Having produced the most unlikely Number One record in recent memory with the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, T Bone Burnett and filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen's next undertaking will be DMZ Records, a new imprint on Columbia. The label will release its first album, Ralph Stanley's Ralph Stanley, in June.

According to Burnett, the label will likely issue four to six discs in its first year and proceed from there. "We're not gonna do only traditional American music, but we are going to put out some more of these kinds of records," Burnett says. "We'll probably record two or three or four of the other acts in this group of people as they get ready to make a new record. It's a funny thing, country music has been trying to get more pop for a long time and it's been getting thinner and thinner sonically as it's done so. It's lost so much of its resonance and the beauty of the sound in the high end that they try to drive through people's brains. I think we all need a new sound. I think we need something that sounds more beautiful and less transistorized, less digital, less computerized."

As for the label's m.o., Burnett suggests it won't be run by the usual template. "The conventional wisdom in the record business is that ten percent of the records pay for the other ninety percent of the records," he says. "So we're gonna leave out the ninety percent and just do ten percent that pay for everything. That way the musicians will be happy, we'll be happy, everyone will be happy. I can't think of a reason to put out a bad record. The companies have to do it, because they have employees and quotas and they have to project sales and volume and all that stuff. We're not encumbered that way."

Burnett describes Stanley's record as "a very intimate look at Ralph," with the mountain music legend backed by Norman Blake on guitar and mandocello, Stuart Duncan on violin and banjo, Mike Compton on mandolin and Dennis Crouch on bass. "It's funny, we were in a big studio room and they went over in one corner of the room in the back and started tuning and playing and we ended up doing the whole album in one tiny corner of this larger room because that's where they were comfortable," Burnett says. "It's basically a string quartet with Ralph singing, very close and intimate. In recording it, we treated it more like a chamber group than a brash hillbilly group. This music has been marginalized for so long. There's a lot of unfortunate things that have happened like the Dueling Banjos and Hee Haw, the Beverly Hillbillies, which was my favorite TV show but it didn't do a lot of good for this kind of music, it stereotyped it."

Should running a label and helping to organize a string of O Brother-based Down From the Mountain tours (a new one will launch this summer), not keep Burnett busy enough, there are also plans for a fall tour around Stanley's upcoming album. Burnett is also planning to spend six months working on a new record of his own, his first since 1992's superb The Criminal Under My Own Hat. "I've written music for two Sam Shepard plays, and one play at Steppenwolf," he says. "So I have a tremendous amount of music that I've written and haven't released, or even recorded myself."

ANDREW DANSBY
(March 14, 2002)