Description:
The album, completed fresh off Burnett`s stunning work as producer and arranger of the Robert Plant/Allison Krauss collaboration Raising Sand featuring some of the same musicians, is a vibrant outgrowth of a long-running collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard that began with the 1996 musical staging in New York of his noted play of the same name. The songs are arresting distillations of modern conflicts and personal drama in a modern hyper-reality. The arrangements are imaginative and inventive. The performances are stunning, masterful, and unpredictable. Tooth of Crime is a prophetic play that Sam first wrote in 1972, and it takes place in a time very much like now, Burnett explains. It`s a time when there are zones of fame that flare up and people can become incredibly famous in their own zone and nobody else can know it. And then the zone completely disappears, but the famous person doesn`t realize it because you can t even find the zone anymore. You have to hook up a toaster to a television to a microwave to a piano very post-apocalyptic. That was the initial inspiration for the album. These songs came together like a broken mirror, and you get a bunch of shards and start putting them together and create a lot of different angles, he says. That`s this group of songs, this process. Working with Marc Ribot and drummer Jim Keltner, Burnett crafted the sound of Tooth of Crime into a unique aesthetic. (Nonesuch)
