Well, I don't really like recordings, you know.  And I don't particularly like processing.  What I really like is hearing a musician play in a room, or a group of musicians play in a room.  That's what I fell in love with first.  When I was a kid, about 14 or 15, I started going to the Skyliner Ballroom in Fort Worth, Texas.  It was owned by Jack Ruby.  I saw The Band when I was a kid and they talk about it [the venue] in the movie, The Last Waltz.  It was the most beautiful sounding room.  The music I heard in that room had a profound effect on me.  And years later, Daryl Leonard, a friend of mine whom I've worked with since the mid-1960's, brought over a recording we had done in '65 or '67.  We put it on and it sounds exactly like what I am doing today.  It started me thinking.  I remembered that Ike and Tina Turner had played a show at the Skyliner Ballroom in the mid-1960s.  They had recorded it and I wondered if I could buy that record.  I went online and I got the record and I put it on.  It too sounded like everything I've done my whole life and I realized that everything I've been trying to do from the beginning was to recreate this excitement of sound that I heard from the Skyliner Ballroom when I was a kid.  I love recording but I don't usually love recordings.  I hardly ever say, "Wow!  That's a great recording."  I say, "That's an incredible song or incredible piece of music."  But the times I do feel that it's been a great sounding recording is where I find a real sense of place.  Mike Piersante, Emile Kelman, Jason Wormer, Gavin Lurssen and Lisa Surber are my team.  We stay very much on top of all the technological developments in recording so we never hear the recording. [laughter] I cannot stand processing.  I love the sound of an instrument bouncing off a wall and into a room when you hear that pure, deep sound.

- T Bone Burnett

Reproduced without permission.