THE OTHER SIDE

TRACK BY TRACK

When T Bone Burnett began writing from a new perspective, he did so on some new guitars he had finally allowed himself to buy. The songs came fast. “Every time I picked one up, a song would pour out of it,” he recalls of this near-magical burst of creativity. “There were all these songs in these guitars. And they just came out over a three-week period.”

While Burnett had tinkered with a few of the tunes before this fruitful time span, the bulk of The Other Side simply materialized. Here, he talks about how they came to be.

“HE CAME DOWN”

This pastoral opener began life at Burnett’s kitchen table:

My wife Callie and I were sitting down one early morning, and she asked me something about a specific kind of music. And I said, "Well, it's just like this." And I sang the first couple of lines of “He Came Down,” and she said, "Record that right now." And I said, "Record what?" Because it just came out, "After he climbed the mountain high, he came down. After he walked into the sky." That was just an ad lib trying to explain something to her about folk music. But she heard it and knew that it was good.

The thing I love about starting with this song is the last chorus of it is, "Out on the highway traveling south/ Leaving a life he could live without/Nothing was bitter in his mouth/He came down/He came down." The rest of the album, I feel, stays true to that and I realized, in retrospect, that there was a lot of bitterness in my mouth before that.

“COME BACK (WHEN YOU GO AWAY)”

An ambling acoustic number, gently beseeching a spirit to return:

The first song I wrote after starting to write again was the song “Come Back.” It's interesting because come back means a lot of different things but how it ends, "Come back to the world my love" —I think that's something of a mission statement for the whole album.

“(I’M GONNA GET OVER THIS) SOME DAY” with Rosanne Cash

Burnett and Cash warm each other up in this spirited, at times comic jaunt about making peace, noting “I'm gonna get over this someday/I might as well get over it now”

Rosanne and I have loved each other for a long time, and we've done one off things together, but we’ve never recorded together. I decided to ask her because I could just hear her voice on it. It had to be whatever the Everly Brothers were, that interesting blend of country and blues. I think of the record as a country blues record, basically. Everything was recorded very quickly; nothing was labored over. So, when this was done, I sent it to Rosanne —and it came back just like that, as you hear it on the record.

“WAITING FOR YOU” with Lucius

The first of the album’s appearances by the gifted vocal duo, adding a spectral flourish:

They're brilliant orchestrators and they're brilliant conjurers. And I didn't tell them a thing to do, just as with Rosanne and Steven Soles, they devised those parts.

“THE PAIN OF LOVE” with Lucius

A gem of wordplay featuring a litany of clever couplets, this is one of a few that Burnett wrote before his new spirit arrived, also featuring the vocals of Lucius:

That's a piece I was writing as part of the last Invisible Light record. It had about 30 more couplets like that. But I narrowed it down to these particular ones to turn it into more of a pop- type song. I use a lot of titles all the way through this record, of other songs, of books, of movies. Each section, there's a line and then there's a title, for instance, "We can break rank, we can walk the line," a nod to Johnny Cash. Or “We can give thanks/We can I, Me, Mine” which references George Harrison, who was also a major influence on me, going back to when I was 16.

“THE RACE IS WON” with Lucius

Another appearance by both the mysterious couple central to the album’s loose tale —on which plane they exist is unknown—and the ladies of Lucius

That one was also from Invisible Light. The race is won, W-O-N, but also the race is one, O-N-E. And that's what that song is really about: Even though we're in this painful place, the race is already won, meaning this is the way through, by recognition of the fact that we are one race.

“SOMETIMES I WONDER” with Weyes Blood

A gentle, bluesy musing about life’s big questions featuring unique harmonies courtesy of Weyes Blood:

I love this song. It's going back to the very first music I loved and learned to play. When I started this record, I was calling it Fort Worth because I just wanted to go back to my first love of music, when I was innocent, before I had become so cynical. When I had less optimism than I have now, but I had more optimism than I had my whole working life.

Weyes Blood has got that beautiful tone that, once again, I could just hear her on top of that melody. She did a beautiful counter melody.

“HAWAIIAN BLUE SONG” with Steven Soles

A reunion with his old Alpha Band pal Steven Soles is a dreamy, tropical remembrance:

Steven and Bobby Neuwirth and I wrote that song in 1976. I always loved it, and had recorded it a few times, but it didn't have a bridge, so we never put it out. Now that I was writing these melodies, and now that I was back into this world, I thought, “oh, I'll write a bridge for it.” I sent that to Steve and he did one take and sent it back to me.

“THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAY”

A gentle, waltz-time rumination of seeing a spirit fly free:

I moved to Nashville at the beginning of the pandemic. I would wake up at five in the morning and sit on a bench at the end of a little lane back in the garden and watch the sun come up. I’d watch the sky go from black to white. It was wild, because as the sun would come up, before you would see the sun, the sky would suddenly go white, not blue. That's the last song that I wrote for the record. Steven actually wrote the melody and it's a really lovely melody.

“EVERYTHING AND NOTHING”

A catchy-but-wise jaunt that surveys human nature’s warring instincts with lyrics including “Everybody wants to live forever/But nobody wants to get old”:

I wrote that song with the great songwriter Gary Nicholson who just said that one day: "You know how everybody wants to live a long time, but nobody wants to die?" I thought, yeah, let's write that. Then really, I just kind of took it away. I was writing some things for the theater and listening to Frank Loesser a lot (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Guys and Dolls), who may be the greatest of all the Broadway composers. He was a pop songwriter that wrote for the theater, but every word in every one of his songs was considered and thoughtful and necessary. So that's a song I would say was most definitely inspired by Frank Loesser.

“THE TOWN THAT TIME FORGOT” with Lucius

A hushed, shiver-inducing folk song and one of the few that predates work on The Other Side:

“The Town that Time Forgot” was written for Downtown Owl, an independent film I was working on with Lily Rabe and Thomas Hamish Linklater during this process. It was written with a young man called Peter More whom I really like. Lucius is conjuring a graveyard voice here, very chilling. It’s the moment where you've given up hope, you think the woman is gone, and the man will never find her again. And even if he does, he won't know it. That was the descent into hopelessness at almost the end of the record…

“LITTLE DARLING” with Lucius

Hope returns to close things out with this contented paean to a great love full of blues skies and light as our couple find one another:

… but suddenly, there she is, and it’s a surprise after the desolation of “The Town That Time Forgot.” But are either of them alive at that point? Because he says, “I’ll meet you at the farthest star.” We don’t know.

For more information please contact Carla Sacks, Krista Williams or Samantha Tillman at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000.