T Bone Burnett Taps Into a River of Love for His First Acoustic Album in Decades: ‘In a Way It Feels Like My First Solo Record, at All’
06.05.2024 - 21:53
/ variety.com
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “There’s a river of love that runs through all times,” the singer-producer T Bone Burnett sang in a signature song of his back in the 1980s. But that’s not a river he’s necessarily always been riding.
A lot of music from his debut solo album, 1980’s “Truth Decay,” on forward (and even going back to his late 1970s albums with the Alpha Band) has been in the cautionary tale vein. And even when he stepped away from releasing solo albums for decades — focusing on production work, winning Grammys for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and the first Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration — his writing or public speeches were prone to sounding warnings, about everything from degraded audio quality to Silicon Valley making artists’ lives more difficult.
On his new album, “The Other Side,” though, Burnett sounds like he really has rounded a corner to another side of his music — the side that used to have “Generosity is the hallmark of an artist” as his going motto. This record, his first solo album of all-new material in 18 years, has him singing in an arguably warmer voice, with a definitely warmer attitude.
It stands in contrast to the chilly, electronically oriented “Invisible Light” albums he has done with a trio in recent years, closer to the string-band sound he’s mastered in some of his production efforts but only occasionally adopted in his own very intermittent records over the years. A T Bone Burnett who is embracing the spotlight as an artist would seem to be a different guy than the fellow who’s often insisted over the years he prefers to stay out of it.
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