Today, Grammy-and Oscar-winner T Bone Burnett unveils a new song, “Sometimes I Wonder,” with Weyes Blood. The single is from his first solo album in nearly 20 years, The Other Side, due April 19 on Verve Forecast. Listen to the track HERE and preorder the album HERE.
Set in a graveyard, Burnett guides listeners through a soft and haunting meditation on life’s biggest questions with the help of distinctive counter melodies from Weyes Blood. Burnett holds a special place in his heart for the song, describing it as “going back to the very first music I loved and learned to play. When I started this record, I was calling it Fort Worth because I just wanted to go back to my first love of music, when I was innocent, before I had become so cynical. When I had less optimism than I have now, but I had more optimism than I had my whole working life.”
In celebration of the new music, Burnett will embark on a tour of Nashville, playing his first full-length concerts in two decades. The shows kick off at the Franklin Theatre on May 3, followed by The Blue Room at Third Man Records on May 9, and concluding at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMA Theater on May 10. Tickets are on sale now, find more information HERE.
On The Other Side, Burnett delves deeply into the myriad genres of American Music, returning to his roots as a singer and songwriter. The love story at the center of the 12-song collection follows the journey of a couple that may no longer be of this plane. Co-produced by Colin Linden, Mike Piersante and Burnett, the album features longtime friends Rosanne Cash and early bandmate Steven Soles, newer artists Lucius and Weyes Blood, and trusted musical companions including Dennis Crouch, Stuart Duncan, Jay Bellerose, and Rory Hoffman.
“Sometimes I Wonder” follows the album’s lead single, “Waiting for You” with Lucius, which was released last month to acclaim from Rolling Stone, calling it “a melancholy song full of yearning, with a little Spanish guitar flare, setting a gentle tone for the record.”
A deeply personal work, The Other Side features some of the richest vocals and most direct songs of the artist’s long career.
Following his dystopic The Invisible Light series, The Other Side reflects a new outlook and approach Burnett didn’t even know he was seeking. While the album includes some songs Burnett had tinkered with before, the bulk of the record materialized in a sudden burst of writing after he finally allowed himself to buy some new guitars.
“Every time I picked one up, a song would pour out of it,” he recalls of this near-magical spark of creativity. “There were all these songs in these guitars. And they just came out over a three-week period.”
When Burnett was making his new record, he was thinking a lot about “you.”
“I was reading a news story that some shocking percentage of number one hit songs had the word you in the title,” he says, and started contemplating who all those “yous” are and what it means when an artist puts them in a song. He realized that for many years, when he worked on his own solo albums as a singer-songwriter—in between acclaimed stints of coaxing the best work out of a wildly diverse set of artists as a producer or curating ideal soundtracks for an equally disparate group of films and series —he had been “tough” on listeners.
“I view the purpose of art as creating conscience, so I was constantly appealing to people's consciences,” he says of a solo career that stretches back to the mid- ‘70s, “but I realized when a songwriter uses the word you, he is, of course, in the world of conscience, but he’s also in the world of people's dreams. And when you enter into people's dreams, you have to be very careful with them.”
This return to form fits seamlessly in the contemporary cultural landscape shaped so heavily by Burnett’s career in the arts. Working on The Other Side, he sought to care for himself as an artist in the same manner he has helped shepherd so many others in the studio and ended up finding himself in the process.]
T BONE BURNETT—THE OTHER SIDE
1. He Came Down
2. Come Back (When You Go Away)
3. (I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day (w/Rosanne Cash)
4. Waiting For You (w/Lucius)
5. The Pain Of Love (w/Lucius)
6. The Race Is Won (w/Lucius)
7. Sometimes I Wonder (w/Weyes Blood)
8. Hawaiian Blue Song (w/Steven Soles)
9. The First Light Of Day
10. Everything And Nothing
11. The Town That Time Forgot
12. Little Darling
T BONE BURNETT LIVE
May 3—Nashville, TN—Franklin Theatre
May 9—Nashville, TN—The Blue Room at Third Man Records
May 10—Nashville, TN—Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMA Theater
