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Inside T-Bone I
Musician and producer T-Bone Burnett is the man who sorted the music for the Coen Brothers current hit film Inside Llewyn Davis. Dave Peabody meets the expert.
t’s rare that an American fiction fea- ture film centres on folk music. In 2003 A Mighty Wind took a humor- ous poke at ’60s folk music. The hugely successful O Brother, Where
Art Thou? set in the 1930s, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, came along in 2000 and led to a resurgence of interest in the various folk music styles presented in the film. The Coens’ new opus is the highly praised Inside Llewyn Davis, now released in the UK, whose fictitious story (set main- ly in Greenwich Village, New York in 1961) utilises various elements culled from folk singer/songster Dave Van Ronk’s biogra- phy Mayor Of McDougal Street. For both O Brother and Llewyn Davis The Coen Brothers entrusted the important task of getting the music right to the very capa- ble hands (and ears) of musician and music producer T-Bone Burnett.
Much of the music for O Brother was pre-recorded but the music in Llewyn Davis is recorded live on camera. Did this cause any problems for T-Bone and the Coens?
“It posed such a formidable barrier that we were thinking that we weren’t going to be able to make the movie until we found Oscar Isaac to play the role of Llewyn Davis. It just seemed like impossi- ble to do at all. It would have been easier to do if we’d had the guitar pre-recorded and then have the guy just playing like he was playing guitar and sing live. You can get a lot of detail that way, the way he does this, the guy’s hands… but to have him do both things, and to have him do both things believably and well, it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen. Once we found Oscar the only problem then became can we keep him at the same tempo. If we could keep him at the same tempo and tone, then we could cut between takes. The old-fashioned micro- phone you see in the film had a new microphone in it and then there was a microphone above. It was recorded just on high-def Pro Tools. It’s pretty pristine and most of it is just one microphone. I feel as if everything I’ve done in my life
taught me how to do this particular thing. I couldn’t have done this when we did O Brother, Where Art Thou? I couldn’t have done it five years ago, but at this point, with my belief in the Coen’s luck and how good they are…”
Had T-Bone and the Coens been sur- prised by the impact that the music from O Brother had made? “Yes, completely, but thrilled about it of course. I thought, we’ve got Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, we’ve got all these extraordinary artists, there hasn’t been a light put on them for decades, and we’ve got a George Clooney movie which was going to focus more light on them than they’ve ever had and I thought ‘people have to like this’. It was also set at a time when there was a world music movement, our entry into the world music market, our version of world music, American world music. It seemed to fit, so I expected something good to happen but I certainly didn’t expect it to go on for this much time.”
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