Jakob Dylan’s “Women And Country” is a pretty, occasionally monotonous, often stirring, American dust bowl country-folk album.
And T. Bone Burnett’s production drags me. Afgain. He is like the Rick Rubin of arty hickdom. So fucking authentic you wanna fucking smack him.
He wasn’t always like that. His work with Costello on King Of America and as the Coward Brothers, was wonderful and authentic but a different type of authenticity, Like if Gram Parsons had lived to hear New Wave and then rejected it.
But Burnett began to believe his press clippings and brandishing his oscar like a mallet he started to bash everybody to death with his good tase.
O Brother Where Art Thou, the award winning soundtrack of American folk is a poor man’s Harry Smith. It is fine for what it is but what is it? It’s like taking half the songs off the Lenny Kaye compilation Nuggets and calling it a look at garage rock of the 60s.
Anyway, it stroked his ego nice and easy and now there isn’t a song he can not tastefully somnabulistically make suckier than ever before. He does it to Jakob. There are a handful of good songs but the arrangements are deadly and everything drifts into wallpaper. Rubin and Burnett should get together and release a lullabye album for adults. I feel drowzy just thinking about it.