T-Bone Burnett
The Criminal Under My Own Hat
Reviewed by Chris Estey
It's been almost ten years since Burnett released this, possibly the darkest folk-rock album ever recorded, right up there with Richard & Linda Thompson's masterpiece I Want To See The Bright LIghts Tonight, or Neil Young's chilling Tonight's the Night, or Lou Reed's disturbing Berlin. All of these are classically haunted albums that don't tread lightly into the darkest areas of human experience. They're all exquisitely pretty records with soft blurred edges and choking, caustic centers. The difference with Criminals, of course, is that Burnett is a Christian, and whereas intelligent Christian music has been known to paint a somber picture every now and then, Burnett created a huge canvas full of pain and sorrow, his own "Guernica"; not the Spanish Civil War of Picasso's vision, but the emotional remains of human brokenness most human beings end up with in their closets. There's something so right, so bone-chillingly truthful about this record. It must have taken a ton of heartache and misery to conceive these songs, from the pinched clarity of the opener "Over You" ("Been a long time breaking through / Going to be a long time till I'm / over you"), to the raging ontological anarchy (political and musical) of "I Can Explain Everything" (advocating the guillotine for our political leaders), to the metanoid and cosmically despairing "Primitives" ("The terrible thing is not living / The terrible thing is not dying.") Who is T-Bone Burnett? A guy with a really strange but fruitful track record in and out of Christian music. Right now, he is celebrating the success of building the soundtrack to O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, that amazing adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses by the Coen brothers, currently playing at a theatre near you. Before that, in this decade, he was responsible for the success of the Counting Crows, producing their first album and helping them to define their sound. Both of these things would be noteworthy enough if he hadn't also done such things as produce Leslie Phillips' The Turning back in 1985, probably the most adult and honest CCM album ever recorded; wrote columns for CCM Magazine back when the periodical attempted overt social consciousness in their editorial perspective; and has recorded, since 1973, a handful of mesmerizing records, brimming with rootsy folk rock sweetened with sweet Beatlesque vocals, and lyrics that torque the mind and spirit in ways no other songwriter can. Rumor has it he has another album coming down the pike, after his nearly ten year hiatus since Criminal. It has songs apparently co-written with Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders and cyberpunk science fiction novelist Bob Gibson (Neuromancer). Obviously, this guy does not think in a box.