"Nashville" Music Guru T Bone Burnett Won't Return for Season 2 (Exclusive)
6/18/2013
by Lesley Goldberg


When ABC's "Nashville" returns for its second season, the country music drama will be without the services of T Bone Burnett.

The show's executive music producer will not be returning to the series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Burnett, who is married to "Nashville" creator Callie Khouri, oversaw the creation of more than 100 original recordings and personally produced or co-produced dozens of original songs featured on the Connie Britton/Hayden Panettiere drama.

In addition to guiding the show's musical direction, Burnett also co-composed the score for each of the show's 21 episodes. Buddy Miller, who was Burnett's No. 2 during "Nashville's" freshman run, will now take over the role.





"His slate of other film, television and recording projects would have made it impossible for him to return for a second season," Burnett's manager said in a statement, noting the busy producer initially only planned to stay for one season.

"He became close to many of the actors on Nashville, and wishes all of them -- as well as the show’s producers, writers and crew -- all the best with the coming season."





"T Bone's schedule this year is so overwhelming with the Llweyn Davis movie coming out and several other producing projects that he has: Elton John's record and so on," Khouri told THR.

"We're going to do Nashville's second season with Buddy and some of the other producers that we worked with. T Bone set the gold standard for the show. His commitment to the quality of the music, the sound for the characters and all of that was something that we were very lucky to get him for."





Burnett is currently prepping music for the Coen brothers feature Inside Llewyn Davis, a biopic of the singer-songwriter who navigates New York's folk music scene in the 1960s.

Oscar Isaac stars as Davis, with Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake among the cast.





Despite heavy buzz at the start of the season, "Nashville" didn't become the ratings performer that ABC had hoped for against competition from NBC's "Chicago Fire" and CBS' "CSI" in its Wednesday 10 p.m. slot. Critics, meanwhile, have favorably responded to the music featured on the series, with two soundtracks released thus far.

"Nashville" returns in the fall on ABC.

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T Bone Burnett on Quitting Wife Callie Khouri's "Nashville": It Was a 'Drag-Out Fight'
10/30/13
by Chris Willman


If T Bone Burnett declines to work on your next movie, TV series or album, please understand: He may be acting on doctor's orders.

"I turn down anything that seems like the person doesn't care about me," says Burnett, eating pistachios under one of the abstract expressionist paintings that line every open wall of his expansive Brentwood home studio.

"I've been doing this a long time, and five years ago my doctor said, 'You can only work with people who love you and whom you love.' And it's wild -- [director] Scott Cooper knocked on the door that afternoon about Crazy Heart," the 2009 country music drama starring Jeff Bridges that resulted in a best song Oscar for Burnett for co-writing 'The Weary Kind'.

"I don't want to be in any impersonal business deals -- having to do with music, anyway. If we're doing a shopping center, that's another story."







At 65, Burnett won't need to bone up on retail construction anytime soon, seeing how he's a darling among a dizzying and exponentially increasing array of talent in Hollywood and beyond. He caught the attention of the rock intelligentsia as a touring guitarist in Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue during the mid-'70s and with a string of acclaimed solo albums during the '80s.

But since essentially retreating behind the mixing board for the past 25 years, he's taken on the mantle of "beloved producer" -- a phrase he has helped ensure no longer is the oxymoron it seemed in the Phil Spector era.



To some, he's a father figure. "He's so enigmatic. He's like 170-feet tall, for one thing," says Lisa Marie Presley, who enlisted the 6-foot-4 producer to helm 2012's 'Storm & Grace'. "But he's the sweetest man ever. I adopted him, paternally."

To a superstar like Elton John, who tapped Burnett for 2013's 'The Diving Board', John's best-reviewed album in decades, he's that rarest of finds: an equal.

"I'd gotten disillusioned, but in the twilight of my career, here's someone whom I feel as excited about as when I first met Gus Dudgeon," says John, comparing Burnett to the legend who produced his first 11 landmark studio albums. "He's gotten my love of recording back. I thought I'd lost that."







But it's Burnett's partnership with Joel and Ethan Coen that led to his mutual lovefest with some of the cooler pockets of the film industry (and to his being the recipient of Billboard-THR's Maestro Award, set to be presented at Hollywood's W Hotel on Oct. 30).

It was, swears Burnett, "the first and only time I cold-called somebody" when he dialed up the brothers after seeing Raising Arizona in 1987.

"I remember the call very well," says Ethan. "He was basically saying that he found what we did in the movie very amusing, and did we want to get together just for the hell of it? We became friends, but we weren't even talking about working together. The Big Lebowski was, ****, how long? -- 10 years later!"







As Burnett tells it, he reached out partly because he recognized anarchically disciplined kindred spirits and partly because he saw the advent of CDs presaging digital piracy and the fall of the music business. "I knew even back then I had to diversify and find another line of work," he laughs.

If he really intended to troll for a gig, the Coens were slow to pick up the hint -- or perhaps they were too busy enjoying a fellow raconteur to put him to work.

"Fun is high on our list, and geez, you can have a few laughs with T Bone," says Joel. "He's articulate about culture and also quite funny about it. That's part of what makes the dialogue so productive and easy."

Their fourth collaboration, Inside Llewyn Davis, opens in December.







Not every Hollywood encounter has been so charmed. Burnett left ABC's "Nashville" after one season, in which his idealized version of what country music ought to sound like won plaudits from fans and critics.

Officially, he already had overstayed his welcome because he'd promised the creator and executive producer -- Callie Khouri, his wife -- only a 13-episode commitment. But when asked to elaborate, it's clear this was one of his rare excursions into non-physician-approved collaborating.



The marital/professional overlap wasn't the problem. (He also had worked alongside his second wife, singer Sam Phillips, with whom he had the second of his two daughters; they divorced in 2004.)

"I love working with Callie," explains Burnett. "I have no problem working with Callie. I have a problem when people don't treat Callie right. I like to see artists treated with tremendous respect, and I like the executives to say, 'How can I help you do what you do?' That's what I do."



And ABC didn't?

"Some people were making a drama about real musicians' lives, and some were making a soap opera, so there was that confusion. It was a knockdown, bloody, drag-out fight, every episode. You remember that show The Prisoner? If I were to tell you the truth, you'd think I was insane."

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