t bone burnett...

Just listening to Twenty Twenty (the Essential T Bone Burnett). I recall buying many of these original albums both on vinyl and on cassette. That's right! I made the mistake of buying cassettes for a while. Packaging was even smaller than the dread jewel box! And now nobody wants cassettes. But my new car has a problem with the CD player (a CD from the previous owner is jammed in the 3rd slot) so I dug around for some of those cassettes to have some music of MY choice playing in the car (instead of what passes for radio these days.) So I started listening to The Criminal Under My Own Hat in the car and then decided to listen again to this 2-CD set from last year on the CD player at work. While I have to say I'm not crazy about T Bone's more recent explorations (the spoken word stuff on the true false identity is tough to enjoy) his earlier work is well worth digging. Even the spoken word stuff, like Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, seems to work. And the musicians are all great. Richard Thompson, Ry Cooder, Van Dyke Parks, Ruben Blades, David Hidalgo, Jim Keltner, Jerry Douglas, Marc Ribot, and they are given wonderfully open soundscapes to play in. T Bone toured with Jerry Douglas one time and I came upon a bootleg recording of one of these shows. Excellent. Maybe I'll give the true false identity another chance. I'll watch the DVD side of the dualdisc again, and see what I think. I'll get back to you later.