T Bone Burnett, Seeing Clearly

T Bone Burnett on his new music: "What I'm able to connect with now is much less disjointed." (By Jesse Dylan)

As ubiquitous as T Bone Burnett has seemed over the past five or six years, it's shocking to realize he hasn't released a solo album since 1992's "The Criminal Under My Own Hat" or toured since 1986.

There was, of course, another hat or two that Burnett was under: uber-producer for other artists and master of the soundtrack. In 2002, Burnett won four Grammys, including producer of the year, for the old-timey, multiplatinum "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and subsequently crafted outstanding roots-rich soundtracks for "Cold Mountain," "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," "The Ladykillers" and last year's Johnny Cash-June Carter love story, "Walk the Line."

But between those last two films, Burnett began to feel a familiar fire in his soul, the one that had flamed out after the commercial disappointment of "The Criminal Under My Own Hat." That's when Burnett had slipped into the shadows of production, pretty much abandoning songwriting and retiring his considerable guitar chops outside of session work.

Now Burnett is back with a new studio album, "The True False Identity''; a 40-track career retrospective, "Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett"; and a tour.

It's T Bone Time!

Burnett, 58, says he will continue to work with other people -- as he is now on "Across the Universe," a Julie Taymor film about the turbulent '60s built around Beatles songs -- but for the first time in two decades, he will vigorously pursue going out and playing live, including Tuesday's seated concert at the 9:30 club.

"That sounds like the most fun and the most invigorating thing to do," Burnett says. "And it's why I got into doing [music] in the first place."

Perversely, it's also why he got out of it after 20 years of critical acclaim and commercial frustration colliding with creative uncertainty.

"There came a time when it just seemed like nothing was going anywhere -- the touring and the writing -- and I didn't know what I wanted to say," Burnett says. "I wasn't connecting, and I just wasn't as generous as I would have liked to have been musically. I had other strengths that I was grateful for, and it didn't make sense to keep doing it at that point, although I had incredible times playing all that music. What I'm able to connect with now is much less disjointed, although the music probably sounds way more disjointed."

Which is a good way to describe a career that dates to when Burnett was 17 and purchased a small recording studio in Fort Worth in his native Texas. His emergence began a decade later in 1975 in Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, whose principal members formed the Alpha Band, recording a trio of albums featuring mostly Burnett songs. There would be six solo albums between 1972 and 1992, none of which found the level of commercial favor accorded to artists that Burnett produced, including Los Lobos, Marshall Crenshaw, the BoDeans, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, the Wallflowers, Counting Crows and Tony Bennett's duets with k.d. lang.

Even as Burnett illuminated others' voices, his own seemed to disappear. What got him going again was writing music for a 1996 production of Sam Shepard's "The Tooth of the Crime." (As a cast album awaits release, one of its songs, "Kill Zone," is on "Twenty Twenty.") Another song from that time is on "The True False Identity": "There Would Be Hell to Pay," an elegant eight-bar blues fable inspired by Skip James's classic open E minor guitar tuning and reminiscent of the classic murder ballad "Stagger Lee."

"That's where things first rumbled," Burnett says, adding that "that song provoked about 30 more songs."