James Dean Garage Band
T BONE BURNETT - Producer
T Bone Burnett’s 40 years of experience in music and entertainment have earned him an unparalleled reputation as a first-rate innovative artist, songwriter, producer, performer, record company owner and artist advocate. Burnett’s highly sought-after involvement in music, film, television and stage projects is marked by his uncanny ability to successfully combine artistic sensibilities with commercial appeal. Just as importantly, T Bone Burnett is a champion for artistic freedom and independence, and a driving force in the elevation of our popular culture.
He is a 10-time Grammy Award winner, earning numerous statues in 2009 – including Album of the Year and Record of the Year – for his production work on Raising Sand, the worldwide smash album from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. That same year, he was also awarded a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album for his work on B.B. King’s One Kind Favor. He previously earned Grammys for his work on the 8-times Platinum release, O Brother Where Art Thou?, the platinum soundtrack to the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk The Line, and the platinum Tony Bennett / k.d. lang duets album, A Wonderful World. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, along with Elvis Costello in the category of Best Original Song for “The Scarlet Tide” from the film, Cold Mountain.
Burnett’s work as an in-demand music producer spans three decades and has resulted in some of the biggest selling and critically lauded releases of all time, including albums from Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Los Lobos, Cassandra Wilson, Roy Orbison and Ralph Stanley. His first major foray into film was his 1999 collaboration with the Coen Brothers on The Big Lebowski, for which he served as “Musical Archivist.” He has since served as Executive Music Producer on numerous additional films, including Across The Universe, the aforementioned Walk The Line (for which he also composed the score) and The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
T Bone’s most recent music productions include Secret, Profane & Sugarcane from Elvis Costello and Life, Death, Love and Freedom from John Mellencamp. He is currently producing album projects for Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Jakob Dylan and Robert Randolph. Burnett is also collaborating with Mellencamp and author Stephen King on Ghost Brothers Of Darkland County, a play with music set in the fictional town of Lake Belle Reve, Mississippi. T Bone is currently producing the film Crazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall, which will be released by Fox Searchlight in the spring of 2010. He is also composing original music for the film.
T Bone and his team of engineers have developed and recently released the ΧΟΔΕ (CODE) High Definition Audio Standard to address the collapse in quality control that has come about in the transition from analogue to digital sound. The ΧΟΔΕ process has already been employed for several releases, including albums by John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
Born Joseph Henry Burnett in St. Louis, Missouri in 1948, T Bone grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where he first began making records in 1965. His big break came in 1975, when he was asked by Bob Dylan to play guitar in his band on the now-legendary Rolling Thunder Review tour.
From that experience, he formed the Alpha Band with David Mansfield and Steven Soles, and the group made three acclaimed albums before Burnett went solo with the arresting Truth Decay in 1980, followed by the Trap Door EP (1982), Proof Through the Night (1983), the Behind the Trap Door EP (1984), an acoustic collection, T Bone Burnett (1986), The Talking Animals (1988), and The Criminal Under My Own Hat (1992).
T Bone emerged from a self-imposed 14-year hiatus as a recording artist in 2006 to release two highly-anticipated collections of music simultaneously: The True False Identity, his first album of original songs since 1992, and Twenty Twenty - The Essential T Bone Burnett, a 40-song retrospective spanning his entire career of music-making. In 2008, he released the album Tooth Of Crime, a vibrant outgrowth of his long-running collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard.