When I interviewed T-Bone Burnett in 2002, he was riding high as the producer of the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film "O Brother, Where Art Thou," which sold 5.9 million copies in the United States, hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 album chart and won five Grammys, including 2002 album of the year, beating out U2, OutKast and his friend and onetime boss Bob Dylan. Still, The Hollywood Reporter only gave me enough space to squeeze two or three quotes from our conversation into my profile of him. So here, for the first time, I'm posting the interview in in its entirety.
What do you think of the current state of the music industry?
For a long time people in show business have believed that the audience is actually involved in this music that’s been coming out, and especially in the last two years people have had a lot of success selling teenage music. But in the time a lot has happened to divorce a great number of people from entertainment in general. I mean, the entertainment industry is a tiny thing, really. People in this town take it as a big thing, but even compared to sports, it’s a small industry and it’s shrinking. And the reason it’s shrinking is because in its effort to almost social engineer art, it lost its audience.
Do you think it's the result of obsessive test marketing and giving people what they think they want?
All of that, and thinking because it got played on the radio, etc. There was a system that seemed to be working. It’s no longer working. The system is broken. I think there are many recent records like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and Nora Jones’ (album), which is in the Top 10 now without radio play or any of the other levers that the heads of record companies used to be able to pull, without any of the mechanisms of the system, have reached people because they’re good. Partially what’s happened is that we’ve gone from a nation of people that make music to a nation of people that listen to recorded music. And even musicians now used recorded music as part of the music they make.
You mean sampling by rap artists?
Not just rap artists, but all artists. There are large numbers of people who enjoy hearing people actually sing, somebody who’s good sing. And they don’t care how old the person is or what genre they want to call it. Genres, classifications and charts and all of those things were just marketing mechanisms. They mean nothing now, because people are much more sophisticated than that now. None of the categories mean anything any more. And I’m not interested in doing anything that’s in a category, because if it’s in a category, you’re by very definition of the thing limited. For instance, as a metaphor, if you’re trying to do a Britney Spears record, you’re getting in line behind 800 other girls who are trying to do a Britney Spears record. And even at that, it’s a limited audience. Whereas something that is just flat good… The White Stripes are playing all around the world with just drums and guitar – that’s the band – they’ve left out one of what was thought to be an essential instrument in the rock & roll band.
There’s a thing called Americana Music. Just as a matter of fact, there hasn’t been any good Americana music since the Flying Burrito Brothers. Bob Dylan, I guess, in a way invented it. It was called country rock originally. But since the first handful of records that were made in that which is now a genre, there haven’t been any inventive records made by anyone. They’re all essentially the same intervals, the same chords, the same beats. It’s just this endless rehashing of something that was vital 20-30 years ago.
There are charts now called the Americana charts. It’s now a genre with that name; they co-opted that name. And it’s this very snobbish group of people who can afford to be snobbish, because it’s easier to be snobbish than to actually put yourself on the line.
Any piece of crass modern pop that you’ve enjoyed in a guilty pleasure sort of way lately?
Nothing comes to mind. That used to be an art form.
Motown, The Beatles…
All of that stuff. It was all beautiful, beautiful stuff.
What do you do as a producer?
Yesterday, I did a session with Vic Chesnutt. We went in with two pianos, drums, I played the bass, Vic played gut-string guitar and sang. We did three takes live and that was it; that was the end of it. What I like is to work with people who are really good and then get a performance, play the song until it sounds like a performance. Perfection is a second-rate idea, and we’ve reached a period where perfection in music is so easily attainable, my ear craves dissonance.”
When you’re talking “good,” that doesn't necessarily mean good chops and perfect pitch.
All of that stuff is great, but perfect pitch is not perfect. The greatest singers sing in their own mode. We didn’t even use A440 as perfect pitch until I think the 1930s. Orchestras used to tune to all different kinds of pitches.
The “O, Brother” soundtrack sold 5.9 million copies, which is probably more than Britney Spears’ last record. Did it get any airplay?
It got airplay here and there. Airplay was certainly part of the thing, but I think it had a lot of different elements going. There are a lot of different ways people found out about it.
Who did play it?
I think public radio played it some, some country radio stations played it – at least the single from it.
What do you think of what stands for contemporary country music?
I don’t hear any of it, so it’s hard for me to remark on it. In Nashville, they’ve been trying to make Eagles records since 1975. It’s all essentially… The Eagles popularized what Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers were doing, and Nashville fell in love with the Eagles because the Eagles are the biggest selling band of all time or something like that. Nashville fell in love with that, and ever record made there since then uses the Eagles as its template.”
The AOR rock of the ‘70s is today’s country.
I think that’s a legitimate analogy.
When you were doing “O Brother,” did you have any vague sort of hope that it might turn a lot of people on to the sound?
I’ve been following this particular group of musicians for quite some time. I first worked with Jerry Douglas and Edgar Meyer and Roy Husky Jr. and Mark O’Connor back in the mid ‘80s. Nineteen-eighty-five was the first time I recorded with any of them. And I’ve been following them for some time since then. They have always inspired me with their musicianship and their commitment to being good. And I thought there’s never been a light shined on this group of musicians that play this type of music like there was getting ready to be when we were putting out "O Brother Where Art Thou?" I knew that, no matter how meager the release was, it was still going to bring more attention to the music than had ever been brought to it. And I thought that if a lot of people heard it there was a good chance that a lot of people were going to like it, because it’s the kind of music that people who like music like. In other words, they’re playing really great, they’re singing really great and the songs are really great. That’s the way out of this malaise that the record business is in is just through doing things that are actually good. Because the audience has been impressed. We’ve come out of an age of special effects and everyone knowing where the camera is into a time where people are weary of that and want to see real people on stage doing what musicians do and enjoying it, not impressing them, not posing and not being superstars or cool or any of that stuff, but just being musicians.”
Nevertheless, you must’ve been surprised by the level of success.
I was happy about it, but not really surprised. I mean, I didn’t expect it. Don’t let me mislead you. The one thing that I was shocked about was when it went #1 in the country. The story of "O Brother Where Art Thou?” is the story of three guys who broke off a chain gang and recorded a song and sometime later it became a hit without their knowing it, and it won them their freedom; it was their redemption in the end. When the #1 record in the country started off with a song that was recorded by a guy who was on a chain gain in Mississippi, on parchment farm, 50 years ago, and without his having any inkling of it, became a hit... When the story replicated itself in this broad way into real life (with James Carter, a convict whose four-decade old recording of the spiritual "Po' Lazarus" was used on the soundtrack), and then the [folk music historian' Alan] Lomax people found him and took him a check and a platinum record and he had no idea what they were talking about. He didn’t even remember recording the song. That was shocking.
You've kicked a hole in the door of the pop industry for this type of music. Do you have any plans for what you’re going to do with it?
I don’t really agree with that. I just think that it was a good record on which a group of very talented people all put their minds, hearts and souls together for a period of time. It connected with an audience that was really happy for it. I think the Nora Jones record is very much the same kind of thing. It’s kind of a quiet record; it’s not really trying to impress you. It’s a modest quiet record that’s really easy to be in the room with.
I don’t expect there to be a large number of multiplatinum bluegrass records. I mean, I’m not exactly sure what genre this record was anyway. But I hope it’s true. I hope we cracked open the door for people who play and sing well. That would be the best straight answer I could give.
So, you're looking for things w/same spirit, but you're not searching for “O Brother 2.”
No, I’m not going to try to exploit a genre because I don’t believe in genres. I believe genres as we know them today are just marketing constructs. I just think good music is good music, whoever plays it, whatever color they are. I don’t agree with the boxes people are put in, [the way they say] a black guitarist can’t play rock & roll, and even if he did it, it wouldn’t be called rock & roll.
Now, you're working on “Cold Mountain," which is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War.
Most of my work is done on that except for the mixing. We prerecorded about 25 songs before they even started of filming, pretty much the way we did ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ They’re probably lip-syncing one version and doing a live version to the track, then a free live version, so you have three versions, three choices to cut in and out of and ways to just keep everything together.
I’m also starting work with a band called Autolux that’s a really good rock & roll band; a modernist band, I would call them. A modernist beat band. I’ve never heard a band like them. One of them is from Russia, one is from Huntsville, Alabama… they’re from all over the place.”
You were recently quoted as saying the movie business was corrupt. Most say the music business is much more corrupt.
I’ve never experienced the sort of avarice in the music business that I’ve experienced in the movie business. I think years ago there were just flat-out gangsters in the record business, but that’s changed. First of all, people who like music are a pretty nice group of people, generally. Musicians are the most incredibly decent people I’ve ever met. I can think of very few musicians who aren’t kind, thoughtful, sensitive people.
But would you loan them your car?
Yeah, I would. Well, some of them I wouldn’t because they would obviously go sell it to buy dope. (laughs) But most musicians are very decent people. The film business is a very rough business.”
The movie business greedy, but not as exploitive as something like "American Idol.” They’re getting raped by their contracts.
But that’s the TV business. That’s a whole different business. The Backstreet Boys and a lot of those bands that came out got signed to really bad contracts, and that was a guy from the airline industry.
Lou Pearlman. He's Art Garfunkel’s cousin.
Oh, really.
He also has something called Options Talent.
That sounds perverse.
He’s asking people to pay $600-700 to have pictures taken and be put on a web site.
That’s wrong. You know what that should be? That would be an interstate commerce beef, I would think. Seriously. I think somebody should take that on a federal level, because that’s just wrong. You can’t make people pay. That’s just terrible.
[Note: In 2008, Pearlman was put on trial for perpetrating what was characterized as "one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history." He pled guilty to conspiracy, money laundering and making false statements was sentenced to 25 years in prison for swindling investors and major U.S. banks out of more than $300 million.]
Any thing you’re eager to do in show business other than producing?
No, there’s nothing. I just want to keep going every day. I’m in a real nice part of the record business, [where] people are really nice. People get all bent out of shape at the record companies these days. I’m doing a label and we’re doing very different kinds of deals. It’s called DMZ and it’s with Columbia. I have a company called D Pop and the co-head is Mike Zoss, so it’s our company to make records.
Does the label have a unique philosophy?
We’re trying to make good records. We have no quotas, so there’s no reason to put out records we don’t believe in with all our hearts. Basically, that’s it – just to put out good records.
Are the deals structured differently?
Oh, yeah. Because I’ve suffered through so many years of these artist contracts and the vicissitudes of them, I’m trying to give the artists the benefits of my mistakes. We’re trying to set up every artist to be successful. We’re trying to give them the kind of record deal in which they can be successful. We’re really working it out artist to artist. What does this artist need? We'll have them on the road long enough to do what they need to do. All you can do is make sure the artist is out there. We haven’t put out a record yet… The Autoluxe record will have a radio component, but the radio component is not the biggest part of the plan on any of the records we’re putting out. We just did a video with Ralph Stanley (through DMZ). We’re giving them better royalties, but I don’t want to talk about that because it’s unseemly, but it’s a more fair split. It’s a different way of looking at the splits.”
Will they be shorter deals?
We’re open to all of that. We’re just trying to make it appropriate. Rather than have a boiler plate and stick to it and be overly concerned about precedent.
Will the artists get to retain their masters?
I’m always open to that. As an artist myself, I own some of my masters and other people own some of my masters, and I’m very happy to have Columbia own some of my masters, because I know they’re going to be there forever. To own your own masters, you need a structure to keep them alive, otherwise they’ll just disappear. I think the ideal situation for an artist is to own some of his masters and to have some responsible great archive for some of them. And if you’re one of those incredibly lucky people who got to a point where you can have an archive of your own stuff, I don’t know if that’s such a great thing. You need a staff their constantly overseeing it and growing it.
No matter what’s going on with the record company, recording artists maintain most of their own rights, anyway. The record part of it is a very small part of it anyway, when you look at publishing, merchandising and all the things that happen over time with a successful artist.
I’m not saying that the record business isn’t corrupt, it’s just that a record costs $200,000 and a film costs $100 million. You can sort of figure out the multiplier of corruption in that formula somewhere. You can make a releasable album with zero dollars [with a computer]. The potential for corruption is so much greater, and because the costs are so great the avarice and the fear is exponentially greater.
You can have an album that fails, and no one knows.
Right.
If a film fails, people are going to notice.
That’s right. I didn’t want to sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy, because I know there are unscrupulous people. There always have been, but there aren’t the kind of gangsters there used to be, as far as I know.
[I ask a stupid question about him being an industry leader, obviously forced on to me by editors.]
This is the first I’ve heard of my being a leader. What I would like to see out of our leaders is more imagination. If I’m thrust into a leadership role I only hope that I would be inspired to use my imagination to address the problems we face today.
What do you think of the current state of the music industry?
For a long time people in show business have believed that the audience is actually involved in this music that’s been coming out, and especially in the last two years people have had a lot of success selling teenage music. But in the time a lot has happened to divorce a great number of people from entertainment in general. I mean, the entertainment industry is a tiny thing, really. People in this town take it as a big thing, but even compared to sports, it’s a small industry and it’s shrinking. And the reason it’s shrinking is because in its effort to almost social engineer art, it lost its audience.
Do you think it's the result of obsessive test marketing and giving people what they think they want?
All of that, and thinking because it got played on the radio, etc. There was a system that seemed to be working. It’s no longer working. The system is broken. I think there are many recent records like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and Nora Jones’ (album), which is in the Top 10 now without radio play or any of the other levers that the heads of record companies used to be able to pull, without any of the mechanisms of the system, have reached people because they’re good. Partially what’s happened is that we’ve gone from a nation of people that make music to a nation of people that listen to recorded music. And even musicians now used recorded music as part of the music they make.
You mean sampling by rap artists?
Not just rap artists, but all artists. There are large numbers of people who enjoy hearing people actually sing, somebody who’s good sing. And they don’t care how old the person is or what genre they want to call it. Genres, classifications and charts and all of those things were just marketing mechanisms. They mean nothing now, because people are much more sophisticated than that now. None of the categories mean anything any more. And I’m not interested in doing anything that’s in a category, because if it’s in a category, you’re by very definition of the thing limited. For instance, as a metaphor, if you’re trying to do a Britney Spears record, you’re getting in line behind 800 other girls who are trying to do a Britney Spears record. And even at that, it’s a limited audience. Whereas something that is just flat good… The White Stripes are playing all around the world with just drums and guitar – that’s the band – they’ve left out one of what was thought to be an essential instrument in the rock & roll band.
There’s a thing called Americana Music. Just as a matter of fact, there hasn’t been any good Americana music since the Flying Burrito Brothers. Bob Dylan, I guess, in a way invented it. It was called country rock originally. But since the first handful of records that were made in that which is now a genre, there haven’t been any inventive records made by anyone. They’re all essentially the same intervals, the same chords, the same beats. It’s just this endless rehashing of something that was vital 20-30 years ago.
There are charts now called the Americana charts. It’s now a genre with that name; they co-opted that name. And it’s this very snobbish group of people who can afford to be snobbish, because it’s easier to be snobbish than to actually put yourself on the line.
Any piece of crass modern pop that you’ve enjoyed in a guilty pleasure sort of way lately?
Nothing comes to mind. That used to be an art form.
Motown, The Beatles…
All of that stuff. It was all beautiful, beautiful stuff.
What do you do as a producer?
Yesterday, I did a session with Vic Chesnutt. We went in with two pianos, drums, I played the bass, Vic played gut-string guitar and sang. We did three takes live and that was it; that was the end of it. What I like is to work with people who are really good and then get a performance, play the song until it sounds like a performance. Perfection is a second-rate idea, and we’ve reached a period where perfection in music is so easily attainable, my ear craves dissonance.”
When you’re talking “good,” that doesn't necessarily mean good chops and perfect pitch.
All of that stuff is great, but perfect pitch is not perfect. The greatest singers sing in their own mode. We didn’t even use A440 as perfect pitch until I think the 1930s. Orchestras used to tune to all different kinds of pitches.
The “O, Brother” soundtrack sold 5.9 million copies, which is probably more than Britney Spears’ last record. Did it get any airplay?
It got airplay here and there. Airplay was certainly part of the thing, but I think it had a lot of different elements going. There are a lot of different ways people found out about it.
Who did play it?
I think public radio played it some, some country radio stations played it – at least the single from it.
What do you think of what stands for contemporary country music?
I don’t hear any of it, so it’s hard for me to remark on it. In Nashville, they’ve been trying to make Eagles records since 1975. It’s all essentially… The Eagles popularized what Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers were doing, and Nashville fell in love with the Eagles because the Eagles are the biggest selling band of all time or something like that. Nashville fell in love with that, and ever record made there since then uses the Eagles as its template.”
The AOR rock of the ‘70s is today’s country.
I think that’s a legitimate analogy.
When you were doing “O Brother,” did you have any vague sort of hope that it might turn a lot of people on to the sound?
I’ve been following this particular group of musicians for quite some time. I first worked with Jerry Douglas and Edgar Meyer and Roy Husky Jr. and Mark O’Connor back in the mid ‘80s. Nineteen-eighty-five was the first time I recorded with any of them. And I’ve been following them for some time since then. They have always inspired me with their musicianship and their commitment to being good. And I thought there’s never been a light shined on this group of musicians that play this type of music like there was getting ready to be when we were putting out "O Brother Where Art Thou?" I knew that, no matter how meager the release was, it was still going to bring more attention to the music than had ever been brought to it. And I thought that if a lot of people heard it there was a good chance that a lot of people were going to like it, because it’s the kind of music that people who like music like. In other words, they’re playing really great, they’re singing really great and the songs are really great. That’s the way out of this malaise that the record business is in is just through doing things that are actually good. Because the audience has been impressed. We’ve come out of an age of special effects and everyone knowing where the camera is into a time where people are weary of that and want to see real people on stage doing what musicians do and enjoying it, not impressing them, not posing and not being superstars or cool or any of that stuff, but just being musicians.”
Nevertheless, you must’ve been surprised by the level of success.
I was happy about it, but not really surprised. I mean, I didn’t expect it. Don’t let me mislead you. The one thing that I was shocked about was when it went #1 in the country. The story of "O Brother Where Art Thou?” is the story of three guys who broke off a chain gang and recorded a song and sometime later it became a hit without their knowing it, and it won them their freedom; it was their redemption in the end. When the #1 record in the country started off with a song that was recorded by a guy who was on a chain gain in Mississippi, on parchment farm, 50 years ago, and without his having any inkling of it, became a hit... When the story replicated itself in this broad way into real life (with James Carter, a convict whose four-decade old recording of the spiritual "Po' Lazarus" was used on the soundtrack), and then the [folk music historian' Alan] Lomax people found him and took him a check and a platinum record and he had no idea what they were talking about. He didn’t even remember recording the song. That was shocking.
You've kicked a hole in the door of the pop industry for this type of music. Do you have any plans for what you’re going to do with it?
I don’t really agree with that. I just think that it was a good record on which a group of very talented people all put their minds, hearts and souls together for a period of time. It connected with an audience that was really happy for it. I think the Nora Jones record is very much the same kind of thing. It’s kind of a quiet record; it’s not really trying to impress you. It’s a modest quiet record that’s really easy to be in the room with.
I don’t expect there to be a large number of multiplatinum bluegrass records. I mean, I’m not exactly sure what genre this record was anyway. But I hope it’s true. I hope we cracked open the door for people who play and sing well. That would be the best straight answer I could give.
So, you're looking for things w/same spirit, but you're not searching for “O Brother 2.”
No, I’m not going to try to exploit a genre because I don’t believe in genres. I believe genres as we know them today are just marketing constructs. I just think good music is good music, whoever plays it, whatever color they are. I don’t agree with the boxes people are put in, [the way they say] a black guitarist can’t play rock & roll, and even if he did it, it wouldn’t be called rock & roll.
Now, you're working on “Cold Mountain," which is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War.
Most of my work is done on that except for the mixing. We prerecorded about 25 songs before they even started of filming, pretty much the way we did ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ They’re probably lip-syncing one version and doing a live version to the track, then a free live version, so you have three versions, three choices to cut in and out of and ways to just keep everything together.
I’m also starting work with a band called Autolux that’s a really good rock & roll band; a modernist band, I would call them. A modernist beat band. I’ve never heard a band like them. One of them is from Russia, one is from Huntsville, Alabama… they’re from all over the place.”
You were recently quoted as saying the movie business was corrupt. Most say the music business is much more corrupt.
I’ve never experienced the sort of avarice in the music business that I’ve experienced in the movie business. I think years ago there were just flat-out gangsters in the record business, but that’s changed. First of all, people who like music are a pretty nice group of people, generally. Musicians are the most incredibly decent people I’ve ever met. I can think of very few musicians who aren’t kind, thoughtful, sensitive people.
