Colvin and Earle a natural musical match
Seasoned musicians have a lot of living behind them to put into collaboration
SEATTLE — When Shawn Colvin visited Seattle in January, she said she was working on a project with fellow singer-songwriter Steve Earle.
Now she and Earle are touring in support of their first album together, simply titled Colvin & Earle.
Colvin and Earle are a natural match, musically and personally. Earle, 61, had a hit country album in 1986 with Guitar Town and got a second wind a few years back playing a street musician on the TV series Treme.
Colvin, 60, is a three-time Grammy winner whose single Sunny Came Home won both song and record of the year in 1998.
Beyond that shared folk-rock history, both players also share rocky histories.
Colvin wrote about her depression, alcohol abuse and anorexia in her memoir Diamond in the Rough.
Earle has been homeless at least once, thanks to drugs, and married seven times (twice to the same woman).
Colvin lives alone now — happily, she says — with two divorces in her wake.
With all that living behind them, they have a lot to sing about on Colvin & Earle.
“Standing by the highway, and I’m a mess,” they belt out on the album’s hard-driving opener, Come What May, whose title could stand as a credo.
You’re Right (I’m Wrong) is a sentiment familiar to anyone who’s been in a relationship more than five minutes.
On You’re Still Gone, Colvin and Earle wearily lament that “everyone looks like you,” and yet sweet tenderness surfaces on The Way That We Do, a verse-trading ballad with a lived-in line worthy of the Everly Brothers: “Nobody cries, nobody tries, the way that we do.”
The opinionated, raspy-voiced Earle was full of fascinating lore about the cover songs on the album.
Ruby Tuesday, the killer fourth track, he considers “the best song the Rolling Stones ever wrote.”
Tobacco Road, a 1964 hit for the British band The Nashville Teens, offered Earle an early role model for the songwriter he would become.
“By that time, if I heard a song, I’d look to see who wrote it,” he said. “John D. Loudermilk was in Nashville.”
Loudermilk wrote not only Tobacco Road, but hits for everyone from the Everlys to Johnny Cash.
Folkies will be pleased to hear the old Ian & Sylvia anthem You Were On My Mind, including the second verse (about getting drunk), omitted in the scrubbed hit version by We Five.
“Sylvia wrote us an email that she was really happy we restored her second verse,” said Earle.
The pair soars on that song, but really hits its stride on Emmylou Harris’s Raise the Dead and the rousing Tell Moses, which started as a mandolin piece Earle had been playing for years.
Come What May, he said, grew out of a riff he would always play any time he tried a new guitar.
“I knew it would become a song,” he said. “I finally just wrote it.”