T Bone Burnett

When T Bone Burnett was making his new recordThe Other Side, he was thinking a lot about “you.” “I was reading a news story that some shocking percentage of number one hit songs had the word you in the title,” says the Oscar -and Grammywinning composer-producer-songwriter well known for his work with everyone from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss to Brandi Carlile to Elton John and on iconic soundtracks including O Brother Where Art ThouandWalk the Line. Burnett started contemplating who all those “you”s are and what it means when an artist puts them in a song. Burnett says he realized that for many years, when he worked on his own solo albums as a singer-songwriter — in between acclaimed stints of coaxing the best work out of a wildly diverse set of artists as a producer or curating ideal soundtracks for an equally disparate group of films and series —he had been “tough” on listeners. “I view the purpose of art as creating conscience, so I was constantly appealing to people's consciences,” he says of a solo career that stretches back to the mid-ʻ70s and includes several well-reviewed albums including 1992ʼs The Criminal Under My Own Hat. “But I realized when a songwriter use the word you, he is, of course, in the world of conscience, but heʼs also in the world of people's dreams. And when you enter into people's dreams, you have to be very careful with them.” And the man born Joseph Henry Burnett knows about the power of dreams. As a teenager, he had a recurring nightmare. He and other members of his Episcopal church were lined up around the walls of the parish hall where peopleʼs right hands were being replaced with electronic tracking devices that could be controlled by shadowy black figures who lorded over a larger dystopian landscape. “As I was already playing guitar at that time, I would wake up in a cold sweat saying ʻI can't do this. I've got to get out of here!ʼ” says Burnett, now 75, but still crystal clear on the details of the dystopia. That nightmare sent him off on a study of writers and philosophers, including Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul, whose ideas about the ways in which technology threaten humanity would inform much of his work over the course of his career including, most recently, his sci-fi-oriented The Invisible Light series.