Exile’s Return : T-Bone Burnett’s feverish mixed emotions permeate a new album tinged with idealism and outrage

The man at the controls is all nervous concentration tonight. The road to heaven is on his mind, and it’s a road paved with strawberries, as it turns out. Or that’s the version T-Bone Burnett is being serenaded with, under a gentle mingling of cello and the voice of his wife, Sam Phillips.

She’d written “Strawberry Road” after hearing an old American Indian parable that says the route to paradise is indeed covered with fresh strawberries. But this recording of her song isn’t exactly finished, and Burnett is scanning the console in front of him, tapping, sliding, turning knobs and switches, scratching his head and biting a fingernail to get the thing right.

He’s used to this by now, after two decades as a musician and producer for such artists as Elvis Costello and Los Lobos. And this is the fourth time he’s doing as much for Phillips and her swirling pop. But Burnett had been away for a while, hiding out in Fort Worth for months in search of renewed energy and inspiration, escaping the less-appealing wrinkles of the record-making business .

So his new album, “The Criminal Under My Own Hat,” on Columbia Records, is his first in more than three years, finished after the “extended vacation” from a schedule that sometimes had him producing two or three albums at once.

“I guess I got swept up in Reaganomics,” Burnett says. “There was that whole trend toward doing a lot of work all through that period of time. There was a tremendous amount of industry happening. I found it destructive in the end to my own work, my own writing, my own thinking. Sometimes you can work so much that you don’t even take time to think about what you’re doing.”

And if his current work in this Ventura Boulevard studio, along with the mean cold he got during a six-week promotional tour for the new album, seems to indicate a return to the musical grind, it’s at least at a pace Burnett is comfortable with.

The new Sam Phillips record is still in the early stages of recording, and she’s talking about calling it “Martinis and Bikinis,” a departure from her last album, the sobering “Cruel Inventions.”

“Which I think is a good idea,” Burnett says, tall and casually elegant in tinted glasses, dark slacks and a white shirt buttoned to his chin. “More fun and games--fun-and-games music.”

A few days earlier, a less upbeat Burnett is huddled over a giant cup of coffee in his Brentwood apartment, where he and Phillips typically spend six months of the year, though not always at the same time. Inevitably, one or both are touring or working out of town. They cross paths often for only short periods, except when recording their own albums.

“During the riots, I was thinking there’s really no other place to be,” Burnett says of Los Angeles. “We’ve had earthquakes, floods, famines, fires, plagues, pestilence, riots. It’s like God’s judgment of Sodom, or something. And I thought, ‘You can’t run away from this. You just have to get right into this.’

“Living out here you get so much information, so many images that it ends up being a blur,” says Burnett, who grew up in Fort Worth, where his two young sons and ex-wife still live. And he returned there when it came time to break away from the industry for a while. “I wanted to just go back and become a part of ordinary life again, and feel all the things that ordinary people feel. I think poets have to be ordinary people, and are ordinary people, in fact. I got taken over by the business out here.”

His new album is a kind of a reaction to that, and to Burnett’s own elaborate production skills, which he says overwhelmed some of his earlier solo records. “The Criminal Under My Own Hat,” recorded largely in Nashville, opens with some quick acoustic guitar chords, along with messages of raw emotion and his sardonic brand of social and moral outrage.

That tone, maintained through most of the record’s 12 tracks, may be a lingering influence from his days as a guitarist in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the early 1970s. That massive rock-and-folk roadshow was Burnett’s first professional gig, injecting him into a diverse crowd of new and veteran talent, including folk singer Joan Baez, poet-rocker Patti Smith, Mick Ronson (David Bowie’s former guitarist) and playwright-actor Sam Shepard.

“I think this record is closer to the idealism of that tour than anything I’ve done,” Burnett says. “This is a very idealistic record.

“Dylan opened the borders and wrote about life from a whole other point of view. I had started trying to do that,” he says of those early days, “writing songs that weren’t just about girlfriends and boyfriends and cars. He became a tremendous influence on me. . . . It was my first close exposure to what was possible in show business, and what kind of communication a performer could get with his audience. It’s a hard place to get to, but it can happen.”

And yet few locals seem to know of his work back in Fort Worth, the source of inspiration for many of his new songs of personal politics and difficult romance. He performs there rarely.

“I go back there to hide,” Burnett says. “I tend to write really well in Fort Worth. There’s something about seeing the horizon all the way around you, all 360 degrees, for hundreds of miles. It lets you look a long way off. It gives you room to think.

“When you go down a street in a town that you grew up in, and two out of three stores are closed down that you’ve known your whole life and can no longer afford to be in business, it brings forward a lot of feelings.”

The song “It’s Not Too Late,” for one, is a wry nightmare of physical and spiritual catastrophe. Against a backdrop of violin cries and mandolin rhythms, Burnett sings, “The ocean rolls like thunder/The tempest pulls us under/The dogs are howling,” before adding, almost ludicrously, “But it’s not too late.”

During her own visits to Burnett’s hometown, Phillips says, she found the landscape that perhaps helped generate his worldview, a grim understanding of human nature mixed with a wit culled from James Thurber, Robert Benchley, P. G. Wodehouse.

“It’s like England in that it’s very bleak,” says Phillips, who grew up in Hollywood and Glendale. “For most of the year the weather’s pretty horrible. I think when he was growing up there it would have been a lot like ‘The Last Picture Show’--pretty stark and bleak. And I think a lot of artists seem to come out of places like that, because there is nothing else to do but make art.”

The two met during the making of her 1987 album “The Turning,” which would be her farewell recording as a gospel singer, known then as Leslie Phillips. She was quitting a successful career partly over frustration with the strict creative guidelines within the Christian-music industry, and in reaction to the intolerance she found among many in the evangelical leadership.

“They just wanted political and religious propoganda,” she explains. “I didn’t want to do that.”

That issue is still very much on their minds, particularly in the aftermath of the Republican convention, where the Rev. Pat Robertson, the televangelist, and other members of the religious right demonstrated their influence on national politics. In an article he wrote recently for Spin magazine, Burnett even describes Robertson “as power-mad a religious figure as anyone since Rasputin.”

“Anyone who disagrees with them are called radical,” says Burnett, a Christian, speaking about a subject that emerged repeatedly over two interviews. That is, along with earnest comments on the savings-and-loan crisis, the Gulf War, the Los Angeles riots and other singular events of the 1980s and ‘90s. “I feel like I’m very middle of the road. I don’t want to participate in the arguing. But it’s gotten so ludicrous that I feel we have to participate. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

These are sentiments that have been creeping onto both their albums, “though in more subtle ways,” says Phillips.

Even so, Burnett has been surprised by early reactions to “The Criminal Under My Own Hat” as an “election-year record.”

“I feel a little amazed that it actually did connect up somewhere with anything ,” he says, laughing. “I hate politics myself. And yet, I just went around the whole country and everybody was talking, everywhere I went. I haven’t seen this country so activated for 30 years, probably. It’s been a long time since there’s been that kind of solidarity. I think it’s a very healthy sign.”