They broke the mould when they made Steve Earle. The last of the hardcore troubadours was the title of a song on his ‘I Feel Alright’ album – one of a set of defiant songs asserting that despite his checkered past he was still standing and still more than capable of writing great songs.
That title was also used for the warts and all biography of the man covering his five wives, recurring drink and drug habits and time in prison. That he’s still alive to tell the tale is a miracle in itself as is the fact that at almost 55 he is still making albums that matter.
His latest album, the Grammy nominated ‘Townes’ is a set of covers of his mentor Townes Van Zandt who he met at the tender age of 17. Van Zandt was almost 11 years his senior and died aged 53 and perhaps it’s no coincidence that Earle has decided to make this album at about the age his hero passed on.
Fortunately, having just seen Earle perform solo on stage at Faenza, Italy, I can say that he looks good for a few years yet. He seems to have licked his drug/booze dependency and thrown his energy in music and writing. He announced that he has a novel coming out in 2010 as well as a collection of original songs produced by T-Bone Burnett.
In a two-hour set, around a third of the songs were from the Townes album, most of which he prefaced with anecdotes about a singer-songwriter who is not the first (or the last) to have has achieved wider recognition dead than in his lifetime.
What strikes you about Earle is that he still has the same passion and feisty spirit but this is more focused – “I realised recently I’ve written a fuck of a lot of songs”, he says, “I guess that’s what happens when you don’t die”.
He admits that he can’t remember all his back catalog but in introducing ‘Goodbye’ he says he can be sure that this was written fifteen years ago when he was 40 because it was the first song he wrote sober!
Maybe because of this emotional link, he performed it with more tenderness and you could hear most of the words, something that was not true for most of other the tunes he played. Earle’s distinctive Texan growl meant the lines were mostly slurred and indecipherable. If he’d played more songs in the same vein as ‘Goodbye’, I’d have gone home more contented.
As it was, I was happy to have seen one of music’s great survivors but disappointed that the intelligent songs didn’t make the same impact live as they do on record.
