T Bone Burnett wants you to know who he is. He wants you to know that he isn't just an esteemed producer and collaborator for artists like Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Ry Cooder, and Ralph Stanley; and he certainly isn't the beard-stroking archivist type a lot of us probably began to envision him as in the fourteen years since his last record, during which he became better known than ever for his production and soundtrack work (think O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain) than for his own music. Perhaps that's why the simultaneous release of these two discs, a retrospective and a brand new album, has been given such hefty meaning by Burnett himself, who in his liner notes to the retrospective referred to the T Bone of 1972 to 1992 as "a dead man," while the T Bone of 2006 and presumably beyond sets out to begin a new life "after forty years of wandering in the desert." Perhaps this is just his way of clearing the air, getting out a blank slate, and at last, allowing the real T Bone Burnett to stand up.

Then again, perhaps not. Because the trouble with Burnett — and the trait which makes him so consistently fascinating — is his complexity; his seemingly absolute unwillingness to be second-guessed. One can see all the ingredients in this latest pronouncement, from the Old Testament symbolism of the number forty to the New Testament "born again" trope, of the enigma that is T Bone Burnett's public persona: archaic, prophetic, willfully obscure, like a traveler from the distant past and the distant future all at once. His categorical summation of the first twenty years of his career, and his simultaneous teasing at the concept of identity, dares us to dig into these records and find out who he really is. But does this rabbit hole lead anywhere, or is it just another riddle within a riddle?

Let's start with the basics: T Bone Burnett is a staggeringly versatile artist. For proof of that fact, one need look no further than the first disc of Twenty Twenty. Sure, there's plenty of the austere Americana one might expect from the guy behind Down from the Mountain; but there's also everything from seething, tuneful quasi-New Wave ("Monkey Dance") to stomping blues-rock ("Tear This Building Down") to white reggae (the Alpha Band's "Born in Captivity"), from the dark-hearted jangle pop of "Fatally Beautiful" to a whole load of atmospheric, ominous avant-roots music, calling to mind the Bob Dylan of Infidels and Time Out of Mind.

Okay, I said it; and now that the "D" word's been uttered, I might as well go ahead and say that if one wanted to find a functional musical analogue or fellow-traveler for T Bone Burnett, Dylan would just about be it — and not only because Burnett first heightened his profile as one of the musical cast of thousands on Zimmy's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. In fact, Burnett's taste for verbose, cryptic, symbolism-ridden turns of phrase — as well as the occasional adenoidal sneer — make him for once a deserving recipient of the "New Dylan" award; though he's nowhere near as accessible as the man behind "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," or "Like a Rolling Stone," with a little effort T Bone Burnett can be every bit as compelling.