Lisa Marie Presley tunes in to her roots with ‘Storm & Grace’

With a little help from T Bone Burnett, Lisa Marie Presley gets back to bluesy-country basics in ‘Storm & Grace’ and breaks free from outside expectations.

Lisa Marie Presley doesn’t seem to mind that everyone in the penthouse office of Simon Fuller’s XIX Entertainment in West Hollywood can see her when she extends both of her middle fingers in the direction of a reporter.

She used the gesture to exemplify how she felt about being asked to promote a “sexier image” at one point in her career. But for a woman whose life has been defined by public scrutiny, the move spoke volumes. Presley, 44, is done trying to live up to expectations that aren’t her own.

More proof? Her first album in seven years, “Storm & Grace” (out this week) finds Presley singing, “She got no talent of her own, it’s just her name,” on deluxe-edition track “Sticks and Stones,” her voice a painful wail while slide guitars whisk around her like unseen demons. In “Un-Break,” Presley wonders whether she was once a “backstabbing liar” and is only getting what she deserves against the sound of shuffling western-gothic grooves.

The album, her first for Universal Republic, may serve as a career reboot, but it also brings her back to her family roots, pairing her dusty, robust vocals with moody country and blues accents made famous by the Sun Studio recording house that captured the voice of her father. The stripped-down affair is produced by T Bone Burnett, an artist with a reputation for possessing a reverential, encyclopedic view of the American songbook.

It’s a far cry from Presley’s last album — a polished affair marked by glossy, Top 40 guitars and studio-enhanced vocals. “Yeah, I know,” Presley interrupts talk about the slick nature of her last release. “I was behind that. I tried to smooth it over, to hide behind it. I wanted louder guitars. I wanted the vocals tripled. All that.”

“I was insulated,” Presley says of that time, adding that she surrounded herself with a team of friends and employees who told her only what she wanted to hear.

“There was a scene woven around me that I had helped weave,” she says. “It was a personal scene -- employees, friends. It was an entourage. That’s all a big mistake. It’s all the stuff that happens to a typical L.A., high-profile…”

Presley trails off and waves her hand, palm up, as if to say, “You know, that scene.” But no one really does. After all, Elvis, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, had but one daughter, and it’s not many who see their childhood home in Memphis, Tenn., become an internationally renown tourist attraction. That says nothing of Presley’s penchant for dominating the tabloids in her late 20s and early 30s, largely due to her short-lived marriage to Michael Jackson.

After releasing and promoting “Now What,” Presley embarked on a research project: herself. While certainly not ignorant of what was said and written about her -- specifically the outside expectations of how she was or wasn’t living up to her last name -- Presley says she was shielded from much of it.

Jeff Bridges signs record deal; T Bone Burnett to produce major-label debut

 
As an actor, Jeff Bridges followed his Oscar-winning turn as down-but-not-out country singer Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart” with an Oscar-nominated spin as down-but-not-out lawman Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit.”

Now comes the news that Bridges will pick up a guitar once more, not for “Crazy Heart II,” but for an album slated to be produced by his longtime friend, producer and “Crazy Heart” prime mover T Bone Burnett.

Bridges has signed with Blue Note Records and is scheduled to release his major-label debut album late this summer, according to a statement released Tuesday by Blue Note.

The project will include songs written by Bridges as well as material from Tom Waits, the late “Crazy Heart” music supervisor Stephen Bruton, Greg Brown and others. The actor-musician will share vocal duties on some tracks with guests including Rosanne Cash, Sam Phillips and Benjie Hughes. 

Shortly after “Crazy Heart” was completed Burnett noted that Bridges and director Scott Cooper were intimately involved with the creation of the original songs used in the film. “Really, Jeff and Scott could get writing credit on these songs, because they contributed so much,” Burnett told me in 2009. “Even though I’m not sure they wrote any actual lines, the discussions would become songs. Somebody would say something, Jeff would say, 'That’s a song'-- that sort of thing.”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Jeff Bridges as country singer Bad Blake in "Crazy Heart." Credit: Lorey Sebastian / Fox Searchlight

Grammys 2011: T Bone Burnett gets Recording Academy President's Special Merit Award, slams MP3 technology

 
Awards season typically brings lots of glad-handing and self-congratulation, but producer T Bone Burnett showed little interest in engaging in the usual pleasantries Wednesday night at the Grammy Week Gala put on by the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing.

