T Bone Burnett emerges from a 14-year hiatus as a recording artist to release The True False Identity - a collection of entirely new songs written and produced by T Bone - on May 16 on DMZ/Columbia Records. The DualDisc version of Identity will also feature a 20-minute film created exclusively for this release directed by Jesse Dylan. According to T Bone, the aim of The True False Identity is to "erase the nonexistent line between comedy and tragedy."

Burnett says the musical roots of Identity are the records he and his band listened to while recording. Burnett acted as DJ for those sessions, spinning records and videos between takes. "We were listening to Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, The Carter Family, and a lot of Haitian music," he says, "so the axis this music turns on is some kind of line drawn from New Orleans through Mississippi and Tennessee to Haiti."

That same day, Legacy Recordings will release career retrospective 40-song, 2-disk Twenty Twenty - The Essential T Bone Burnett. That collection will include songs dating back to the Alpha Band (the group formed in 1976 by T Bone, Steven Soles, and David Mansfield, fellow travelers in Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue); tracks from each of T Bone's solo albums; rarities including "The People's Limousine" (the single T Bone recorded with Elvis Costello as "The Coward Brothers"); and previously unreleased material.

T Bone's impressive career also includes: Grammy-winning producer (O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, the Tony Bennett and k.d. lang album, A Wonderful World); Oscar-nominated songwriter ("The Scarlet Tide" from Cold Mountain); indie record label founder (DMZ Records); soundtrack composer/Executive Music Producer (Walk The Line, The Big Lebowski) and studio wizard (Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, k.d. lang, Alison Krauss, Counting Crows, the Wallflowers, Sam Phillips, Gillian Welch, and Ralph Stanley).