As a musician, songwriter and producer, T Bone Burnett has left his mark on the recording industry in indelible fashion. Yet over the past decade in particular, he’s also burnished his reputation and widened his circle of admirers through much work in film — continuing a collaborative relationship over several movies with Joel and Ethan Coen, serving as the music producer on Walk the Line and Across the Universe, and winning an Academy Award as part of his work as a producer, songwriter and composer on Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart.

His latest big screen endeavor is one of his most challenging. For the Coen brothers‘ Inside Llewyn Davis, set against the backdrop of the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s, Burnett worked with the filmmakers and star Oscar Isaac in capturing the live performances of a talented but seemingly luckless folk singer whose Sisyphusian professional struggles and wrecked personal life combine to elicit a toxic mixture of quiet rage and resignation. I recently had a chance to speak to Burnett at the film’s Los Angeles press day — about the difficulty of capturing the movie’s music live, how he typically works with the Coens, and how (and why) he keeps much of modern-day popular culture at arm’s length. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.