T Bone Burnett

It’s the morning after the 2006 Oscars and T Bone Burnett is feeling “groggy and smoked out.” He has to swallow a cup of tea to clear his head and adjust to the new day. “They smoke cigarettes at the Oscar parties,” he says in a tone that suggests he’s letting me in on one of the biggest secrets of contemporary Hollywood debauchery.

He hadn’t been at the awards ceremony as a nominee—adapted scores are no longer recognized—but as support for Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix, the two actors he coached through the soundtrack for Walk the Line. In the end Witherspoon won Best Actress for her vivacious performance as June Carter. “I was thrilled for her,” says T Bone. “I thought it was so well deserved. She did a beautiful, beautiful job.”

Today Burnett is best known as a producer of movie soundtracks and albums but it wasn’t always so. During the 1980s and early ’90s he was primarily a singer and songwriter who produced a unique body of work that was witty, poetic, intelligent, musically inventive and deeply rooted in American folk music. It attracted a prestigious group of admirers, some of whom (like Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder, Richard Thompson and Bono) sealed their friendship with Burnett by co-writing a song with him. His uncompromising vision was never one likely to catapult him into the Top 10 or make him a regular at the MTV Awards, but it made him cool amongst the cool.

But in 1992 he made his last record, played his last tour and then turned to producing. His prestigious list of clients included then-wife Sam Phillips, Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Gillian Welch, Elvis Costello and Los Lobos. In 2000, he switched his focus to movie soundtracks, the most successful being O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which has since sold over seven-million copies and is credited with reviving mainstream interest in American roots music. But after 14 years in the background, Burnett is back not only with a new album, The True False Identity, but with a retrospective, Twenty Twenty, that collects 40 of his earlier solo tracks. There’s even a theater tour planned for April and May.

So what brought Burnett back to making his own music? “I think it got to the point where there was no longer any challenge,” he says. “There was nothing challenging in producing another rock ’n’ roll record for another rock ’n’ roll band, and I had seen so many people make mistakes. Also, I’d gone past 50, which was the age my father had given me permission to go ahead and start.”