Moments in to our interview with T-Bone Burnett, the creative, musical force behind the Coen brother’s latest production, Inside Llewyn Davis, the esteemed producer set fire to a small piece of Palo Santo (a Peruvian wood). Giving off a striking, memorable smell to create a placid and relaxed ambiance, Burnett then proceeded to sit back and discuss his continuous work with the Coens, while also delving into a series of conspiracy theories.
Giving off an inherent scepticism towards the world wide web, it probably means that Burnett, whose previous credits include O Brother Where Art Thou? And Crazy Heart, is unlikely to be an avid follower of HeyUGuys – which is a shame, because let’s just say this is one of the more intriguing conversations we’ve ever had (and yes, the prominent aroma of the burning incense probably helped).
This isn’t the first time you’ve collaborated with the Coen brothers of course – what is it about their cinematic style and approach to filmmaking that suits your sensibilities as a songwriter and producer?
We all work the same way. All art comes out of community and when communities can get together and not fight over who gets what piece, and instead can say ‘this is ours – let’s make it great’, it just ends up being better. As soon as someone says ‘this is mine’ then it all starts fragmenting and fracturing, so to get the spirit of a piece of art right, everyone has to be generous. I try to do that and I try to leave nothing in the bag when I’m working, and to set up an environment so that others can feel comfortable as well. That’s what they do.
20 years ago there was a line I wondered which of them wrote, so I asked Joel who wrote it, and he said, ‘I don’t have any idea.’ I thought at the time – he knows who wrote that line. But after having worked with them all this time, I don’t know who wrote any of the lines, I don’t know who came up with any of the songs, that’s the beautiful thing. They work that same way, everyone comes in and puts everything on the table, every actor knows that this movie is going to be seen for a hundred years so they’re not going to leave anything in the bag either. Everybody just wants to come in and do their absolute best work.
All three of us have the philosophy of setting up the environment of people doing their best work, giving them the foundation to do that, then get out of the way and give them the support they need if they need it. They never tell anybody anything to do. They never say ‘read the line this way’. They may say, ‘do it like you’re hungover this time’, so some adjustments like that, but not even much of that. The idea of leaving freedom for intellectual thought to run wild. Something like that.
That’s quite refreshing, especially how music in the film industry seems to be a lot about ego.
And it’s pathetic. It happened when they came up with this idea of having a creative executive. To create and to execute are completely opposite. The notion that there’s going to be somebody creatively executing something is ridiculous on the surface. We have none of that. We have no creative executives.
With the films you’ve worked on with the Coens, you’ve managed to highlight areas of classic American music that probably wouldn’t have really impacted on mainstream popular culture like they have in the film. Is is satisfying to know you’re able to showcase this musical lineage to such a wide audience?
It is. First of all, it’s something of a mission for me because music to the United States is what wine is to France. It’s an important part of our national identity – it’s probably the core part of our national identity. We’ve defined ourselves through music, since it’s a country that came together through the notion ‘one out of many’. This notion that different languages, different people, came from the east, west, north and south to the United States, with many different languages and different histories and stories, and music became the common language, and our story was told through music.
Starting with the reality that the poorest people in the United States were recorded – this is the greatest act of democratisation, when the American recording industry went down South to places where there was no electricity, and recorded the poorest people in our country and broadcasted their stories and their voices all around the world – that’s what the United States is supposed to be about. That’s the truth of it. The internet is us attempting a mechanisation of that, which I think is failing horribly, I’m sad to say. It really comes from community and the actual thing we’re trying to mechanise, actually needs humans. I’m worried about this [laughs]. So yeah, this is such an important part of our identity and there definitely is a counter-movement to erase it all, and erase our history.
I was studying Doctor Zhivago the other day because it’s one of the greatest uses of music in a film ever, the song Lara’s Theme… They’ll play it and lead you through the story by giving you parts of the song, it becomes a critical and integral part of the storytelling. But the thing that struck me when watching it, was how closely they were talking about Russia, how much is sounded like where I’m living right now. They’ve done away with the individual… I can’t even remember it all but it’s this totalitarian state they were describing, and I realised that I’m in a worse place than that. This is pretty bad, this is pretty wild.
When I was a kid I had a recurring nightmare from the time I was five until I was fifteen that these stormtroopers dressed all in black, looking kind of like Darth Vader really, came into our church and would start cutting each person’s right hand off and replacing it with a new hand that would be their memory and their guide and their communication system and it was this amazing new thing. But it was a nightmare, I would wake up from it every night in a cold sweat. Then the other day, I picked up my iPhone and I realised, oh, they didn’t have to cut off our hands. They just put it in our hands, you know? This is what they’re doing – we’re living in a surveillance state. I forget what the question was. But yes, it’s a privilege and it’s important to me – it’s something I take very seriously.
Talking about the creative destruction of technology – for somebody who has been in the music business for as long as you have, do you see it as having a detrimental effect?
Oh definitely. In the area of sound quality, we use 90% of our intelligence to process visual information. All the other information enters more subliminally, more unconsciously, but that doesn’t make it any less important, and in many ways it makes it more important. Certainly the area of sound reproduction, digital has taken us backwards. I have empirical evidence that I can show, I’ve got the whole Capitol Records catalogue and one of these days I will come over and play this stuff for you, but you can follow the generation of sound over the last 60 years to the point now, where there are no sound standards. MP3 was never intended as a standard for audio sound. The reality is, I’m working in 5G and holograms and telepresence, and everything is fast and clear and high definition and it sounds great and everything works. Then you get on the internet, and it’s all creaky and it’s a bad, 20th century technology that needs to be discarded.
If we’re going to make it out of this century, there are two technologies that we’re going to have to upgrade immediately. One is the internal combustion engine, and one is our communication system. They’re both destroying us. They’re destroying us because we’re having slave labour all around the world make all this stuff for us. In the United States we outlawed slavery in 1860 but we’re using more slaves now than we were in 1860, to manufacture our shirts in these sweatshops. So we’re going to have to get real about who we are because we’re lying to ourselves about what we’re doing. We can’t lose our regional identity as we move into globalism, and certainly our communication system is trying to move us into globalism at warp speed, without allowing us to really make decisions, important decisions that need to be made.
The world wide web consortium allowed anonymous comments in the most non-anonymous forum in the history of the world. It was just a flat out lie. But it was bait-and-switch, they allowed everyone to go on and state their true opinions under a synonym, but they’ve built incredible dossiers on everybody now. This is recorded, people have done all kinds of things they wouldn’t do in normal life, they’ve said all kind of things to other people they wouldn’t say in person. Not just a little bit, but they’ve got libraries and libraries full of it, they’re building huge warehouses out in Wyoming in Montana to house all of the data they’re collecting on everybody. It’s not just the evil government, there has been an unethical social system put in place and it’s doing the exact opposite of what they said it was going to do. They said it would lower the playing field and democratise everything, but instead it has consolidated power in fewer and fewer hands. There is a lot of work to do.
So, about the movie…
[Laughs] This is all about the movie… We’ve got to face who we are or we’re just going to kill ourselves. We’ve got to be real about who we are.
Inside Llewyn Davis is released on January 24, and you can read our 5 star review here.
