Word: burnette
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...While the industry collapses, an American-roots album from a moderately successful film that received almost no commercial-radio play still lurks in the upper reaches of the Billboard Top 200, now 80 weeks after its release. "A lot of people think we're a fluke," says T Bone Burnett, the producer and creative force behind O Brother. "But I think we've identified a market...
Soon the world will find out if Burnett is right. In partnership with the Coen brothers, T Bone (real name: Joseph Henry) releases this week the first products from DMZ Records, a boutique label that plans to ignore every bit of conventional record-industry sales wisdom. DMZ's first two releases, both Burnett productions, are the Louisiana-laden sound track to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and a new album--the 186th--from mountain-soul legend and O Brother featured player Ralph Stanley. There will be no large promotional budgets, no appeals to commercial radio. Burnett is convinced...
...Burnett, 54, has always been a music-industry anachronism. Raised in Fort Worth, Texas, he arrived on the pop scene in 1975 as the guitarist in Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, the backup musician who literally (at 6 ft. 7 in.) overshadowed a legend. In the '80s he became the lone Los Angeles songwriter to favor salvation over sin on a series of tough, moralistic solo albums. (Burnett and his wife, singer Sam Phillips, are devout Christians.) Burnett segued into producing and, while helming more than 40 albums for such artists as Elvis Costello and Counting Crows, became...
...Burnett doesn't care much for notoriety. He has an obstreperous side that makes him wary of fame but suits his current mission as the retrograde rebel of the music business perfectly. If the industry ticks, Burnett tacks. Take commercial radio, presumed to be the business's main artery to consumers. Most contemporary songs are market tested--not to determine whether consumers like them but to see if they turn the radio up or down; commercial-radio stations want their listeners to do neither, fearing that any reach for the dial could result in a station change. Inevitably, the edges...
...been singing that song for almost 60 years." In a typical Stanley Brothers song, good battles evil, loses and sometimes gets to heaven. Carter died of cancer in 1966, but Ralph still sings his version of the American Gothic. On Ralph Stanley, his first album for T Bone Burnett's DMZ Records, Ralph sings a tune called Mathie Grove, the tale of a husband who took his cheating wife and "cut off her head and kicked it against the wall." The magic is that Ralph has a voice that makes the grotesque sound matter-of-fact. When he sings...