Steve Earle will be here with Allison Moorer during the US Presidential election. Does he have an opinion? You bet. By Brian Wise
“Are we ready to elect a black man? Are we ready to even say that and talk about it? We get to know what the fuck we’re made out of now! I want to know the answer.”
Any conversation with Steve Earle is bound to be
interesting. A musician who wears his heart on his sleeve, Earle shares
his opinions freely, even when they are not requested. In many ways he
is the ideal interviewee because, unlike other musicians who might be
guarded about their opinions, Earle has gone beyond the stage of being
worried that a controversial sentence might damage his popularity. And,
in the course of twenty minutes he probably says more than most other
people can say in an hour anyway.
Earle’s ‘personal problems,’
marriages and politics are well-known. He has been making music for
more than thirty years and despite the publicity for a host of real or
imagined ills he has suffered or inflicted on himself and others, the
fact is that he is one of the greatest songwriters of the modern era.
Earle has a right to stand alongside his idols Townes van Zandt and Guy
Clark as a writer par excellence, though I suspect he would never claim
that honour.
With a dozen solo studio albums in the past 22
years – and a musical history that stretches back at least a decade
earlier - Earle is still at the top of his game. His latest album,
Washington Square Serenade, won a Grammy earlier this year for Best
Contemporary Folk/Americana album. It joins his Grammy of three years
earlier for The Revolution Starts Now.
When we meet by phone,
Earle - who has lived in New York for the past few years with his wife
Allison Moorer - is in Nashville getting ready for the Americana Music
Conference. He is cooking chilli and I can hear him breathe heavier as
he stirs the pot (an image that is somewhat of a metaphor) and politely
requests a yelping dog to keep quiet.
Earle proudly tells me
that his son, Justin Townes Earle (who put out his own fine album this
year) has been nominated for an award as Emerging Artist Of The Year
and that he (Steve) will also be presenting an award to legendary folk
singer Joan Baez, whose latest album Day After Tomorrow, he has
recently produced.
Earle neglects to mention the fact that he
has been nominated for Artist Of The Year, along with Levon Helm, Jim
Lauderdale and James McMurtry. I actually think the fact that he
modestly overlooked his own achievement is a better reflection of the
man than all the second-hand stories about him.
“Well, she’s
fucking Joan Baez,” he says of the folk legend when I start the
conversation by congratulating him on his great production job. “She
wanted straight out to make a great record. So I had some people in
Nashville who might be able to play on it. So I made the phone calls
put the band together.”
I interviewed her just the other week and she couldn’t speak more highly of you.
Well,
you know, it’s an honour. I’ve had the honour for several years of
having two songs that Joan Baez sings every night. Now I have three and
maybe more on this tour because there are three of my songs on the
record.
How does it feel as an artist not only to work with a
genuine music legend but to also have her record and play your songs in
concert?
Levon Helm recorded ‘The Mountain’ this year and one of
the biggest deals for me was that Guy Clark recorded ‘Fort Worth Blues’
a few years ago, which was very special to me because our connection is
Townes [Van Zandt], which is what the song is about. It never occurred
to me, for some reason, that Guy would ever record one of my songs.
He’s one of the people I learnt how to do this from. So it’s a big deal
when one of those people record your songs. There’s no doubt about it.
What
was Joan like to work with? You have known her for a few years,
obviously. Was it any easy process recording? How did you approach it?
Well,
you have to approach it with a certain amount of reverence because if
you’re under-estimating how an artist like Joan Baez is then you’re
making a mistake and you’re not gonna get it and she deserves that and
the music requires that. I’ve never been at a session where everybody
brought their records for someone to sign the way they did for this
record. I mean, all of us brought something for Joan to sign at some
point or another.
The temptation I had was to keep asking her
about Bob Dylan and I had to actively resist that but I bet she’s got
some great stories to tell.
Oh, she does and she’d funny, she
tells stories whenever she gets ready to. I don’t think you could drag
them out of her if you could if she didn’t want to tell you. I’ve heard
some stuff that I’m very, very fascinated with. She was around when my
job was being invented.
I live literally on the street that Suzie
Rotolo and Bob Dylan are walking down on the cover of The Freewheelin’
Bob Dylan - in New York City - and that’s my primary residence these
days. I’m very fascinated with that period of time because I think it
changed music forever.
Arguably rock‘n’roll got elevated to an art
form by Bob Dylan just because the folk thing is what made lyrics
important. Without The Beatles hearing Dylan and John Lennon writing
‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,’ I don’t think lyrics would have
become important as they did and I think, arguably, rock would have
remained a loud sub-genre kind of music rather than developing into the
art form that it did.
