T Bone Burnett - Tooth of Crime

You re my friend, but I m going to kill you.
Don t fret. T Bone Burnett hasn t gone off the deep end. At least not in that way. He s merely explaining the tone of the putyou-
on-your-heels opening track of his gripping new album, Tooth of Crime. At once seductive and unsettling from the haunting
Dope Island (featuring alluring vocals by Sam Phillips) to oddly romantic Kill Zone to the brutal The Rat Age to the atmospheric
Telepresence to the hill-country blues elegy that closes the tale, Sweet Lullaby it s a set of songs capturing a state of identity
and cultural dislocation with an air that could be termed dramatic, even theatrical in places. Fittingly.
The album completed fresh off Burnett s stunning work as producer and arranger of the hugely successful Robert Plant/Allison
Krauss collaboration Raising Sand, and featuring some of the same musicians is a vibrant outgrowth of a long-running collaboration
with playwright Sam Shepard that began with the 1996 musical staging in New York of his noted play of the same name. The songs
are arresting distillations of modern conflicts and personal drama in a modern hyper-reality. The arrangements are imaginative and
inventive. The performancesare stunning, masterful, and unpredictable.
Tooth of Crime is a prophetic play that Sam first wrote in 1972, and it takes place in a time very much like now, Burnett explains.
It s a time when there are zones of fame that flare up and people can become incredibly famous in their own zone and nobody
else can know it. And then the zone completely disappears, but the famous person doesn t realize it because you can t even find
the zone anymore. You have to hook up a toaster to a television to a microwave to a piano very post-apocalyptic. That was the
initial inspiration for the album. These songs came together like a broken mirror, and you get a bunch of shards and start putting
them together and create a lot of different angles, he says. That s this group of songs, this process.
Working with what has become a solid musical team anchored by Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn) and drummer
Jim Keltner (John Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, etc.), Burnett crafted the sound of Tooth of Crime into a unique aesthetic.
It s an approach that has evolved over decades of distinctive work for Burnett, both as a recording artist in his own right and in guiding
an elite roster of artists and movie music projects: The 2000 Grammy album of the year O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack;
the Oscar-nominated The Scarlet Tide for the film Cold Mountain (for which he also produced the soundtrack); albums by Bob
Dylan, Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Roy Orbison, Ralph Stanley, Tony Bennett and k.d. lang; and recent projects such as Raising Sand,
the re-imagining of the Beatles catalog in Across the Universe, and the music for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, are just
highlights of a resume that stands as one of the most productive, distinctive, and lauded production careers of modern music Product Description

T Bone Burnett is a Keeper!

I have been listening to T Bone Burnett for years and it's been a long time since he's put out an album. It is very good listening and he has used his producer, musician skills well over the years. I highly recommend this CD. September 28, 2008

Worth The Listening Effort

When I first heard Tooth of Crime, I was not in the proper frame of mind to actually appreciate it. Before hunkering down to seriously consider it's complexities, I needed to have an open mind and a strong constitution. But that's just me. After all, there is a lot of darkness to ponder as well as some devastatingly dark humor that could rub a person the wrong way.

And I think that it was T Bone Burnett's intention to create something that could rub the listener the "wrong way" in that it is difficult to listen to if all you want is a panacea to the world's ills. Sorry, but our societal ills call for a more homeopathic musical remedy than mere emotional sleight-of-hand and pleasant distraction.

The songs on Tooth of Crime are what performance artist Laurie Anderson once called "difficult listening music". To attach this term to Tooth of Crime is actually a compliment from my perspective. I know another reviewer made a negative aside to David Byrne's "Knee Plays", but since I love that album I cannot share that sentiment. In fact, on many of the tracks the horns remind me considerably of that 80s bit of theatrical soundtracking. However, Burnett's lyrics are much more dark and complex than Byrne's abstract absurdism. I can appreciate both for different reasons, and to be honest I would rather not go into comparing applejack to orangeade.

Going back to Tooth of Crime, for me these tracks have felt like emotional grindcore with a subtext of sadomasochism that adds to the depths of depravity exposed by Burnett's lyrics. I am thinking of his song, "Kill Zone", specifically these words: For I'll steal your dreams while you are sleeping / And sell them for dust and cheap lust / And I'll slit your hope while you are weeping / And wipe the blade clean with morphine / Be my queen."

This is a dark ride on the other side of the spectrum from false cultural "feel-good" tropes. And this is to be embraced as such. To hope for something else from Burnett at this stage in his musical development would be to hope for a lie. It is refreshing to hear the work of someone who does not consider personal struggle as anathema to life. While it may be disquieting for many to hear the combination of music and lyrics contained within Tooth of Crime, perhaps we need to be disquieted at what we have allowed our culture to become: a worthless landscape filled with American Idol worship.

What I hear Burnett saying in this album is that it's high time we melted down the Golden Calf we have created and accept the lessons we have yet to learn.

June 22, 2008

T Bone's albums are always keepers

T Bone's albums are an investment that produce satisfaction on initial listening and reward again in the future. They just don't go stale--- e.g. TRUTH DECAY which can sit on my shelf for many months and then sound great again. T bone has established his status as a producer and his own music is adult rock at its very best. I am also a fan of Sam Phillips who makes an appreciated contribution to TOOTH OF CRIME. June 3, 2008

Fresh T-Bone

The fact that these new T-Bone Burnett tunes were originally written for a play had me concerned at first. ("The Knee Plays," anyone?) But once I listened to the music, I got into it. The CD stands very well on its own without any connection to Sam Shepard's play, and every song's a keeper. You've got the Twin Peaks-ish "Dope Island," the occasional taste of blues such as "Sweet Lullaby," and a variety of other styles in between. As you might expect from producer extraordinaire Burnett, the musicians playing with T-Bone are impressive people like Jon Brion and Marc Ribot, plus his ex-wife Sam Phillips. (I'm a big fan of hers too.) The duets between Sam & T-Bone on "Dope Island" are marvelous, and she even sings lead vocals here and there. By the way, the title of this album reminded me of Burnett's "Truth Decay," except in reverse, right? May 14, 2008

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