‘ALWAYS A LITTLE BIT OF COUNTRY IN EVERYTHING I DO’
Steve Earle’s roots show strongly in his latest album
He may do a musical detour now and again, but Steve Earle always comes back to his country roots.
At least that’s how it appears to be on the outside. If you suggest that this is the case to Earle, however, he’ll beg to differ.
“There’s always a little bit of country in everything I do,” Earle scoffs from his Detroit hotel room, where he’s enjoying a rare day off by watching a Yankees game while fielding interview questions. “All I have to do is open my mouth and it’s there; it’s embedded in everything I do.”
The country voice may be lurking underneath such albums as 2015’s Terraplane, where he dug deep into the blues, or such songs as Johnny Come Lately, where he made the intersections between Celtic music and Americana explicit by recording with The Pogues, but it’s absolutely undeniable on his 16th effort, So You Wanna Be an Outlaw, which was released back in June.
A collection of songs written in homage to the Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings era of ’70s outlaw country, Earle’s latest finds him singing with Nelson himself on the title track, paying tribute to friend and early influence Guy Clark on Goodbye Michelangelo, and dueting with Miranda Lambert on the heartbreaker This is How it Ends. It’s an enjoyable album that ranges farther musically than some reviews suggest, at points deflating the outlaw myth in the process.
We spoke with Earle about the new album, his fond feelings for the outlaw originals, and his wary relationship with the country music establishment.
Q What prompted you to make such an overtly outlaw-flavoured album?
A What happened was, I had written a song for (TV show) Nashville because (musical director) T-Bone Burnett asked me to. It turned out to be in that particular outlaw groove, and when Buddy Miller asked for another one in the second season, I gave them Looking for a Woman (which ended up on Earle’s album). I realized then that I’d been listening a lot to Waylon Jennings’ (1974 album) Honky Tonk Heroes and just went for it.
Q It’s an important milestone in the genre.
A It’s the Exile on Main Street of country music. Waylon had to fight tooth and nail to make it with his band, which you did not do in those days, and it was built around the way he played electric guitar; it’s country riff-rock.
Q You could draw a parallel here because your first album (1986’s Guitar Town) came out in a time where Nashville was going through a similar shakeup as the outlaw period.
A It came out 10 years later, yes, but I’m not sure if you understand what the term “outlaw” means. Waylon and Willie and those guys were called outlaws because they made records the way they wanted to. It was about the songs, and playing with a good band rather than being on the assembly line and making records based on someone else’s radio success. It connects for me because I was in Nashville in that period as a teen, and if I’d gotten a record deal, I would have been part of it as well. There was a moment when I arrived in Nashville where
the inmates were in charge of the asylum for just a second, and that window closed before I could get in. It took me 13 years and another credibility scare in country music to get that record deal.
Q You made good on that deal with some early hits like Copperhead Road, thankfully.
A Well, no. Copperhead Road was never played on country radio; it was always played on the rock stations. It only gets played now on country radio because they’ve gotten this revisionist idea that it’s part of their culture. Guitar Town was the song that got played on the radio. I’ve always had a contentious relationship with country radio.
Q Yet you’re considered to be an enduring country music icon by that world.
A The country music that I make and listen to isn’t necessarily what’s considered country at any given time in the mainstream. It’s all Johnny Cash, Waylon and Willie and Hank Williams for me.