T Bone Burnett returns to relevance with his soulful new album 'The Other Side'

For generations of American popular culture, pop and rock creator T Bone Burnett has never been at a loss for sounds or words.

However, his return to music via "The Other Side" — his tenderly delivered first album release in nearly two decades — represents one of his most potent commentaries ever.

He recently performed at the Country Music Hall of Fame's CMA Theater in Nashville.

Instead of him working through other actors or artists, the new album at best represents the purest artistic conversation that Burnett has had between his songwriting and recording and its listeners in quite some time.

The 76-year-old's career is defined by multidecade excellence, which has found him affiliated as an artist with 20 other albums in the past six decades. However, his work amplifying others' brilliance defines much of his path.

Burnett's storied history and inspirations

In the 1970s, he gained renown as a guitarist, working with artists such as Bob Dylan. The 1980s saw his work behind the production boards help guide Los Lobos from Los Angeles cow-punk fame to mainstream success. In the late 1990s, acts like Jakob Dylan's rock chart-topping Wallflowers and Gillian Welch's early Appalachian country-inspired work benefited from Burnett's guidance, bolstering their evocative, intelligent, and mature core influences. By the 2000s, multiple award-winning soundtracks ("O Brother, Where Art Thou?," "Cold Mountain," "Walk the Line" and "Crazy Heart") gained from his ability to push their authentic messages deep into the hearts of fans worldwide.

Burnett became aware that a long tradition of interpersonal communication between an implied, or actual, other person inspired his entire career as a pop musician.

He recalls that his career was inspired by the Beatles' "Love Me Do," "From Me to You," "She Loves You," and "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Generations that followed were defined by hits such as AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long," the Kinks "You Really Got Me," Queen's "We Will Rock You," Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" and U2's "With or Without You."

"The subconscious of entire generations of musicians was infiltrated by the use of the word 'you' in a powerful way," Burnett says.

To wit, a 2021 New York Times story offers that those songs about interpersonal relationships were bolstered by a "fun, if slightly predictable, roller coaster" of the cyclical process of a verse setting a scene, a tension-building pre-chorus and the chorus reaching a climax.

He reflects on this notion while witnessing a surge of political rhetoric in America that uses the same "predictable roller coaster" of emotion to, in his opinion, "hatefully and negatively" sway political tides.

Eventually, spending almost twice as long wearing the hat as a producer instead of sitting behind the microphone pushed Burnett past the notion of those who intentionally performed art to create dreamlike states of broad social consciousness.

'The Other Side'

"The Other Side" arrives as Burnett's desire to retrofit music to counterbalance other areas of society that have abused the altruistic good that guided pop sensibilities for generations.

The collection features ballads, pop songs and country waltzes by a decades-long list of collaborators and friends, including Rosanne Cash, early bandmate Steven Soles, current indie-to-mainstream-renowned acts Lucius and Weyes Blood, and artists like Dennis Crouch, Stuart Duncan, Jay Bellerose, and Rory Hoffman.

To complete the album, Burnett essentially created a third-person looking over a fourth-wall perspective to his six decades of work.

He describes the level of symbolic shape-shifting that went into songs like the Lucius collaboration "Waiting for You" as occurring from a "subjective, yet unconscious" creative space governed by his "experienced, intuitive and creative second nature."

Hearing artists "passing around guitars and singing each other's songs re-animated the mental "thrills" associated with "melodies from other dimensions."

For the album opener "He Came Down," Burnett describes sitting with his wife, Callie, and having an early-morning conversation about folk music. As he often does, he used an elaborate metaphor to make a simple point artfully.

"After he climbed the mountain high, he came down. After he walked into the sky," he recalls telling her.

"Out on the highway traveling south / Leaving a life he could live without / Nothing was bitter in his mouth / He came down / He came down," he continued.

The future of 'American' music

For Burnett, the album ultimately sounds like an unprecedented collection of songs that reinterpret the influence of the blues on America's love of country music.

The creator then globalizes that statement to offer that "American" music is a multicultural style influenced by multiple parts of the world that, after those sounds undergo a creative quest to achieve alignment, get magically distilled into soulfully defined art.

Dig into his work and a level of cool not limited by traditional genre classifications unifies the bluesy Rosanne Cash collaboration "I'm Gonna Get Over This (Some Day)," pairing with Lucius on the indie-pop-aimed "The Race Is Won," the waltz-tempo tune "The First Light of Day" and joining with Soles on the 50-year-old tropical-themed tune "Hawaiian Blue Song."

"These are open songs that listen to how people live in community with each other," says Burnett.

When pushed by the idea that his songs work because they make positive declarative statements about the actions of those communities, he adds that the answers to society's questions often emerge from the places we least expect.

"Blending different eras, feelings and people allows you to achieve a level of freedom and happiness that causes you to remember enough to forget everything," he says.

About the process of recording his latest album, Burnett offers a fascinating statement that honors his past and stares stunned at the potential of his present and future.

"My whole life led up to this moment of (metaphorically) leaving that life and starting over," he says. "Starting again from scratch but still maintaining my years of experience makes me assured that this album will feel (refreshingly relevant) to every conversation."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: T Bone Burnett releases 'The Other Side,' his first album in decades