But would you loan them your car?
Yeah, I would. Well, some of them I wouldn’t because they would obviously go sell it to buy dope. (laughs) But most musicians are very decent people. The film business is a very rough business.”
The movie business greedy, but not as exploitive as something like "American Idol.” They’re getting raped by their contracts.
But that’s the TV business. That’s a whole different business. The Backstreet Boys and a lot of those bands that came out got signed to really bad contracts, and that was a guy from the airline industry.
Lou Pearlman. He's Art Garfunkel’s cousin.
Oh, really.
He also has something called Options Talent.
That sounds perverse.
He’s asking people to pay $600-700 to have pictures taken and be put on a web site.
That’s wrong. You know what that should be? That would be an interstate commerce beef, I would think. Seriously. I think somebody should take that on a federal level, because that’s just wrong. You can’t make people pay. That’s just terrible.
[Note: In 2008, Pearlman was put on trial for perpetrating what was characterized as "one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history." He pled guilty to conspiracy, money laundering and making false statements was sentenced to 25 years in prison for swindling investors and major U.S. banks out of more than $300 million.]
Any thing you’re eager to do in show business other than producing?
No, there’s nothing. I just want to keep going every day. I’m in a real nice part of the record business, [where] people are really nice. People get all bent out of shape at the record companies these days. I’m doing a label and we’re doing very different kinds of deals. It’s called DMZ and it’s with Columbia. I have a company called D Pop and the co-head is Mike Zoss, so it’s our company to make records.
Does the label have a unique philosophy?
We’re trying to make good records. We have no quotas, so there’s no reason to put out records we don’t believe in with all our hearts. Basically, that’s it – just to put out good records.
Are the deals structured differently?
Oh, yeah. Because I’ve suffered through so many years of these artist contracts and the vicissitudes of them, I’m trying to give the artists the benefits of my mistakes. We’re trying to set up every artist to be successful. We’re trying to give them the kind of record deal in which they can be successful. We’re really working it out artist to artist. What does this artist need? We'll have them on the road long enough to do what they need to do. All you can do is make sure the artist is out there. We haven’t put out a record yet… The Autoluxe record will have a radio component, but the radio component is not the biggest part of the plan on any of the records we’re putting out. We just did a video with Ralph Stanley (through DMZ). We’re giving them better royalties, but I don’t want to talk about that because it’s unseemly, but it’s a more fair split. It’s a different way of looking at the splits.”
Will they be shorter deals?
We’re open to all of that. We’re just trying to make it appropriate. Rather than have a boiler plate and stick to it and be overly concerned about precedent.
Will the artists get to retain their masters?
I’m always open to that. As an artist myself, I own some of my masters and other people own some of my masters, and I’m very happy to have Columbia own some of my masters, because I know they’re going to be there forever. To own your own masters, you need a structure to keep them alive, otherwise they’ll just disappear. I think the ideal situation for an artist is to own some of his masters and to have some responsible great archive for some of them. And if you’re one of those incredibly lucky people who got to a point where you can have an archive of your own stuff, I don’t know if that’s such a great thing. You need a staff their constantly overseeing it and growing it.
No matter what’s going on with the record company, recording artists maintain most of their own rights, anyway. The record part of it is a very small part of it anyway, when you look at publishing, merchandising and all the things that happen over time with a successful artist.
I’m not saying that the record business isn’t corrupt, it’s just that a record costs $200,000 and a film costs $100 million. You can sort of figure out the multiplier of corruption in that formula somewhere. You can make a releasable album with zero dollars [with a computer]. The potential for corruption is so much greater, and because the costs are so great the avarice and the fear is exponentially greater.
You can have an album that fails, and no one knows.
Right.
If a film fails, people are going to notice.
That’s right. I didn’t want to sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy, because I know there are unscrupulous people. There always have been, but there aren’t the kind of gangsters there used to be, as far as I know.
[I ask a stupid question about him being an industry leader, obviously forced on to me by editors.]
This is the first I’ve heard of my being a leader. What I would like to see out of our leaders is more imagination. If I’m thrust into a leadership role I only hope that I would be inspired to use my imagination to address the problems we face today.
