T-Bone Burnett

T-Bone Burnett, born January 14, 1948, has spent his career on both sides of the glass, and by the time he made The Talking Animals in 1988 he'd already done a stint in the '70s playing guitar in Bob Dylan's band. On his own records he's a sharp, literate songwriter with a taste for the strange, and "The Strange Case of Frank Cash and the Morning Paper" has a title that reads like a pulp-paper headline, delivered with a raised eyebrow and a wiry guitar.

It's as a producer, though, that he changed the weather. He was behind the early, defining records of Los Lobos, Counting Crows, Sam Phillips and Gillian Welch, and later worked with Gregg Allman, John Mellencamp, Elton John, Sara Bareilles and Ringo Starr. He paired Alison Krauss's bluegrass with Robert Plant's blues rock on Raising Sand, from 2007, and walked off with a Grammy for it.

The movies kept him busier still: Grammy-winning soundtracks for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, Walk the Line and Crazy Heart, an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2010, and music for the TV shows Nashville and True Detective. His 2008 album Tooth of Crime grew out of songs he wrote for a revival of Sam Shepard's play.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.