Written by Steve Earle has never been just a country singer. Throughout his life has read like a rock’n’roll parable: the bacchanalian rebel with a taste for booze, bad drugs and run-ins with the law.
From his rural Texas childhood through a career in Nashville (and now New York City), Earle has survived six tumultuous marriages, heroin and crack addiction, jail, rehab and near-death. He’s also produced a stream of genre-defying records – welding honky-tonk to rockabilly, bluegrass to punk and, as on 2007’s Washington Square Serenade, country to trip-hop.
He’s also a novelist, playwright, DJ, political activist and, with his role as recovering drug addict Waylon in HBO’s The Wire, a TV actor. “I didn’t have to act,” Earle quipped.
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Earle began playing guitar at 11. By 14, he’d left home for Houston, where he met like-minded rebel Townes Van Zandt, another hard-living songwriter. Earle later called him “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”
Earle landed in Nashville in the early 70s, taking blue-collar jobs in the day and playing bass with Guy Clark at night. After years of aborted record deals, MCA picked up the free-spirited 30-year-old in 1985.
His sensational debut Guitar Town marked him down as a workingman’s troubadour à la Bruce Springsteen / John Mellencamp. 1988’s anthemic Copperhead Road was an international success, yet Earle was already heavily into a self-destructive lifestyle.
By 1994, he was arrested for drug possession and landed a jail sentence. Post-rehab, he returned stronger than ever. Both the all-acoustic Train A Comin’ and I Feel Alright were raw, thrilling albums that sounded, literally, like a man reborn. Earle’s gift for rousing narratives and driving rock’n’roll, tempered by artful ballads, were fully to the fore on 1997’s El Corazon, a record that also captured his catch-all appeal.
Recent years have found him railing against the death penalty, attacking America’s “war on terror” and calling for a tolerant new kind of patriotism. The resulting albums, particularly Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts…Now, are as impassioned as anything he’s ever done.
He’s also paid tributes to fallen friends: 2009’s Townes celebrated his old buddy Townes Van Zandt, while 2019’s Guy did the same for former boss Guy Clark. In January 2021 he released J.T., a collection of songs written by his late son, Justin Townes Earle, and followed it a year later with Jerry Jeff, celebrating the music of folk singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker.
His art, it seems, still lives in extremis. “I’m into pain and joy,” he once said, “and the in-between doesn’t interest me.”
…and one to avoid
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