T Bone Burnett is well-known and widely respected as a producer, but before he embarked on that career he was a guitarist – he played in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the ’70s – and started a solo career that saw him release albums in musical styles ranging from New Wave to country.
This song appeared on his 1992 LP “The Criminal Under My Own Hat,” which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk album, but it was first released the year before on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ film “Until the End of the World,” which Burnett also produced.
Wenders asked more than a dozen artists to each write a song for the film and got contributions from Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello and Patti Smith, among others. The director’s only instruction was to write something they imagined they would write 10 years in the future, when the movie was set. Burnett’s entry, with humans as invading aliens, actually sounds timeless.
