Singer doesn’t look back often or easily
Since 1986, Steve Earle has put together an eclectic career that has encompassed country, rock, bluegrass and blues — almost always with a resolutely forward-looking approach.
“I’m just trying to find a way to make records that are interesting,” Earle, 62, said by phone from Seattle.
“To do that, I’ve got to keep me interested and keep the audience interested. I think the two things go hand in hand.”
During the past year or so, however, the past has been of unusual interest to Earle.
He considers his latest album, “So You Wannabe an Outlaw” (released in June), to be the spiritual or philosophical — both his words — companion to “Guitar Town” (1986).
Like that gold-certified album, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Country Albums chart, “So You Wannabe an Outlaw” is a country-rock blend with an attitude drawn from the outlaw-country movement of Tompall Glaser, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.
It has the same genre-blending musical aggressiveness that country purists found offputting 30 years ago and a lyrical honesty that’s both insightful and occasionally uncomfortable.
It comes on the heels of the 30th anniversary of “Guitar Town,” so returning to that root was “happenstance,” Earle said, but not exactly coincidence.
“I was in that mindset, in that zone,” he acknowledged.
“Once I started writing to purpose, I knew what this record was going to be. I wrote (the title track) and I wrote the second verse for Willie Nelson to sing, hoping I’d get him to do it. He said yes, and that was the beginning of everything. We just went from there.”
The full-circle nature of “So You Wannabe an Outlaw” — including the participation of producer Richard Bennett, who plays guitar in Earle’s band, the Dukes, and also worked on “Guitar Town” — certainly brought back memories for Earle, both good and bad.
Earle — born in Virginia and raised in San Antonio — became hooked on music in his preteen years and dropped out of high school when he was 16. He kicked around the Texas music scene before moving to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1974. There, he played in Guy Clark’s band and was a staff songwriter for a couple of publishing companies, selling songs to Johnny Lee, Carl Perkins and Connie Smith, among others.
Earle and the Dukes signed with MCA Records, a deal that led to “Guitar Town,” a critically lauded album that launched Top-10 hits in the title track and “Goodbye’s All We’ve Got Left” and was nominated for a pair of Grammy Awards.
However, Earle faced resistance from the Nashville country establishment, which found his sound a bit too maverick for its established conventions.
“It pissed me off when people told me what I was doing wasn’t country, when I had the No. 1 country album,” he recalled.
“I had that one moment where, as far as I was concerned, I defined what country was. There was about 30 seconds, around the time I left Texas and arrived in Nashville, when the inmates were pretty much in charge of that asylum, but there was even a lot of (garbage) on country radio back then. I was never coming from a very mainstream place.”
Earle has pursued his own path ever since, with a rich career encompassing 21 albums and plenty of personal turbulence, including seven marriages and mid1990s arrests for drugs and weapons that led to a 60-day incarceration.
The enforced break from recording actually did him some good on the musical as well as personal fronts.
“When I got out of jail, I hadn’t sung for 4½ years,” said Earle, who also has written a novel, a play and a book of short stories; acted in the HBO series “Treme” (201011); and written songs for the show as well. “I didn’t write any songs, so I didn’t sing.
“The combination of some damage that had been done and the rest that my vocal cords got, I discovered that I could sing soft and there was something cool about that, because before that I’d always sung full-throttle. If you listen to ‘Guitar Town’ and ‘Exit O’ (1987) and all my (early) albums, my voice sounds a lot more one-dimensional.
“I’m just a lot better singer now than I was then — a better player, too.”
The latter helped Earle embrace the rocking nature of “So You Wannabe an Outlaw.”
“You know, playing a lot of acoustic guitar and no electric guitar for several years helped,” he explained. “I’ve owned this ’55 (Fender) Telecaster for years, mainly as a collector’s piece. I played it maybe on one track on another record, and tended toward my way-morefriendly-and-forgiving electric guitars that didn’t show my sins as clearly. But this time I used that guitar and made myself play it the right way.”
There came a moment in November, however, when Earle almost did some major surgery on “So You Wannabe an Outlaw.”
A supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders in last year’s presidential race, Earle was “resigned to Hillary Clinton being president” and “wrote maybe half of this record believing it.” After Donald Trump’s victory in the general election, Earle recalled, “I thought about scuttling maybe a third of the record or half the record and writing some political stuff.”
Then he thought differently, though, and decided to leave it as it was.
“You know, I made this record for a reason,” he explained. “I’m really proud of these songs. Things I’ve done as a songwriter in various other areas I’ve dabbled in come to bear on this album. As a writer I’m really proud of these songs, so as a writer I decided to let it live the way I intended it to be.”