FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Get (Re)Acquainted With T Bone Burnett, Mark Knopfler, and More

More often than not, I use these Founders’ Keepers columns to highlight artists you might not already know. There’s some of that this month, too — but we’ll bolt out of the gate with some star power. Mark Knopfler is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with Dire Straits, and T Bone Burnett is, well, T Bone Burnett. Then it’s on to a couple of generation-spanning Austin acts, and finally a couple of artists who may or may not be new to you, but they’re both new to me.

T Bone Burnett — The Other Side

Since the massive success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack more than 20 years ago, Burnett has been in high demand for production and film projects. Following that path paid off: He earned Grammys for music from Walk the Line, Crazy Heart, and The Hunger Games, plus nominations for his work on Cold Mountain and Across the Universe. But Burnett first proved his worth in the 1970s and ’80s as a songwriter, and The Other Side shows he can still return to that well with razor-sharp lyricism set to graceful acoustic arrangements.

For me, Burnett’s benchmark remains his self-titled 1986 album, a country-folk masterpiece with a few key accompanists (David Hidalgo and Jerry Douglas among them). But The Other Side might be his next-best, and that’s somewhat surprising, given how far he’d been moving away from such endeavors with his recent pair of electronic-focused Invisible Light albums. A key commonality: Like the 1986 record, this one has no drums at all.

Collaborators include Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe of Lucius, who add harmonies on five songs, and Rosanne Cash, who joins Burnett on “(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day.” But the real stars are the songs themselves, filled with keen insights set to arrangements that co-producers Colin Linden and Mike Piersante wisely kept uncluttered. Highlights include “The Pain of Love” and its cautionary refrain, “We are like gods, but we are not gods”; the bittersweetly lovely “Hawaiian Blue Song,” a co-write with Steven Soles and the late Bob Neuwirth; and the attention-getting opener “He Came Down,” which leaves its spirituality for the listener to assess. But every track here belongs and contributes to the whole: The Other Side plays less like a 21st-century collection of streamed tracks, and more like an old-fashioned cohesive album of songs that hang together tightly.

Mark Knopfler — One Deep River

Watching Knopfler onstage in Austin in September 2019, I didn’t realize it would be one of his last live performances. Whether it was the pandemic or just aging — he’ll turn 75 this summer — Knopfler hasn’t played a concert in nearly five years, and there’s no longer even a “tour dates” page on his website. Thankfully, he’s not done making music. One Deep River is his 10th album since the early-’90s demise of Dire Straits, not counting soundtracks and collaborations. Once the leader of an offbeat rock band that somehow became huge (1985’s Brothers in Arms remains one of the top-selling albums of all time), Knopfler has morphed into a classic singer-songwriter with particular attention to tasteful guitar tones and carefully detailed lyrics. (An example: The track “Tunnel 13” is a history lesson about a century-old train robbery in Oregon that includes the names of all four railroad employees who were killed.)

“Watch Me Gone,” sweetened with a chorus harmony from sisters Emma and Tamsin Topolski, may reveal why Knopfler has finally stopped touring, after decades of his loved ones watching him go. In the song’s third verse, he marvels at getting to play shows with his heroes Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, but takes stock of the toll such adventures took on personal relationships. Perhaps most intriguing is “This One’s Not Gonna End Well,” which first suggests that life will go on after tyrants fade — until the final verse’s warning that present-day fascists may “whip up old lies to ride into power, and history comes back from hell.”

Kimmie Rhodes — Hypnotized

It’s a long way from Knopfler’s classic Britain to Rhodes’ mythic Texas, but music has a way of bridging such distances. In 2006, Knopfler duetted with Emmylou Harris on “Love and Happiness,” a song Rhodes co-wrote. Rhodes is probably better known for her collaborations with Willie Nelson — they made an album of duets together, and Rhodes wrote the title track of Nelson’s 1995 record Just One Love — but she’s also made more than a dozen records of her own. Hypnotized, produced by Rhodes’ son, Gabriel Rhodes, might well be her best album, solely on the strength of the songs. “No Tom Petty” is the instant hook, a folk-rock tune spiked by Bill Carter’s harmonica that wonders aloud exactly how we’ll get by without the music of legends such as David Bowie and Tom Petty (“the world was bad enough already”). On the other hand, we’ve still got Alejandro Escovedo, who turns up as Rhodes’ duet partner on “If You Closed Your Eyes.” The record’s most intriguing track is “Invisible Mary,” a minor-key fever-dream that pushes Rhodes out of her country-rock comfort zone. On the album’s closing track, “Automatic Music Inc,” Rhodes grapples with a world of Auto-Tune and AI with observations such as “I feel like an old jukebox” and “I got flipped to the B-side of life” — but the song’s beautiful melody and exquisitely minimal arrangement underscore her point about the old-school methods of making music.

Calder Allen — Dreamers, Drifters and Hiders

Much like Rhodes, Allen has family roots in Lubbock — his grandfather is renowned sculptor-songwriter Terry Allen — but now calls Austin home. Barely into his 20s, he’s already on his sophomore album. Dreamers, Drifters and Hiders picks up where his 2022 debut The Game left off: Charlie Sexton returns as producer and multi-instrumentalist, guiding an impressive crew that includes Calder’s uncle Bukka Allen on keyboards, cellist Brian Standefer, bassist John Michael Schoepf, and fiddler Richard Bowden. As a singer, Allen sounds less like his grandfather and more like longtime Austin musician Scrappy Jud Newcomb, imbuing his character-sketch songs with a weathered and frayed coolness that suggests Allen is an old soul despite his tender years. Allen wrote about half of these songs on his own, with Sexton chipping in at times. Almost the entire Allen family had a hand in “No Rush to Fly,” which is credited to Calder, his grandparents Terry and Jo Harvey, uncle Bukka, father Bale, brother Sled and cousin Kru.

Stephanie Lambring — Hypocrite
Louisa Stancioff — When We Were Looking

I’ve tied these two together mainly because both artists brought to mind Deb Talan from The Weepies, which is a very good thing. Nashville-based Lambring originally hails from Indiana; Hypocrite is her second album, following 2020’s acclaimed Autonomy. Stancioff recently returned to her native Maine after a few years rambling far and wide (Alaska, California, New York, North Carolina); When We Were Looking follows two 2023 singles that romanticized her backwoods youth. Their timing is good: Artists such as Phoebe Bridgers and Waxahatchee have proven there’s a sizable audience for indie-folk women singer-songwriters. Both Lambring and Stancioff have the goods, with incisive lyrics and emotionally resonant vocals that benefit from the studio touches of well-traveled Americana veterans (Teddy Morgan produced Lambring’s record, with longtime Josh Ritter cohort Sam Kassirer handling Stancioff’s). The leadoff tracks — “Cover Girl” by Lambring and “Gold” by Stancioff — find both artists putting their best work up-front.