So it must be pretty awesome working with
someone who was there at the time and had the first hand experience -
in fact, introduced Dylan into her audiences.
Yes, there’s no
doubt about that – Joan and probably Izzy Young, who lives in Stockholm
now but I know Izzy as well. I know a handful of the people. Dave Van
Ronk is gone now. I only met him once before he died but he lived
around the corner from where I live and these are people who helped
make Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan. He was definitely a force of nature and he
was gonna be something but they all had a hand in him coming what he
became.
Well, certainly New York changed Bob Dylan. Has it changed you over the last few years? You obviously enjoy living there?
I
think it has in a good way and I think I needed it. You gotta keep
changing and you gotta keep growing. I wouldn’t be the same person if I
hadn’t toured as much as I have. I think the way I think and my
worldview - whatever that means - is a part of who I am.
I see a lot
more than a lot Americans see. It’s a big country and if you live in
the middle of it – and I come from the middle of it – you could live
out your whole life and never hear anyone speak another language except
for maybe Spanish.
I like being able to travel all over the world –
it’s made me part of who I am and living in New York has been really
good for me at this point in our history – to keep my hopes up about us
what we can turn out to be. Just to live in a place where it is really
obvious that every great nation in the world was built by immigrants
from somewhere – not forgetting that we need that new blood all the
time. I needed to be reminded of that - and it helps to be able to buy
any book, see any movie, see new plays too.
The older you get the
more things start to shake up a little bit. Art is recycling to a
certain extent. You have to put something in to get stuff out.
You’re
going to be touring here shortly after the Presidential election. I’m
pretty sure you’re not going to be voting Republican.
No, I
won’t be. I can’t deny that McCain is a hero - even though I opposed
that war too, actively opposed it. I was old enough to be drafted by
the end of it. So I was in the fucking street - you can count on that.
I’ll actually be in Australia when the voting takes place. We are
voting early because of that.
I don’t think we can withstand four
more years of what we had and McCain has promised us four more years of
what happened under Bush as far as Iraq is concerned. I think that as
far as this financial crisis we are in now - all the stuff going on -
the war is an economic issue: it has cost trillions of dollars and I
don’t think we have a chance of getting anything close to back on the
right track until we get out of Iraq.
I was watching the Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young movie, Déjà vu. They got a negative reaction to
their views, particularly in the South at time. You’re very forthright
in your concerts. What sort of reaction do you get? Do you find you
sort of engender a fairly lively response amongst the audiences or is
it mainly preaching to the converted?
Well, there is a lot of
preaching to the converted - there is not any doubt it. My audience is
obviously smaller than Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I’m not near as
political than Neil is. I’ll see Neil at Farm Aid and we see each other
there every year.
I’m probably not more political than David Crosby
and Graham Nash are individually but I’m probably more overtly
political as an artist than Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as an act
are.
In people’s minds they go in there and they want to hear
‘Helplessly Hoping.’ I guess they might want to hear ‘Ohio’ but they
don’t want to think about what it’s about. It’s one of those things.
Of
course, that didn’t happen everywhere. The film’s about the places
where it was like that and they reacted that way. He’s being really
honest about it. I think it’s a lesson for artists. It’s really
important that we not censor ourselves.
All those guys have made
enough money and I think it was very brave of them. Trust me, there is
no way Neal could make Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and David Crosby do
something they didn’t want to do.
So it was discussed and they all
decided, ‘Yeah, we could just go have a career and make some money but
we have this forum and we are gonna use it and I thought it was really
brave and I thought it was pretty impressive.
Having been to
America many times in the last few years the mood has changed
dramatically, hasn’t it? Early on, you would never hear anyone
criticise the President no matter what party they voted for. That’s
changed?
Well, I think it’s changed. I think that was a
relatively new attitude when it happened at the beginning of this war -
that all of a sudden it was considered criminal to criticise anything
the administration did. But I think people are sick of that and they
are over it.
I don’t think this election’s going to be about that.
It should be about the Iraq War but it’s being about other things too.
I’m hoping it becomes about that before it’s over with - and I think it
might - but right now it’s about the war the way it turned out. It’s
going to be about whether we are ready to put money where our mouth is
and whether America is really literally a place where anybody can be
president of the United States.
Are we ready to elect a black man?
Are we ready to even say that and talk about it? You know what? It
would have been the same thing if Hillary Clinton had been nominated.