The academy elected Burnett to receive this year’s President’s Merit Award after an extraordinarily productive year, even by Burnett’s busy standard. He applied his signature touch to Elton John and Leon Russell’s “The Union,” Elvis Costello’s “National Ransom,"  Jakob Dylan’s “Women + Country,” Willie Nelson’s “Country Music,” Robert Randolph and the Family Band’s “We Walk This Road,” John Mellencamp’s “No Better Than This” and Gregg Allman’s just released “Low Country Blues.”

He even found time amid all that to pick up a best original song Academy Award for “The Weary Kind,” which he cowrote with Ryan Bingham,” for the  surprise hit film “Crazy Heart,” for which he also served as executive producer.

Leon Russell on Elton John, crystal radio sets, and playing piano for Phil Spector

 
When Leon Russell was in the midst of what possibly was the busiest period in his life, he was often referred to by the musicians he worked with as “the master of space and time” for his otherworldly ability to fit into any musical situation.

The Oklahoma pianist, singer, songwriter and producer tapped a wellspring of American roots music forms, from country and gospel to blues and soul, during his assignments as a studio session player in Los Angeles who worked with Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra and countless others in the '60s. Later that decade, before launching his solo career, he became the leader of bands assembled by Southern rock musicians Delaney & Bonnie (Bramlett), and English rocker Joe Cocker.

“He was the greatest bandleader of the late-'60s and early-'70s,” longtime admirer Elton John said recently.  “At [George Harrison’s] Concert for Bangladesh, on [Cocker’s] Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, he was the man. He walks into a room of musicians [today], sits down at the piano and he still is the bandleader; he still is the man.”

Where did that musical expertise come from? 

“I started playing in nightclubs when I was about 14 in Oklahoma,” Russell, 68, told me recently during a conversation about his forthcoming album with John, “The Union,” which was produced by T Bone Burnett and is the subject of a profile of John and Russell in Sunday's Arts & Books section. “At that time I made a crystal radio set, and oddly enough, with a crystal radio you can only get one station.

“So after I would get off my job at 1 or 2 in the morning, I’d get home and put on the crystal set with the headphones and just listen,” he said. “The station it got was a blues and gospel station, so I heard a lot of that music. That was a simple twist of fate.”

Elvis Costello accelerates to 78 rpm for 'National Ransom'

 
Elvis Costello’s forthcoming album, “National Ransom,” mines a century’s worth of pop music history in both the characters, scenarios and themes in his songs, and in the atmospheric sound that producer  T Bone Burnett has given the record. 

So it makes perfect sense that Costello, a voracious fan of music of all styles, would want to add a vintage touch of some kind in conjunction with the album’s release come Nov. 2.

Vinyl LP version? Everyone’s doing that nowadays, so Costello is going one step beyond: He’s releasing four songs on a pair of 78 rpm discs.

A whimsical announcement about the 78s has been posted on Costello’s website, sounding much like the fancifully stylized introductions he gives his musical guests on the Sundance Channel “Spectacle” show:

“Lupe-O-Tone -- Purveyors of fine flat phonograph records & cylinders since 1913. Our motto is ‘Ego sum satus infremo.’ Lupe-O-Tone present 78 rpm discs in full Lycanthropic Sound. …‘A Slow Dance With Josephine’ b/w ‘You Hung the Moon’ and ‘Jimmie Standing in the Rain’ b/w ‘A Voice in the Dark,’ by the Lupotonians with vocal refrain by Elvis Costello.”

The 78s will be pressed in limited editions of 25 copies, each signed by Costello. No price is mentioned, but the announcement promises more details to come.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Elvis Costello during a 2009 performance at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Buffalo Springfield to reunite for Neil Young's 24th Bridge School benefit

Neil Young will reunite with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay for a pair of performances as Buffalo Springfield for Young’s annual Bridge School benefit concerts in Northern California, with lineups that also include Pearl Jam, Elton John and Leon Russell, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and several other acts.

The reunion of the influential country-rock band born in 1966 in Los Angeles will feature Young, Stills and Furay as an acoustic trio, given the Bridge School’s history of unplugged performances by all participants. The group's other two original members, bassist Bruce Palmer and drummer Dewey Martin, died in 2004 and 2009, respectively.

First Look: The Secret Sisters' PBS special from Hollywood

 

Could it really be that in this age of pop music, often built on calculation and manipulation, that there’s still a place for bona-fide innocence?

There is, at least in the parallel musical universe that producer T Bone Burnett is creating, one that has recently expanded to include the utterly endearing sibling duo of Laura and Lydia Rogers, a.k.a. the Secret Sisters.

