Tooth of Crime

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Fresh off producing Raising Sand, the celebrated collaboration between Allison Krauss and Robert Plant, T Bone Burnett has just released his most recent solo effort, Tooth of Crime.

Both otherworldly and immediate, the album's origins stretch back to 1996 when the songs - in partial form - first appeared as the soundtrack to a staging of Sam Shepard's play of the same name. Shepard's Tooth of Crime (1972), an unconventional musical fantasy, is a "tale about an aging rock star surviving in a spiritually bankrupt world where entertainment and warfare go hand in hand." Of the play, The New York Times wrote: "A fascinating, even brilliant work. It is bracingly insightful on the ephemerality and corrupting powers of stardom."

With the help of Sam Phillips, Marc Ribot, and Jim Keltner, Burnett creates a soundscape equivalent to Shepard's desolate text. "These songs came together like a broken mirror," Burnett says, "and you get a bunch of shards and start putting them together and create a lot of different angles. That's this group of songs, this process." Like shards of glass, then, the songs draw blood: "People tell me I look like hell / Well I am hell" begins the opening track, "Anything I Say Can and Will Be Used Against You."

Sam Phillips's sultry vocals join the mix on "Dope Island": "We lived outside the law / We struck with wild desire / We blinded all we saw / We made the sun our fire." After a searing montage of sounds and forsaken locales - from the Beatle-esque "Kill Zone" to the Dylan-like "Here Come the Philistines" - the album ends with "Sweet Lullaby," written by Burnett and Shepard: "Time is quit / Look it in the eye / In blood we sit / In dark we die / Don't blink now / Sweet lullaby."

If the music and lyrics of Tooth of Crime seem bleak it's because they are - they're the broken pieces of a world in which faith in God is almost extinguished. In many ways it's a world not so far removed from our own, one in which humanity has nearly stopped imaging a Creator by reflecting merely the self. Shepard's play has been called prophetic, and that might be said of Burnett's soundtrack as well. Whatever the final verdict, it seems an important album, a warning regarding where things are, where they might be headed.

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Tooth of Crime from Syracuse University