A dedicated follower of Delta blues (Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson) and bluegrass (the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe), White was thrilled to be in the company of a producer — or anyone — who was as passionate about the same music he was. Burnett’s role was as much to sit around talking with him about unsung legends such as Blind Willie Johnson as directing him on the songs. “Growing up in Detroit, in an all-Mexican community, there weren’t too many people into this stuff,” White says with a laugh.
He was no stranger to “Sittin’ On Top Of The World”, the first blues song he played (at age 15), or “Wayfaring Stranger”, which he played in his previous band, 2 Star Tabernacle, and regards as one of the great American tunes. “It’s always been a side note in my brain to pay respect to the people who came before me,” he says. “We [the White Stripes] play covers and sneak some stuff in otherwise, but it’s hard with only two people to get away from the garage-rock kind of thing.”
As a producer, Burnett is not one of those studio auteurists with a signature sound or sonic strategy — like, for example, Daniel Lanois, whose dense atmospherics make close relations out of albums as different as Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball. Burnett is geared more toward enabling the singer and the song.
“T Bone’s not a control freak; he’ll never make you do something you don’t want to do,” says veteran Warner Bros. publicist Bill Bentley, who saw him work close-up on Los Lobos’ How Will The Wolf Survive?, their powerful 1984 debut. “He goes after shaping songs and helping a band discover the best side of itself to record. He spends a lot of time listening before stepping in.”
“I have this feeling that if you concentrate and listen hard enough, you listen it into existence,” said Burnett. He found a believer in Tony Bennett — first during the Ya-Ya Sisterhood sessions, for which Burnett had the great popular singer record “If Yesterday Could Only Be Tomorrow”, an early-’40s Nat King Cole number that Bennett had always wanted to record, and then during the recording of “A Wonderful World” with k.d. lang.
“T Bone’s great gift is that he trusts the strength of the artistry of the performers and the music,” Bennett says. “He lets the artists find their own way. He comes to a session completely open-minded to whatever might happen; there is never one way to get the best results. I think that is why his career has been so versatile — it is just about making great music for him, not about making a particular type of music or getting a particular sound.
“He’s very intuitive and he looks to capture the moment of the performance very much like one would take a photograph. He concentrates on keeping it spontaneous rather than getting overly caught up in the technical aspects.”
For all that, it would be a mistake to downplay Burnett’s skills at the sound board. “I’m completely all about sonics,” Burnett says. “I’m addicted to sound and have been since I was 11 and I hit a guitar string and it went boing and I said, ‘What was that?’ My main job is to create a world of sound for something to exist in. I hear music as rings and dings and bongs and booms and dings and dongs. For me, all instruments are drums, resonating chambers. A guitar is a drum with strings.”
“I had these new songs, story songs based on blues and folk ballads, and a whole new way of working, but I didn’t know where to go with them,” Peter Case recalls of his first solo record. “T Bone and I came up with a whole idea of production that had never been done. We put the songs, which we called ‘tribal folk,’ to a groove, playing and singing live with a drum machine going — not a programmed drum machine, but one that was attacked by Jerry Marotta. He ripped up the instructions to it and played the thing with a screwdriver.”
Burnett’s methods as a producer can be subtler than that, so subtle that it’s easy to mistake some of his projects as exercises in laissez faire. But there’s a reason Los Lobos and the Wallflowers have never sounded as good with other producers as they did with him. He has a great ear for warmth and nuance, and for honest expression. There’s also a reason that the excellence of his work on Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s Braver Newer World (1996) was overlooked by many. Its eerie ambient effects, bold textural strokes and nods to Roy Orbison caught everyone completely by surprise.
“I caught a lot of grief for that album in Texas,” Burnett recalls. “Some of our homeboys thought he sounded pretty strange. But Jimmie said he wanted to make a psychedelic pop record, and I think he has a psychedelic voice in the first place. I was really happy with that album. I think it’s beautiful record.”
“What I don’t want to do,” says T Bone, who on a slow week gets a dozen calls a day from people who think they want him to produce them, “is the thing that’s happening now. If someone comes up and says I wanna make a record like Christina Aguilera, well, the line forms on the right and there are 5,000 people on it. I’m not interested in competing for some kind of space.”
With Cold Mountain, as with O Brother, the challenge was to bring some real vitality to traditional music without negating its earth values, and to draw on its history without getting moldy. His solution in both cases was to record the music as if it were rock ‘n’ roll. In an interview about O Brother, Burnett compared his treatment of “Man Of Constant Sorrow” (sung by Dan Tyminski) to a Traffic song.
“To me, he produces like I do,” says White. “He takes a situation for what it is. If someone shows up with a Fender guitar instead of a Gibson, he goes with that.”
“Dan Tyminski’s version of ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’ ranks with ‘My Sharona’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘She Loves You’ in its immediacy,” suggests Rodney Crowell, a longtime acquaintance of Burnett whose 2003 album, Fate’s Right Hand, was released by DMZ.
