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Emily Burns
The Hunger Games has absolutley hammered the movie box office since it opened a week or so ago-surpassing even the Twilight franchise (gasp!) and other epic book-to-movie adaptations. I'm sure the movie is great (I personally have yet to see it..) but I can already say without a doubt that the one thing I LOVE about The Huger Games actually has nothing to do with the movie whatsoever but rather it's equally epic soundtrack produced by none other than the incomprable (and my personal, all-time, fave producer) T-Bone Burnett. This guy is literally a force of nature in the producing world. You may not have heard his name before but I GUARANTEE you have heard PLENTY of his work without realizing it. Over the last 20 years some of his projects have included the Wallflower's awesome, unforgettable Bringing Down the Horse album, the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou, the grammy winning Robert Plant & Alison Krauss masterpiece, Raising Sand (#4 on my top ten albums of all time), the Oscar winning soundtrack for the movie Crazy Heart, and most recently, The Hunger Games soundtrack (I can see the wheels spinning as you're beginning to put it all together....). Yes! All these different projects do have distinct similarities that are THE T-Bone Burnett sound. This is why I love his work, SO much. Everything he does, has his stamp ALL over it. The way he's able to take a whole album and make each song extremely unique yet, all sound as though they have so much depth and soul in them that it's almost eerie, I find incredible. After discovering his body of work, I realized just how big of an impact producing can have on an album. It was something I never really thought about before but after hearing that undeniable T-Bone stamp on a song it becomes obvious that production, especially his, can take what might have been an ordinary song and make it extraordinary. I also love that everything he does is so simple-in the sense that the parts he comes up with for instruments, vocals, etc are ALWAYS there to serve the melody/harmony or ambience of the song. His work serves to remind myself and other producer hopefuls out there that you may only be one small part, a quick re-arrange, an extra bar, an added harmony, or a simple shaker part away, from an extraordinary song.
Till next time-
E
