Tooth Of Crime

Tooth Of Crime

You re my friend, but I m going to kill you. <br>Don t fret. T Bone Burnett hasn t gone off the deep end. At least not in that way. He s merely explaining the tone of the putyou-<br>on-your-heels opening track of his gripping new album, Tooth of Crime. At once seductive and unsettling from the haunting<br> Dope Island (featuring alluring vocals by Sam Phillips) to oddly romantic Kill Zone to the brutal The Rat Age to the atmospheric<br> Telepresence to the hill-country blues elegy that closes the tale, Sweet Lullaby it s a set of songs capturing a state of identity<br>and cultural dislocation with an air that could be termed dramatic, even theatrical in places. Fittingly.<br>The album completed fresh off Burnett s stunning work as producer and arranger of the hugely successful Robert Plant/Allison<br>Krauss collaboration Raising Sand, and featuring some of the same musicians is a vibrant outgrowth of a long-running collaboration<br>with playwright Sam Shepard that began with the 1996 musical staging in New York of his noted play of the same name. The songs<br>are arresting distillations of modern conflicts and personal drama in a modern hyper-reality. The arrangements are imaginative and<br>inventive. The performancesare stunning, masterful, and unpredictable.<br> Tooth of Crime is a prophetic play that Sam first wrote in 1972, and it takes place in a time very much like now, Burnett explains.<br> It s a time when there are zones of fame that flare up and people can become incredibly famous in their own zone and nobody<br>else can know it. And then the zone completely disappears, but the famous person doesn t realize it because you can t even find<br>the zone anymore. You have to hook up a toaster to a television to a microwave to a piano very post-apocalyptic. That was the<br>initial inspiration for the album. These songs came together like a broken mirror, and you get a bunch of shards and start putting<br>them together and create a lot of different angles, he says. That s this group of songs, this process. <br>Working with what has become a solid musical team anchored by Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn) and drummer<br>Jim Keltner (John Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, etc.), Burnett crafted the sound of Tooth of Crime into a unique aesthetic.<br>It s an approach that has evolved over decades of distinctive work for Burnett, both as a recording artist in his own right and in guiding<br>an elite roster of artists and movie music projects: The 2000 Grammy album of the year O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack;<br>the Oscar-nominated The Scarlet Tide for the film Cold Mountain (for which he also produced the soundtrack); albums by Bob<br>Dylan, Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Roy Orbison, Ralph Stanley, Tony Bennett and k.d. lang; and recent projects such as Raising Sand,<br>the re-imagining of the Beatles catalog in Across the Universe, and the music for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, are just<br>highlights of a resume that stands as one of the most productive, distinctive, and lauded production careers of modern music