“Our last name isn’t Secret,” elder sister and lead singer Laura said Wednesday night during their charming performance at the Music Box @ Fonda in Hollywood, a show being taped for a PBS special slated to air early next year.

“We’re new to this stage thing,” she told a couple of hundred invited guests, many seated at tables with white tablecloths in the supper-club atmosphere. “Really new; shockingly new. If you knew how new, you wouldn’t be here.”

Yet they were. The Muscle Shoals, Ala., singers having attracted some friends in high places in the last year, Burnett chief among them, for a sound that harks back to an era of family musical acts such as the Everly Brothers, the Louvin Brothers and the Carter Family. Burnett introduced them, occasionally joined the impeccably tasteful band he helped assemble for the show and brought a couple of high-profile pals along for the ride: Jakob Dylan and Elvis Costello.

Album review: Sahara Smith's 'Myth of the Heart'

Texas singer-songwriter Sahara Smith creates Cinemascope-like wide-screen portraits of romantic passion, loneliness and unrequited love in her richly impressive, intensely soulful debut album.

“Blue light breaking on the window glass and cool wind shaking in the long white grass, the ocean speaks the language of the dawn,” she sings in the achingly beautiful opening track, “Thousand Secrets,” which quickly places this 21-year-old in the Emmylou Harris-Alison Krauss camp of country-rock singers of exquisite tastefulness.

“Train Man” is a Chris Isaak spaghetti western-soaked adventure in the search for love on the wrong side of the tracks. In “Are You Lonely,” Smith preemptively tells a would-be lover, “It’s OK if you forget me in the morning/I’ll forget you too.” She’s throwing in the towel after fruitless attempts to find true love when she sings, “Why don’t we treat it like a real thing” in the deliciously eerie “The Real Thing.”

She’s got an eminently empathetic partner in producer Emile Kelman, who’s learned his lessons well studying under T Bone Burnett. Kelman gives her songs plenty of sonic air in which to breathe, supporting her deeply felt takes on matters of the heart with painterly applications of yearning guitar and marrow-deep bass and drums served up by Burnett stalwarts Marc Ribot, Dennis Crouch and Jay Bellerose, respectively.

If Smith and her team err occasionally on the side of self-restraint, it’s hard to argue in an age of pop music in which excess is the rule rather than the exception.   And as any good storyteller knows, myths are better whispered than shouted.

--Randy Lewis

Sahara Smith

“Myth of the Heart”

Playing in Traffic Records

Three and a half stars (out of four)

 

Live review: Sahara Smith, Villagers at Hotel Cafe

 
The Hotel Café served up an illuminating session on the power of good songwriting when it's delivered by a resourceful band — and when it’s not — with Tuesday night’s double bill in Hollywood featuring two rising talents: Texas singer-songwriter Sahara Smith and Irish multi-instrumentalist-songwriter Conor O’Brien, a.k.a. Villagers.

Both have new albums demonstrating their passion for literate lyric-writing. Smith,  21, has been honing her craft for nearly a decade despite her youth, and has come under the tutelage of T Bone Burnett, whose associate Emile Kelman has adroitly produced her debut album, “Myth of the Heart,” coming out Aug. 31 and featuring several members of Burnett’s stable of instrumental aces.

Dubliner O’Brien, 27, is a virtual one-man band on “Becoming a Jackal,” the Villagers album that’s just been nominated for the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize as one of the year’s best by a UK-based act.

Smith brought with her a sharp backing trio of fellow Texans consisting of guitarist-bassist Will Sexton, guitarist Jake Owen and drummer Mike Meadows; when O’Brien took the stage by himself, holding just his acoustic guitar, he offered a  sheepish introduction: “We are Villagers. Actually, I’m Conor from the Villagers. I usually play with a band, but I couldn’t afford to bring them with me.”

First listen: Elton John, Leon Russell and T Bone Burnett unveil 'The Union' in Santa Monica

 
Elton John has always been passionate about his musical taste, always ready to throw his support behind new acts that capture his imagination, whether it’s the Scissor Sisters or Lady Gaga.

But in recent years he’s also been on a special mission to turn the spotlight on veteran artists who never got the attention he and other pop stars received, a key reason he dreamed up the Sundance Channel music interview and performance series “Spectacle,” and persuaded his friend Elvis Costello to take on the job as host.

That mission is front and center with “The Union,” his forthcoming duet album with fellow piano-pounding rocker Leon Russell, to whom John doffed his cap during the first episode of “Spectacle.”