I’ve always liked T-Bone Burnett — as an artist, that is, aside from his current fame as a producer. His 1980s albums, Proof Through the Night and T-Bone Burnett are records I still find myself returning to like familiar friends. His most recent album was 1992’s The Criminal Under My Own Hat, which has great stuff on it, but perhaps in hindsight it was a mis-step to try and use too broad a palette on that record (it’s an electic mix of driving acoustic and noisy, bashing pop/rock/whatever). Since then, he’s issued no new material, but that’s about to change as of May 16th, with The True False Identity. I have no idea what to expect from it, but T-Bone has landed squarely in the internet age with a web site at http://www.tboneburnett.com/, where you can hear, at this point, one track from the forthcoming LP.

(Yeah, “LP,” I love using that term.)

The Dylan connections with T-Bone range from the obvious (he played on the Rolling Thunder tour) to the obscure (he played with Dylan during his bizarre cameo appearance on the “Dharma and Greg” show) to the oblique (Bob Neuwirth, another Dylan associate, gets songwriting credits on the T-Bone Burnett and Criminal Under My Own Hat albums, and also co-produced the latter). Make of that what you will; it’s not actually relevant to anything. Oh; and T-Bone once amusingly recounted how some had suspected of him of converting Dylan to Christianity. It was while he was doing a good deal of collaboration with Elvis Costello during the eighties, and I remember him remarking something like, “I wonder if there’s anybody out there saying, ‘I hope he doesn’t convert Elvis Costello too.’ ”

Evidence is, he didn’t.

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