Time & Perspective Quote by Elvis Costello

Name-dropping can be a flex, but Costello uses it here as a kind of soft-focus credentialing: he’s not telling you T Bone Burnett is important, he’s reminding you he was there before the rest of the culture caught up. “Since the time that we first worked together” quietly plants a flag in origin-story territory, the insider’s vantage point that reads as both generous and self-positioning. It’s a musician’s way of saying: I’ve watched the myth get built from the loading dock up.

The syntax does a lot of the work. Costello keeps circling time markers - “since,” “when we first met,” “we toured together” - as if chronology itself is the proof. Burnett’s “remarkable career” isn’t just praise; it’s a framing device that turns a collaborator into a through-line for an era when producing still meant taste, risk, and a human ear, not just workflow and plug-ins. By noting Burnett “dividing his time between recording and producing… and touring,” Costello sketches a now-rare hybrid: the producer as working musician, accountable to the stage and not only the studio.

Then he lands on the simplest sentence: “We toured together and we were great friends.” That’s not mere sentiment. It’s an assertion of intimacy that implies trust, shared battles, and a pre-brand relationship - friendship before legacy. The subtext is reverent but practical: Burnett’s authority comes from lived proximity to the music, and Costello’s endorsement comes from the kind of history you can’t fake after the fact.