In 1977 there was an advertising campaign - there's old wave, there's new wave and there's David Bowie. I was definitely moving more and more into what was called New Wave at that time (while of course still listening to Bowie). A year later I was at my first year in university enjoying the rough and sometimes ham fisted production values that went along with New Wave.
The Go-to man for many of the British Bands at the time was Nick Lowe who helmed the first album by The Damned, a number of the early Costello Albums, some Graham Parker and The Rumour John Hiatt and of course his own material.After working with a few other producers in the early 80's (Nashville's Billy Sherrill (!), Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley and Hugh Padgham - Costello recorded King of America with T Bone Burnett. I had earlier become aware of T Bone Burnett's production in 80's for his work on Los Lobos excellent debut - Will the Wolf Survive and was also aware that he was guitarist on Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour.
I enjoyed the work he did with Los Lobos and Costello so much that I started discovering new artists simply by looking for work he produced. One of the nice things about T Bone Burnett at that time is that he seemed to produce a lot of new artists and so I was picking picked up on some great second and third tier artists. Artists like Peter Case, Sam Phillips (his then wife), Tonio K and Joseph Arthur. What particularly drew me to his production was that he managed to make music sound fresh, clean and without too many gimmicks. While I enjoyed his work with but for a while in the late 80's and early 90's his name was enough for me to buy something/anything. In hindsight his production was another early touchstone to my love of Americana and Country music.His soundtrack albums to the Coen Brother's movies are superb where he played a mix between producer and curator. Check out O Brother Where Art Though and The Big Lebowski Sountracks. Sadly to my ears eventually his production became muddier and to my ears more "affected" and contrived and while some of his latter productions get raves I found myself quickly losing interest in the award winning and mega selling albums he has done with Robert Plant and Alison Krause and Greg Allman.
Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake frequently helped out T Bone and then went on to produce on their own including Los Lobos's masterpiece Kiko, Crowded House, Suzanne Vega, Richard Thompson and the Finn Brothers and the mighty and long forgotten Semi Twang.They have a close relationship to NZ artists and even produced NZ's own Gin Wigmore - which must have been interesting!
