The Talking Animals

The Criminal Under My Own Hat	T Bone Burnett Texas native T Bone Burnett is celebrated for his production efforts on the behalf of Gillian Welch, Counting Crows, and Elvis Costello. His solo albums released in the '80s and early '90s on Warner Brothers and Columbia didn't sell, but they generated a fair share of mostly posi...	The B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks 1972 solo debut album.	Tooth of Crime You re my friend, but I m going to kill you. Don t fret. T Bone Burnett hasn t gone off the deep end. At least not in that way. He s merely explaining the tone of the putyou-on-your-heels opening track of his gripping new album, Tooth of Crime. At once seductive and unsettling fr...	Keep It Simple Those familiar with Van Morrison's ever mercurial muse could hardly have been surprised when he turned up on the artistically centered, avant-country label Lost Highway to pay tribute to a era-spanning slate of country icons on the Nashville imprint's `06 collection, Pay the Dev...
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at 'The Club' "Live at 'The Club'" boasts the cover of this 1966 album. Of course, this turned out to be a lie, as did the entirety of the original liner notes. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy was not recorded at that Chicago venue, but instead at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. (The ruse was a favor to t...	Kill to Get Crimson Three decades after Dire Straits broke onto the scene with their remarkable debut, Mark Knopfler remains an iconic figure in popular music, his graceful guitar playing equaled only by his genial baritone and a novelist's ability to create distinct characters and themes in his son...	Boo! They're back...Was (Not Was) the darlings of the avant disco set and avatars of the absurd have emerged from the abyss of the recording industry with a new long-player, Boo! It's been almost 20 years since their last salvos of surrealistic soul and Jurassic dance mixes delighted ...	The Good Thief Soundtrack of the 2002 Motion Picture by Neil Jordan with Soundtrack Music Written by Elliot Goldenthal and featuring Tracks from Among Others, U2's Bono Doing Quite a Jazzy Cover of the Frank Sinatra Classic "That's Life", Leonard Cohen's "a Thousand Kisses", Serge Gainsbourg an...	Bringing It All Back Home "You sound like you're having a good old time," a purist Dylan fan is spotted telling the artist in the documentary Don't Look Back just after the release of this, his first (half-)electric album. He certainly does. Updating Chicago blues forms with hilarious, tough lyrics--in fa...

Burnett is a musical genius (but this isn't his best album)
T-Bone Burnett is a musical genius and everything he does is worth exploring. However, this album is probably not the best place to start if you are new to his music. I'd suggest Twenty Twenty - The Essential T Bone Burnett as a place to start and then expand out from there.

The first "heretic" of the Christian music industry
When I first found Burnett's The Talking Animals on vinyl back in the 1980's, I really enjoyed this album, especially the song "The Wild Truth" without realizing that this album was about his faith and other human interests. Now that I share his faith, I enjoy it much more than the oh-so-obvious Christian rock that is popular today. The subtleties behind all the tracks of this album make this CD re-release worth the monetary price. I particularly enjoy the tracks "Image" (with it's multi-lingual translations), "Purple Heart", "Relentless" (about God's grace, BTW) and the vastly underrated "Frank Cash and the Morning Paper", the latter of which is a wickedly subtle take on the "does God exist" debate with a dash of Rod Serling in the lyrics for subtlety's sake. At the time this album was first released, Burnett was listed on the Christian charts. Now, he joins his subsequent brother-in-Christ Kevin Max as two of the "heretics" who chose more alternative songwriting styles over the more mainstream Christian artists' trend towards feeding the industry beast. Burnett refuses to hit listeners over the head with a cross-shaped two-by-four, preferring to let his lyrics sink in slowly in hopes the the seeds he sows may someday take root.

Sporadically Brilliant but Bland by T Bone Standards
Sometimes T Bone is too smart for his own good; other times he tries to make a straight rock album and you get the sense he's just slumming. "The Talking Animals" doesn't quite gel, even though "The Killer Moon," co-written by his (then) six-year-old daughter, ranks up there as a Burnett classic. (It's also an amazing video.) "The Strange Case of Frank Cash..." is a wonderful story but works only for the first few listens. The rest is, it pains me to write, sort of generic. You know there's a genius behind it all but it sounds like he's trying to make a pop album. Though I heartily recommend all his other efforts, this one is just for the die-hards.