catalog from scratch, as he did with Jeff Bridges in his Oscar-winning portrayal as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart (2009) or Oscar Isaac’s folk turn in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). 

“Music onscreen was always disturbing to me,” T Bone says. “Even in the stuff we’ve done, I’m still disturbed by it. We never get it really right. The only time we got it really right was Inside Llewyn Davis, and that’s because Oscar Isaac is such a prodigious talent, such an amazing guitarist and singer. We drilled that music so hard. We shot every one of his songs handheld, almost documentary-style. I was sitting this far away from him,” he says, shrinking his hands from a foot apart to a clasp. “I had a stopwatch, timing measures. And he never sped up or slowed down once, so we could cut between any two takes.” 

Moviegoing was a mainstay throughout T Bone’s Texas childhood. “I was growing up in Fort Worth,” he continues, “and there was a good movie theater, an arthouse. I spent a lot of time there, because it was an escape from Fort Worth. They’d have a Kurosawa festival and you’d see Throne of Blood. Just completely mad, crazy movies. Which also got us into late-night science fiction—bad, off-channel science fiction like Evil Brain From Outer Space.” 

Years later, T Bone found himself in a movie theater in Kalispell, Montana watching Alien (1979) for the first time, seated beside one of its stars, John Hurt. “We were the only two people in the theater,” he says. “And when that thing came out of his stomach, I looked at John and he turned absolutely white. White as these shoes.” He points to his wingtips and laughs. 

T Bone had become friendly with Hurt while filming Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, considered one of the more demanding shoots in Hollywood history. Despite only occupying a few minutes of screen time as percussionist of the fictional Heaven’s Gate Band, which entertained immigrants and homesteaders in late 19th century Wyoming, T Bone spent six hard months on location for the shoot. “Cimino wanted to have a real band up there,” he explains. “There was a nightclub and a gambling hall called the Outlaw Inn. We would get up and sit in every night and do songs. Then we’d end up in someone’s room, playing songs all night. That was a several-months- long party interrupted by some very unfortunate ride up a mountain at three in the morning to get the first light.” 

This communal spirit, increasingly difficult to maintain in a digital age, is still central to his process. “I’m still very much in the analog world,” T Bone says.

“It separates you a little from mass culture. I’m happy when things we do penetrate mass culture, but I realized early on that if you depended on mass culture for sustenance, then you were gonna be on a treadmill constantly running as fast as you could.” “There are a lot of great young musicians in the world I live in, which I think of as folk music. I would include hip-hop in that. Hip-hop is most definitely a form of folk music. Psychedelic music, jazz—at some level it all enters the folk consciousness.” 

How listeners consume music remains a sticking point. “It actually causes me pain to listen to music streaming,” he says. “I’ve spent my whole life in these rooms listening to music under these circumstances. I’m all for people having access to everything and to listen to it at a remove. That’s fine. We use all technology here,” he says, gesturing to the arsenal of gear cocooning us. 

“I try to be conscientious about it. Part of the problem we’re facing now, a lot of these leaders of the digital industry lack the ethical foundation to have as much power as they do. That’s why we’re facing all this chaos all around us. Other saner people are gonna have to come in at some point and organize this in some kind of way that’s not anti-human. Because much of what’s going on on the internet today, even according to Tim Berners-Lee, who drew the schematic for the internet on a napkin, it’s anti-human.” 

Preservation of musical heritage is paramount. “As an artist, you [want] an archival way to leave your work. And I’m very much at that part of my life—I’m working for history now. Things you did 20 years ago in digital, you can’t even access now. In a thousand years, if someone finds a hard drive, it’ll just be a piece of metal. This is why we’re looking for an archival analog storage medium, that’s what we’re trying to develop now.” 

Although a self-avowed traditionalist, T Bone has been consulting with scores of scientists and technicians to find a solution. At Georgia Tech, he learned of a coating used to protect the International Space Station from direct exposure to the sun. When the material is applied to an acetate disc, he discovered, it can create an album durable enough to suggest its immortality. 

“Acetate is a very good storage medium,” T Bone explains, “because it’s a flat aluminum disc with nitrocellulose painted on it. It’s flat and there’s a spiral cut into it. If you leave it like that, it can last - we don’t know how long. However, if you play it, it wears out, because it’s soft. Gravity pressing the needle into the groove creates friction, which creates heat, which melts the nitrocellulose. Friction creates static electricity, which attracts dust, which causes pops and clicks. It deteriorates from the first play.” These limitations are drastically reduced when the coating is applied. 

“We’re selling the acetates in the fine-art world as one-of-ones,” he explains, citing a successful inaugural auction held last year at Christie’s in London. Several more discs are currently in the works, though details are under wraps. He calls the acetates Ionic Originals and declares them “future-proofed.”

Lost in the science of it all, T Bone decides an audio demonstration is in order. Before embarking on his next round of meetings and bidding farewell in advance, he asks Mike Piersante to cue one of the private sessions—a single song produced by T Bone, heard only by the musicians who made it and, ostensibly, the inevitable auction winner who would own the one-of-one pressing. As Piersante loaded the files, there was a quiet moment to observe the space. Within the game room of this former Masonic temple built in the 1920s, the walls were lined with hand-inlaid wood, which disguise a kind of secret door in the corner. A breeze once again rattled the windows overlooking Butler Avenue.  

I was then situated at the center of the 48-channel Genesys mixer, between two Ocean Way HR3.5 audio speakers. The demo displayed the shocking clarity and consistency between how a recording sounds after 10 plays and a simulation of how the disc would sound after 1,001 plays. The differences were undetectable. The future does, in some small way, feel conquered. As the final note was struck and the tiny trail of hiss faded to silence, Piersante pulled back his long-sleeved T-shirt with flame designs on the arms to show his goosebumps. I turned to gauge T Bone’s reaction. He’d already slipped out through the secret door.