Music Quote by T-Bone Burnett

There’s a quiet jab in T-Bone Burnett’s “also ironic”: a reminder that our current loudness debates didn’t arrive with streaming or earbuds, they were baked into the medium from the start. Back when music lived on tape and vinyl, the enemy was literal noise: hiss, rumble, surface crackle. “Louder” wasn’t just an aesthetic flex, it was a practical workaround, a way to push the song’s signal above the medium’s mess. Burnett is pointing at that basic engineering impulse and letting it indict us.

The subtext is that necessity has a way of becoming habit. Once the technology stopped demanding brute-force volume, the industry didn’t stop chasing it; it professionalized the chase. Loudness became a competitive posture: louder mixes grabbing attention on radio, then in playlists, then in the ceaseless scroll. Burnett’s irony lands because it exposes how easily a technical fix turns into a cultural reflex, and how “overcoming noise” mutates into “outshouting everyone else.”

Context matters here: Burnett is a producer and musician steeped in analog craft, often associated with fidelity, dynamics, and the feel of real space in recordings. He’s not romanticizing hiss; he’s diagnosing a mindset. The line implies that when you design music primarily to defeat a medium’s limitations, you risk flattening what makes music hit in the first place: contrast, intimacy, breath. Loudness becomes a kind of arms race where nobody wins, except the noise.