T Bone Burnett

T Bone Burnett

With 50-years’ experience in music and entertainment, T Bone Burnett has earned an unparalleled reputation as an innovative artist, songwriter, producer, performer, film and concert producer, record company owner and artists’ advocate. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Burnett grew up in Fort Worth, Texas where he first began writing songs and making records as a teenager. In the mid-1970s, Burnett was traveling the country as a musician and record producer when he was asked by Bob Dylan to play guitar in his band on the now-legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour. That experience led Burnett to form the Alpha Band with David Mansfield and Steven Soles, making three acclaimed albums with the trio before releasing a string of critically acclaimed solo records in the 1980’s. Toward the end of that decade, Burnett displayed his unique abilities to effectively meld music with film, producing the groundbreaking all-star music special, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night.

Burnett has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and 13 Grammy Awards. He’s worked and collaborated with musicians spanning many genres, such as the aforementioned Bob Dylan, Elton John, Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, B.B. King, Tony Bennett, k.d. lang, Elvis Costello, The Civil Wars, Taylor Swift, Ryan Bingham, Steve Earle and Leon Russell. Burnett’s highly successful and acclaimed work in film throughout the past 30 years includes his collaboration with the Coen Brothers on The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, The Hunger Games, Walk The Line, Inside Llewyn Davis and Crazy Heart, for which he also served as one of the film’s producers. In 2014, Burnett staged the all-star concert event, Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating The Music Of Inside Llewyn Davis, at New York’s Town Hall. The show was inspired by music from the Coen Brothers’ film, set in the 1960’s Greenwich Village folk music scene, and the event reunited the trio behind O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the highly successful concert events launched in conjunction with that film.

His extensive work in television includes serving as the Executive Music Producer and Composer for the HBO series True Detective, and the first season of the ABC television series, Nashville. In 2014, T Bone hand-picked a diverse group of artists to form a band and compose music for newly-unearthed Bob Dylan lyrics written at the time of the artist’s historic Basement Tapes recordings. These sessions resulted in the Burnett -produced Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes album and the accompanying Lost Songs documentary on Showtime. Burnett was nominated for a 2017 Emmy Award for his work with Jack White and Robert Redford on American Epic: a multipart, multimedia project that explores the history of music in America, as well as its global roots.

His work as a recording artist continues with an ambitious three-album series in collaboration with drummer Jay Bellerose and keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, The Invisible Light. The first volume, Acoustic Space was released in 2019 and the second volume, Spells was released last month.