Over the course of a meandering career that has spanned most of four decades, T Bone Burnett has been associated with some of the most successful collaborations between music and movies (“Walk the Line,” “O Brother Where Art Thou?”), as well as some of the worst (the cartoonish Jerry Lee Lewis biopic “Great Balls of Fire”). A singer and songwriter with a string of terrific albums on his own, a producer who’s won a couple of Producer of the Year Grammys, and a musical man-about-town, philosophizer and raconteur, the idiosyncratic Texan is behind the music that makes the upcoming “Crazy Heart” one of the most realistic and heartfelt depictions of a musician ever put on film.
Burnett also produced “Crazy Heart,” which stars his longtime friend Jeff Bridges as a downtrodden, alcoholic country singer named Bad Blake. (Burnett photo, below: AMPAS)
You and Jeff Bridges go way back.
We met in 1978 on “Heaven’s Gate.” We were up in Kalispell, Montana for six months, with Kris Kristofferson and his whole band, and there was nothing to do. So we started writing songs and playing music. I guess that’s where we started rehearsing this film. And we’ve been loosely collaborating in a band, or as musical friends, since then.
You also worked on the music for the film that has one of his most iconic performances, “The Big Lebowski.”
That was our first musical collaboration in a film, where Jeff was developing a character and I worked on the musical part. Like, okay, we know the dude is completely blasted, so he’s gotta have great taste in music. So we started out with Captain Beefheart, “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles.” The songs grew out of the character, who he was and what he would listen to, and they all became part of his character. So that was training for this, too. But this time we wrote the tunes, instead of just finding them.
What was the writing process like?
We had a writers’ table, really. Stephen Bruton was my first call after we found out the movie was going to happen, because he was on the road for 15 years, in a Suburban, with a Sparkletts bottle in the front seat. He lived the life of Bad Blake, and he was Jeff’s touchstone throughout the whole process. [Bruton died of cancer before the film was finished.]
So [director] Scott Cooper, Jeff Bridges, Stephen, John Goodwin, Ryan Bingham and I all just sat around a table for about three months, and talked about who Bad Blake is and where he came from. And you know, when you’re writing lyrics, you’re really writing part of the dialogue, so we had to tell the story without telling it blatantly. So the first line that Bad Blake sings, which came up in conversations around the writing table, was “I used to be somebody, but now I am somebody else.” Which, you know, is the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that all modern songwriters are trapped in.
