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T Bone Burnett & Jay Bellerose & Keefus Ciancia — The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space Pamela MÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃéndez ÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃâ Time (22 Feb 2019)Birth name: Joseph Henry Burnett III
Born: January 14, 1948, St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Album release: April 12, 2019
Record Label: Verve Label Group
Duration:     44:09
Tracks:
01 High John   9:00
02 A Man Without A Country (All Data Are Compromised)   8:12
03 To Beat The Devil   8:09
04 Anti Cyclone   6:32
05 The Secret In Their Eyes   5:53
06 Being There   6:11
07 Itopia Chant   0:12
Review
By Andy Crump | April 8, 2019 | 12:31pm | Score: 8.0
•¬    The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space, the latest addition to T Bone Burnett’s solo discography after an 11 year gap, comprises a handful of tracks that sound long~buried and freshly unearthed instead of brand~spanking new. That’s okay. The new can sound ancient if it likes, or if it makes sense, and Invisible Light has the aural quality of a relic tucked away in a cavern deep beneath the earth, waiting to be discovered by future generations, warning them of disasters and embarrassments they maybe could’ve avoided if they’d just dug the damn thing up a few years sooner.
•¬    But Burnett, having busied himself producing and composing music for films and TV series ranging from Nashville to Inside Llewyn Davis to A Place at the Table for the last decade and change, has awakened, and if we’re too late to stop the political tragedies that have befallen us in the intervening years, at least we can rely on his sage counsel for succor.
•¬    Granted, that means first hearing his lamentations. “I had thought the world would have been further along by now,” he opines about two minutes into the record’s second track, “A Man Without a Country,” mourning for the planet while ticking off a litany of varied disappointments. The world is cruel, and wrong, and ungrateful; we’ve become a pack of desensitized criminal saboteurs. He has the “desensitized” part right on the money. 2019 revolves around a news cycle that’s kept many Americans numb since 2016. Burnett declines to mention by name a certain entitled titian tyrant throwing temper tantrums in the White House, but he doesn’t need to, and frankly he shouldn’t anyway: The woes weighing down humanity the globe over tally to more than just the American president and his reign of cataclysmic ignorance. Burnett’s listeners know what kind of awfulness he’s talking about without him needing to specify.
•¬    But hearing that broad message delivered in booming, thunderous tones, one part electronic, one part bluesy, another part still international in aesthetic, invokes an unexpected, humbling shame. Neither Burnett nor Invisible Light mean to make the audience feel guilty, or blamed. All the same the ominous, echoing rumble that defines the album’s character will likely fill more than a few people a powerful need to genuflect and beg absolution for man’s heinous crimes against man. Attending Burnett’s missives, otherworldly and displeased as they might appear at first blush, is like taking a scolding from God but with better production values.
•¬    Not that Invisible Light is entirely a feel~bad album. It’s just that marrying lyrics rife with discontent over the state of humanity to music that bridges Saul Williams’ “Ohm” and Buddy Guy’s “Baby Please Don’t Leave Me,” naturally invites the kind of bad feeling that makes the blues such an enduring musical discipline. And as consolation, not every track on the album presents that sonic model; just most of them. “Acoustic space” is something of a sleight of hand. Read that phrase, you might expect a record defined by strums on an acoustic guitar, perhaps even a hollow body. Instead, reverberations abound, which goes right back to the image of the cavern, where sound bounces around off walls and ceiling.
•¬    There’s a bemusing effect to the double meaning, a sense of geological scale offset by an unexpected intimacy. At the same time, Invisible Light is split up by “Anti Cyclone,” which ditches the trance vibe for global folk, excepting use of what sounds like distorted accordions as a background element. More significantly,“Anti Cyclone” ditches despondency for straightforward melancholy. “If you tell people things they already believe / they will believe you,” Burnett hums. “It doesn’t matter that you don’t believe a word you say.” What remains is the political critique; maybe the song’s more personal in nature, but it’s easy to interpret, maybe mistake, its meaning as rebuke toward lying, deceitful politicians and fascist thought leaders. Seems like swapping style doesn’t push Burnett away from the main thrust of his material.
•¬    He has a purpose driving him on Invisible Light, and it hews toward the apocalyptic. He has hope, too, wrapped up primarily in “Being There,” but it’s a small hope. “Be not afraid / be not afraid / the angel begged / be not afraid,” he sings. The sentiment, while welcome, isn’t exactly a comfort when people in society aren’t there even when they are there, a reality Burnett details throughout the rest of the track. Maybe not being afraid is enough. Maybe being there is enough. Maybe Burnett’s advisements have come too late. If so, they’re at least a marvel to listen to.
