T-Bone Burnett

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have such storied musical pasts that even a seasoned musician would find them intimidating. Plant joined Led Zeppelin in 1968 and went on to release some of the best-selling albums in rock history. He's had a respectable solo career, and the inevitable Zeppelin reunion will likely be one of the top-grossing tours of all time. Krauss is a bluegrass singer and fiddle player who released her first album when she was only 16. Over the course of her career, which stretches back some 20 years, Krauss has won 21 Grammys, more than any other female artist.

T-Bone Burnett, the guy who produced Raising Sand, the Grammy-winning album Krauss and Plant made together, isn't fazed by any of this. Burnett, who's now serving as musical director on their summer tour, is well aware of their pedigrees. But he says both Plant and Krauss are "completely cool" and that touring with them has been a blast.

"Well, you know," the slow-talking Texan says via phone from a tour stop in California, "they're two of the best living singers right now. It can't be anything but fun to tour with them. If a singer is singing a song well, you can drop a bag of rocks and it will sound good. That's how it is with these two. I just do what I always do, which is play and listen. I tell people when to start and stop."

While not a household name, Burnett has a career of his own that includes so many twists and turns, it can't be summarized in a single sentence. Burnett released his first album some 35 years ago but really developed as a musician and producer when he joined Bob Dylan's backing band, the Rolling Thunder Revue, in 1975.

"Looking back on it, Dylan was an incredible mentor," Burnett says. "So much of what I have done since then has been influenced if not based on that. The [bluegrass-themed] Down from the Mountain project was based on the Rolling Thunder Revue. When you put a line-up together with everyone doing a few songs, it's not the same script. You have 10 incredible singers. The audience is getting to hear another singer and getting their minds blown. With anybody, even Sinatra, you become used to their voices. But that's something I learned from Rolling Thunder. Bob's generosity was a lesson in that. He took out unknown people and old friends from the beginning of his life. There was a lot to learn in that approach."

While Burnett issued a couple of new wave-ish albums in the '80s, it was during that time period that he really came into his own as a producer. He's the mastermind, for example, behind Elvis Costello's King of America, an album that paired the British singer with some of the musicians who used to back that other Elvis (Presley). Burnett also was the vision behind breakthrough releases by Counting Crows and the Wallflowers. And that's not to mention his work with Roy Orbison and Gillian Welch.

"I didn't have a desire to be a performer," Burnett explains. "I love the process of recording and making music. It's fun. It was a tremendous experience when I was 16 to go into a studio and there's nothing, and then an hour later you have something. You can hear it and it's not just inside your head. I never lost the exhilaration of that experience and it's a new thing."

O Brother Where Art Thou?, the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' movie by the same name, stands as one of Burnett's crowning achievements. It paired some of the biggest bluegrass stars who covered a range of traditional songs, providing the perfect accompaniment to the film, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey set in rural America. The success of O Brother allowed Burnett to start his own record label and pursue other projects.

In addition to having produced the Plant and Krauss project, Burnett has just issued Tooth of Crime, his first album of new material in over a decade. Actually, the songs aren't that new. He originally wrote them in 1996 for a Sam Shepard play by the same name. But while he played the songs during live performances of the play, this is the first time he actually recorded them, something that took such a long time because of other commitments.

"I started the record years ago, but by the time we got done with the play, only seven of the songs were there," Burnett explains. "I wanted to make a record because I really liked them. I was having to do it between other jobs. Well, I don't think of them as jobs. Between records and films. I had to keep trying to find the pieces and put the original idea back together so it told a complete story. It took me a long time to pull the threads together."

Burnett has said the album, which at time sounds like a more rootsy Tom Waits, is essentially about fame and all its shortcomings.

"Shepard was predicting a time very much like what we have now," he says. "There are people that are famous that none of us have heard of. I don't know any of these people on the Top 40 charts. It's just breaking down more and more into those kinds of incomplete worlds that get a lot of notoriety for we don't know what reason. The pinnacle of all of it is Paris Hilton who gets a billion hits on her Web site. She's got to be the most famous person in the world."

The album even works without much knowledge of Shepard's play.

"I was so deep in the world Sam was creating," Burnett explains. "It was a tremendous experience to go to New York for five months to work on this play. It's a beautiful thing. It was like a firefly. It was there and it was gone. Being the presenter of Down from the Mountain taught me about the live moment and the value of the live moment. That's what the play is about. It's about the degradation of the mechanically reproduced moment, among other things."

Burnett plays a few tracks from the album while he's on stage with Krauss and Plant. He says that's at their insistence because he'd rather the entire show was devoted to their music, which, as odd as the combination might be, has generated a strong response with American listeners.

"I just thought it was damn good," Burnett says of the platinum-selling album's success. "That's the only part I have any control over. All my work is done before anyone hears it. I don't know what influences sales. Rounder Records did a good job with this record. They didn't try to blow it out and fall into that first week thing, even though it debuted at number two on the charts. It's really gone on to have some kind of impact."

As old-fashioned as the sentiment might be, Burnett says his success is simply a function of believing in music.

"There was a long period of time where music was speaking the same language," he says. "The listeners and musicians were speaking the same language. The conversation became that music was a driving force in the culture. It was transformative in a powerful way. The church used it that way. It takes you out of your everyday existence and into a less temporal place and has a healing energy. It's more than that. I just have conviction when something is good."

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, T-Bone Burnett, Sharon Little: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 15 at Time Warner Cable Amphitheater, 351 Canal Rd., 440.247.2722. Tickets: $59.50-$89.50.