T Bone Burnett makes 'Crazy Heart''s country music credible

Country music movie Crazy Heart is generating Oscar buzz for its star Jeff Bridges, whose portrayal of hard-living country singer Bad Blake is truly remarkable. But he could never have pulled it off without the exceptional soundtrack co-produced by T Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton.

Burnett, though, also credits writer-director Scott Cooper.

“He was smart enough to let Jeff do what he does,” says Burnett, who jumped aboard the project after reading Cooper’s script--and became a co-producer for the picture.

“He said he’d make a 1970s-type movie, and I love Payday—which people who talk about Crazy Heart also mention,” continues Burnett, referring to the terrific 1973 country music movie starring Rip Torn. “I thought if we could get Jeff and do something even semi-tough like Payday, we could do something good.”

But the credibility of the movie is a direct consequence of the credibility of the songs. While the soundtrack features classic country songs from the likes of Buck Owens, Kitty Wells, Waylon Jennings, the Louvin Brothers and George Jones, the biggest percentage of the 23 tunes on the soundtrack come from Burnett and Bruton, together or in various collaborations.

“Jeff and Scott should also have writers credits because they were so instrumental to the writing,” notes Burnett, who also co-composed the score with Bruton. “They and Stephen and [Nashville songwriter and Bridges pal] John Goodwin and [Texas singer-songwriter] Ryan Bingham and I formed a little group and got together to talk about the movie and the characters and what their histories were and tried to come up with a timeline and lifeline, and a lot of the lines in the songs grew out of those conversations. It was very collaborative.”

Putting it into an artist context, Burnett says that Cooper wanted to “invoke the fifth Highwayman,” that is, write songs for a country singer who might have been a fifth voice in the country super quartet The Highwaymen, which consisted of Jennings, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

“I saw him as something like Don Williams,” says Burnett, referring to the great, softspoken country hitmaker of the 1970s (Williams' 1981 hit with Emmylou Harris, “If I Needed You,” is included on the Crazy Heart soundtrack in its writer Townes Van Zandt’s version) . “He was a singular artist--not part of any movement. He wasn’t pop country but more on the folk side, with a deep, beautiful voice that didn’t sound like country singing—but he had huge commercial country hits for many years, so in many ways he was the prototype.”

Burnett likewise sees Leonard Cohen as “somebody this guy Blake would have wanted to be when he was young,” he says. “He would really like that Leonard Cohen was a poet.”

That Bridges has a “deep chest voice” allowed him to sing in the unique manner of both Williams and Cohen, Burnett notes.

“Leonard Cohen is a stretch for country artists,” he says. “And Blake listens to Lightnin’ Hopkins [he’s shown listening to the country blues legend’s ‘Once A Gambler’ in one scene] and that also gave us leeway to go in all these musical directions. It was an incredible creative process.”

The collaborators even came up with credible country songs for Colin Farrell’s Tommy Sweet character, who is Blade’s former protégé who has long since surpassed him in stardom.

“It’s the kind of situation that’s repeated time and time again in country music,” says Burnett. “At first we thought of coming up with bad commercial country music [for Sweet], but we decided it would be much more interesting if he was actually good. And you don’t want to have bad music in a film if you can avoid it!”

A 10-time Grammy winner who helmed the 2008 Album of the Year Raising Sand teaming of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Burnett recognizes the enormous input of Bruton, who died earlier this year.

“He was the lead musician, and he was on the set every day,” he says.

And if Bridges resembles Kris Kristofferson in look and sound, Bruton served as Kristofferson’s decades-long musical “aide-de-camp” for years, notes Burnett.

“Stephen was there with Jeff as a constant reference point in the realities of that world and was important in every part of the production,” says Burnett. “His name is first in the credits for a reason.”

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