•¬ https://www.pastemagazine.com/  
Website: https://tboneburnett.com/ 
Grammy Awards
• Producer of the Year, Non~Classical (2001, 2004)
• Record of the Year: “Please Read the Letter” (2008)
• Album of the Year: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001), Raising Sand (2008)
• Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001), Cold Mountain (2004), Walk the Line (2006), Crazy Heart (2010)
• Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album: Raising Sand (2008)
• Best Traditional Folk Album: Down from the Mountain (2001)
• Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album: A Wonderful World (2004)
• Best Traditional Blues Album: One Kind Favor (2008)
• Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media: “The Scarlet Tide” (2004), “The Weary Kind” (2010)
• Best Song Written for Visual Media: “Safe & Sound” (2012)
Solo discography:
The B~52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks 1972
Truth Decay 1980
Trap Door 1982
Proof Through the Night 1983
Behind the Trap Door 1984
T~Bone Burnett 1986
The Talking Animals 1987
The Criminal Under My Own Hat 1992
The True False Identity 2006
Tooth of Crime 2008
T~Bone Burnett Presents The Speaking Clock Revue: Live from the Beacon Theatre 2011
A Place at the Table 2013
The Invisible Light 2019
BIO
WRITTEN BY: Michael Ray
T Bone Burnett
AMERICAN PRODUCER AND MUSICIAN
•¬    T Bone Burnett, byname of Joseph Henry Burnett, (born January 14, 1948, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.), American producer and musician, one of popular music’s most prolific and successful producers, known for his work in a wide range of genres including rock, country, and folk.
•¬    Burnett spent his childhood in Fort Worth, Texas, and it was there that he acquired the nickname “T Bone” and became involved in the local music scene, initially as a guitarist with local blues bands and later as the founder of his own recording studio. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and recorded his debut solo album, The B~52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks (1972), a straightforward collection of bluesy rock tunes. In 1975 he received his major break into the industry, touring as a guitarist on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour. His second solo album, Truth Decay (1980), shows Burnett’s maturation as an artist, but he found greater success in the production booth than he did as a performer.
•¬    In 1984 Burnett produced the critically acclaimed major~label debut from Los Lobos, How Will the Wolf Survive?, and soon after he worked with Elvis Costello, whose King of America (1986) and Spike (1989) feature Burnett as both producer and performer. While these and other projects helped to establish Burnett professionally, his work on The Turning (1987), an album by Christian pop artist Leslie Phillips, proved significant personally. Burnett and Phillips — who recorded as Sam on later albums — became involved romantically, and the two were married in 1989 (they divorced in 2004).
•¬    Burnett continued to record solo material, with the Grammy Award~nominated The Criminal Under My Own Hat (1992) providing an excellent window into Burnett’s evolving lyrical sensibilities, but he remained outside the mainstream of popular music. That changed dramatically when he selected and composed the music for the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Burnett earned four Grammy Awards and was thrust into the public spotlight. He later won Grammys for the Tony Bennett and k.d. lang duet “A Wonderful World” (2002) and for the sound track of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005). In 2009 Burnett received three Grammys for his work on the Alison Krauss and Roger Plant album Raising Sand and one award for B.B. King’s One Kind Favor.
•¬    Although Raising Sand boasted impressive sales and near~universal critical acclaim, Burnett was unimpressed with the sound quality of the final recording. In an era in which many producers were mixing music to be louder and denser for the low~fidelity iPod and ringtone markets, Burnett returned to the basics of audio engineering on subsequent albums, using his XOΔE (rendered in English as “CODE”) technology. CODE offered a listening experience that replicated the original studio master recording as faithfully as possible, with no additional cost to the consumer. CODE audio DVDs were included in the standard CD package, and listeners could thus compare the two formats side~by~side. CODE was further refined for the 2009 debut album from the psychedelic rock supergroup Moonalice.
•¬    That year Burnett also worked with Costello on the album Secret, Profane & Sugarcane and produced the Jeff Bridges film Crazy Heart, a project for which he also scored the sound track. The film’s title track, “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart),” dominated the awards circuit, as songwriters Burnett and Ryan Bingham collected an Academy Award, a Golden Globe (2010), and a Grammy (2011). Burnett earned additional Grammys for his production work on the Crazy Heart sound track and for having cowritten a song performed by Taylor Swift on the sound track of the movie The Hunger Games (2012). Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a Southern gothic musical he created with Stephen King and John Mellencamp, premiered in 2014.
•¬    Although he spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s involved in producing, Burnett continued to perform. His later albums included True False Identity (2006), Tooth of Crime (2008), and The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space (2019). •¬    https://www.britannica.com/ 
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ALBUM COVERS XI.