t-bone burnett to produce the next grace potter and the nocturnals record

Breaking News: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals have announced that T-Bone Burnett is on board to produce the next GPN record. Mr. Burnett (T-Bone? Mr. T?, Boney T?) has a lengthy and impressive resume that most recently includes production credit on “Raising Sand” the grammy award winning record by Allison Krauss and Robert Plant. Other production records of note include Brandi Carlisle, Cassandra Wilson, Counting Crows and Elvis Costello. T-Bone scored and produced the soundtrack to “O Brother Where Art Thou?” A complete list of production credits can be found on T-Bone’s website.

Official Press Release (Photo credit: James Minchin III)
GRACE POTTER AND THE NOCTURNALS TO WORK WITH LEGENDARY PRODUCER T BONE BURNETT ON BAND’S THIRD ALBUM

On April 20th, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals entered Village Recorder in West L.A. to begin work on the Vermont-based group’s third album. It will be recorded under the expert guidance of 2009 Producer of the Year Grammy winner T Bone Burnett, whose remarkable discography includes landmark albums from Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Gillian Welch, Roy Orbison, Counting Crows and the Wallflowers. Grace and The Nocturnals are naturally over the moon about Burnett’s desire to work together. The album is tentatively slated for a fall 2009 release.

“T Bone’s a legend but also a genuinely effervescent personality, which is what I look for in anybody, especially a producer,” says Grace, who explains that Burnett’s name has been at the top of the band’s wish list since it formed in 2002. “We’ve been putting out feelers for a while,” she says. “In the end, it was Bob Cavallo [Chairman of the Disney Music Group] who called him and said, ‘T Bone, you owe me 25 bucks.’ He was referring to a golf match they’d had like 20 years ago. How funny is that?” Soon thereafter, Burnett, Cavallo and Potter got together for breakfast. “They both have such spectacular histories, and for the first 45 minutes they just traded stories. I thought it would just be a ‘getting to know you’ meeting, but at the end, T Bone said, ‘Let’s go make a record.’”

Soon thereafter, the new collaborators started going through the 50 songs Grace and The Nocturnals had written in the last two years, which range from “feel-good to salty Americana to swaggering soul with a backbeat,” as she puts it. “T Bone put the project in cinematic terms,” says Grace. “He told me, ‘You and your voice and your songs are the movie; I’m just gonna score the movie.’ Since then we’ve been riffing back and forth: I’ll shoot a song demo to him on MP3, and he’ll get me notes back within a few hours. He has a really interesting sense of the big picture, but has an acute sense of subtle detail. It’s such a huge relief to find a producer of T Bone’s caliber we can totally put our trust in, not just because of the records he’s made, but because of the person he is. Now it’s happening, and we’re excited and ready!”

Grace Potter and The Nocturnals have generated glowing reviews across the board. David Fricke of Rolling Stone proclaimed, “Potter is poised for bigger things…” USA Today raved, “Nocturnals play the daylights out of rock.” New York Times critic Stephen Holden said of their live show, “The Sound of the ‘70s From a Singer in her 20s, …a sense of familiarity, of a time-honored ritual expertly and reverently re-enacted, is one of the attractions of this Vermont quartet.”

In between recording and mixing the new album, Grace Potter and The Nocturnals will be on the road playing a handful of dates previewing songs from their upcoming album.

You can catch GPN in the following cities

Tour dates and venues:

May 16 Dana Point, CA Doheny Blues Fest (headline Renaissance stage)
May 28 Baltimore, MD 8 X 10 *headlining
May 29 Millvale, PA Mr. Small’s *headlining
May 30 Lexington, KY The Dame *headlining
June 4 Enterprise, AL BamaJam (Alternative Stage)
June 5 Live Oaks, FL Wannee Festival (Mushroom Stage)
June 6 Savannah, GA Livewire Music Hall *headlining
June 8 Isle of Palms, SC The Windjammer *headlining
June 11 Knoxville, TN Sundown in the City *headlining
June 12 Manchester, TN Bonnarroo Music Festival
June 20 Millville, NJ Southern Shore Music Festival (Carmel Green Stage)
June 21 Croton on Hudson, NY Great Hudson River Festival
June 25 Albany, NY Alive At Five *headlining
June 27 Fort Smith, AK Riverfront Park
June 28 Fort Smith, AK Neumeier’s Rib Room *headlining
July 3 Telluride, CO Red, White & Blues *headlining
July 5 Rothbury, MI Rothbury (Sherwood Court Stage)
July 12 Burlington, VT Quadricentennial Festival
July 17 Alta, Wyoming Grand Targhee Americanan Festival
July 18 Park City, UT Mountain Town Stages *headlining
July 24 Floyd, VA Floyd Festival (headline Main Stage)
July 26 Bridgeport, CT Gathering of the Vibes (Main Stage)
Aug. 7 Brooklyn, NY Celebrate Brooklyn Festival
Sept. 5 New Orleans, LA Project 30-90

Did someone say “foreshadowing“?

Now, between gigs, Potter is allowing herself to daydream about producers for the band’s next album, which will be an entirely new sort of endeavor — financed and released by one of the dozen labels, both indie and major, currently courting them. She mentions the Wilco album, ”A Ghost is Born,” and Phish’s ”Billy Breathes,” and the legendary T-Bone Burnett.

T-Bone is also working on a new sound system called CODE which aims to increase audio fidelity of recorded music.

More reading for the curious:
Texas Music.
Interview in MixOnline about the recording process.
Dallas Morning News.
The Daily Times.

Well, I don’t really like recordings, you know. And I don’t particularly like processing. What I really like is hearing a musician play in a room, or a group of musicians play in a room. That’s what I fell in love with first. When I was a kid, about 14 or 15, I started going to the Skyliner Ballroom in Fort Worth, Texas. It was owned by Jack Ruby. I saw The Band when I was a kid and they talk about it [the venue] in the movie, The Last Waltz. It was the most beautiful sounding room. The music I heard in that room had a profound effect on me. And years later, Daryl Leonard, a friend of mine whom I’ve worked with since the mid-1960’s, brought over a recording we had done in ‘65 or ‘67. We put it on and it sounds exactly like what I am doing today. It started me thinking. I remembered that Ike and Tina Turner had played a show at the Skyliner Ballroom in the mid-1960s. They had recorded it and I wondered if I could buy that record. I went online and I got the record and I put it on. It too sounded like everything I’ve done my whole life and I realized that everything I’ve been trying to do from the beginning was to recreate this excitement of sound that I heard from the Skyliner Ballroom when I was a kid. I love recording but I don’t usually love recordings. I hardly ever say, “Wow! That’s a great recording.” I say, “That’s an incredible song or incredible piece of music.” But the times I do feel that it’s been a great sounding recording is where I find a real sense of place. Mike Piersante, Emile Kelman, Jason Wormer, Gavin Lurssen and Lisa Surber are my team. We stay very much on top of all the technological developments in recording so we never hear the recording. [laughter] I cannot stand processing. I love the sound of an instrument bouncing off a wall and into a room when you hear that pure, deep sound.

- T. Bone Burnett – Tape Op Magazine