T Bone Burnett looked out at his invited audience. "We're all in show business," he said with a rueful smile, to an approving murmur from a few dozen listeners.
He was performing at the Magic Castle, a venerable West Hollywood club where pronouncing "open sesame" opens a hidden door to a warren of bars and lounges. Inside, magicians perform card tricks and displays commemorate vaudeville and movie illusions. On one of the club's small stages, Burnett cradled a vintage Kay K161 guitar with a tiger-striped pickguard and played a handful of songs from his new album, The True False Identity, and from an anthology being released simultaneously, Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett, that sums up his long career in 40 songs full of questions, tribulations, sly humor and down-home guitars.
Chatting before he went onstage, he flinched slightly at the word "career." A tall but not overbearing man with understated, almost old-fashioned clothes, he has the reassuring presence of a country doctor in a black-and-white western.
"I never thought of it as a career," he said. "I've always just been completely occupied taking care of the thing that's right under my nose. I had no plan, no arc, no retirement plan. It was just the thing that came along and attacking it with my whole heart. That would be my career if I had one."
He was playing for a gathering of Hollywood insiders: illusion manufacturers. Many of his listeners were music supervisors for film and television, the people who choose songs for soundtracks and shows like The O.C. Burnett was promoting himself but not pandering. The songs he performed were bluesy, droll indictments of human nature and media delusions.
In his own way, Burnett, 58, is a Hollywood insider, too. He has lived in Los Angeles since the early 1970s and works in Los Angeles' top studios. The hits he has produced -- like the multimillion-selling soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou -- have bought him a comfortable house in Bel Air. He has a personal assistant.
Yet he is anything but a slick Hollywood type. He's a voracious reader who casually quotes the Bible, Andy Warhol and the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse. He still pays his way into clubs and concerts,
remembering his own days as a working musician. He tries not to say an unkind word about anything except, when pressed, the longtime business practices of recording companies. "Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises," he sings in Hollywood, Mecca of the Movies on his new album. "I said goodbye a long time ago/You must not have heard me."
In the many projects Burnett has worked on through the years -- from backing up Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour to producing Elvis Costello, Los Lobos and Gillian Welch to assembling soundtracks for films -- there's a consistent streak of what might be called American magical realism. The music he makes is deeply rooted but never simply a throwback. He prizes the simplicity and audacity of classic Americana, from blunt heartbreak songs to surreal tall tales. But he has no interest in recreating the past. Instead, he's mapping old-time integrity into the complicated present tense.
"I want the music to be authentic, but I want it to be authentic in the moment you're doing it." he said. "I want to be honest to God in the moment of the thing when it's happening. So you do toy with it, or play with it. It's not replicating something, it's breathing new life into it -- being true to the thing without trying to duplicate it."
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