Are we ready to elect a woman? We get to know what the fuck were made
out of now! I want to know the answer. I know what I’m going to do.
This
is history getting ready to be made, one way or the other. I think we
either define ourselves as people that are growing and changing or we
put the last nail in the coffin.
We are going to find out soon enough. Have you been writing any new songs recently? What’s the status of a new recording?
There
are a couple of songs that are trying to get written but I’m trying to
ignore them, for two reasons. One is I have to book to finish. So what
I’m going to do is my next record is going to be a record of Townes Van
Zandt songs and I’m going to start recording that immediately and try
to get it out in the Spring of next year, early summer. I’m going to
try and record it between now and Christmas and then while they’re
setting it up I’m going to finish my novel which I’ve been working on
for six years and I want to finish it. I need three months but doing
nothing but the book everyday to get to it finished.
Let me ask you if you are going to record my favourite Townes’ song which is ‘Pancho And Lefty.’
Definitely. I think only a wuss would make a Townes Van Zandt record and not record ‘Pancho And Lefty.’
You
know I don’t think I’ve heard a bad version of that song and I have to
say that every time I hear it I am moved to tears by it.
It’s a
great song. I’m very rarely going to approach it from trying to
reinvent the wheel. By and large it will be based on seeing Townes
perform these songs beginning when I was sixteen years old. There will
be a couple of exceptions. I’m thinking about doing something a little
different with ‘Lungs’ just because I’ve sung it for years and years
and Lyle [Lovett] also recorded it. But I am going to record it because
actually I’ve been doing it longer than almost any of his songs.
I’m
going to do a couple of things with the Bluegrass Band. I’m going too
do ‘White Freightliner Blues’ and probably ‘Don’t You Take It too Bad.’
Then rest of is going to be a lot like the last record was: me working
with ProTools and playing a lot of acoustic instruments myself.
Well having heard you do a fantastic version of a Tom Waits’ song on your last album…..
That
was The Wire. That’s why that happened. It’s a HBO television show
created by David Simon, set in Baltimore. It’s about the war on drugs.
The Tom Waits’ song ‘Way Down In The Hole’ was the theme and a
different artist recorded it every year. I worked on the show as an
actor from the beginning often and I had a recurring character. I
played a redneck, recovering addict - which didn’t require any acting,
actually, when I think about it. Then, the last year I knew the show
was going to be over and I sort of had a fit and insisted that I record
it. So that’s where that came from for that record.
Well, it’s a
great version and I guess the secret to an interpretation is keeping
the spirit of something and the feel of it and putting your own stamp
on it at the same time, isn’t it?
Yeah, I was trying to get it
back …..but there were there were several versions. If you have heard
all the other versions that were recorded for the show I was trying to
take it a little closer to Tom’s version because it had gotten pretty
far from it. The first version was the Blind Boys Of Alabama. The
second year was the Waits version. The third year they used a reggae
version by the Nevilles and then the last year was a hip-hop crew from
Baltimore called DoMaJe. I sort of did it pretty organic but not
without its hip-hop elements and if you ever saw the show, you’ll
understand that.
Speaking of song choices I’m wondering how much
input you had into Allison’s latest album [Mockingbird] because the
song choice is terrific. You resisted the temptation to – or maybe you
didn’t want to – produce it. But she has a great producer in Buddy
Miller.\
I produced the record before and we were making records at the same time and so it
was
impossible for me to produce it. So she started pre-production on her
record while I was recording mine and I was there for only two days for
the recording on her record. But Buddy Miller is pretty fuckin’ good.
So she was in good hands. But she’s pretty much beyond ‘what do you
think about this’ around the house.
I think the only influence I had
on the song selection on that record was that I did say in beginning of
it that you almost had to include Joni Mitchell, ‘Blue,’ and I was a
strong advocate. Apart from Joni and the McGarrigles – because I
thought they should definitely be there - everything else was a hundred
per cent hers.
It wasn’t you who suggested the Patti Smith song? [‘Dancing Barefoot’] Which I must say is a great choice.
No!
That was completely and totally Allison. I certainly think Patti Smith
is a really important writer. A lot of it is, we live in New York and
we know Patti. I think that was very much her own sort of being
around.….. I was an artist on the Meltdown [festival] that they do in
London when Patti curated it and Allison was there. She’s definitely
seen a lot more of that force of nature that is Patti Smith in the last
couple of years but I had nothing to do with that – not even close to
my suggestions that she do that.
Steve Earle will be touring with Allison Moorer next month. His latest studio album is Washington Square Serenade.