Steve Earle: ‘I have to have some optimism about me to survive’
We don’t need to slap some high-falutin label like “Renaissance Man” on Steve Earle. However, it could certainly apply to the alt-country legend, who, along with influencing about half the guys you hear both on country radio and in the Americana scene, has been an actor (“The Wire”), a novelist, an off-Broadway producer, a record producer, a Sirius XM deejay and a tireless activist.
On Friday, the singer-songwriter from San Antonio, Texas, comes to Pittsburgh in the artist/activist role, teaming with longtime friend Emmylou Harris on The Lantern Tour, benefiting the Women’s Refugee Commission, which advances the rights of refugee women and children around the world.
They will be joined at the Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall in Munhall by Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, Amy Helm, Gaby Moreno and Thao.
Earle, who hit the scene in a big way in 1986 with “Guitar Town” and had his biggest success two years later with the epic single “Copperhead Road,” has released two albums since the beginning of the pandemic, both with tragic undertones. The first was “Ghosts of West Virginia,” a song cycle used in “Coal Country,” a theater piece about the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 29 coal miners in 2010.
The more personal one, released in January, was “J.T.,” a loving tribute to his son, singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle, who died of an accidental drug overdose in December 2020.
In advance of The Lantern Tour, Earle spoke to us on the phone from New York City.
It’s good to see you back out again. I’m sure your live shows have been a little sporadic over the past 18 months.
Well, they were for a while. We did do a tour with the Dukes. We didn’t get it west of the Rockies ’cause we didn’t get started till July 1, and my touring shuts down Labor Day because I got a kid in school who has autism, and he has to be back here in New York City by then. So I only tour in the summertime as far as full-blown tours go.
But we did get out, and we played about 44 shows in 60 days, and it was great to be out playing for people. So I’m looking forward to this ‘cause these are all friends of mine, for the most part, and Emmy and I did the [Concerts for a Landmine Free World] together. We were the two constants on those concerts. There were other people every year, but she and I did every one of them. Emmy got me into it: She did my death penalty stuff and I did her Landmine stuff, and some of the same people involved with the Landmine concerts, Gail Griffith, are organizing these concerts, so there are some constants involved.
How far do you go back with Emmy? Where did you first encounter her?
Oh, the mid-’70s, I met her. She probably doesn’t remember it. I was playing bass for Guy Clark in the mid-’70s and we met several times then. She remembers, you know, basically early ’80s when she moved to Nashville. We’ve been friends since then.
What drew you to the refugee cause, and how is it important to the moment?
Well, we first started these during the Trump administration, and we did two for the Jesuit Refugee Service, and then this was just a better fit for Emmy and I and some of the other people involved with the Women’s Refugee Commission. They were the people that were actually getting into these camps. And so it’s a great organization that works with refugees all over the world. Refugees used to be something that we talked about in terms of things that happen someplace else in the world. It’s not that way anymore. It hasn’t been for a while now. I’ve been looking more domestically for the causes that I get into — a lot of anti-war stuff since we decided that we were going to be at war constantly. The refugee thing. ... I’m from Texas, that has a lot to do with it. This one really hit home with me, and the camps that most people were talking about were in Texas. I got to see all that a lot more close up. These folks do great work, and they’re deserving of our support.
I was thinking the other day about “The Revolution Starts Now” album [from 2004], which was very inspiring, and how maybe with that mindset, we’d be in better shape than we are right now.
Right. I always had that hope. But I just don’t have it in me to believe in hopeless cases or lost causes. I’m an optimist. I’m a recovering heroin addict. I have to have some optimism about me to survive. That’s just the way it is.
We’ve all certainly needed it in the past year and half or so.
Yeah, it’s been hard for everybody, and one of the things that I realized I missed most was just audiences. My mental health crisis was about lack of audiences more than it was anything else, ’cause that’s what I do.
I’m always amazed at the fire that musicians have that keeps them going beyond that age when a lot of people are thinking about retiring.
I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal, the whole concept of retirement, when you do something that you love doing. I’ll never retire. Why would I retire? I mean, I could have a health issue that I don’t tour anymore or something like that, but I don’t intend to do that. I don’t tour as much as I used to because of my son and just trying to keep getting him what he needs. But I love to tour, and I’m concentrating on theater music these days ’cause it was just an ambition I had — something I wanted to do was I wanted to write musicals. And that’s why I’m in New York. And that’s why I’m trying to do that. Retiring is a foreign concept to me, because why would I do that?
Tell me about the “J.T.” album. How did you bring yourself to do it, emotionally? And how difficult was it?
Well, it wasn’t that hard to do, actually, because it was what I needed to do. I had to have some help putting the material together because I wasn’t quite ready to go through all eight albums and an EP to figure out what I needed to record. So his brother, Ian, helped me with that and I’ll be forever grateful for that, ’cause I just didn’t have it in me to go through it all. And I wanted it out by his birthday. Also, we’re going to do a concert at the Ryman Auditorium for what would have been his 40th birthday next year. It’ll be Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires and Old Crow and Joe Pug and a lot of people that were friends and contemporaries of his, and then Emmy and Buddy Miller, because they knew him all his life.
That’s great. In previewing a lot of country and country-rock people, I
can’t tell you how many times I’ve said they sound like Steve Earle. I’m wondering if you feel like you get the recognition from a lot of those artists that sound like you?
If you’re talking about new mainstream country artists, there’s a lot of them that are fans and they grew up with my music, and I take responsibility for some of the things I’ve done. I’m responsible for the drums being too [expletive] loud, ’cause I don’t even do that anymore. But you know, it was the ’80s. What the [heck], you know, drums were loud. We were all trying to keep up with Bruce Springsteen and [producer] Bob Clearmountain, so the drums were really loud. I mean, I’m being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame Monday, and Emmy’s going to sing for me. And I still tell people to go to Nashville if they want to be songwriters. I think it’s the best place to learn how to do it. I don’t live there anymore. Part of it was getting tired of being behind enemy lines, politically — not so much in Nashville itself, but Tennessee in general. But a lot of it was just I wanted to do this theater thing, and the place you can do that is in New York.
Well, it seems like the mainstream machine didn’t agree with you for very long or you didn’t agree with it.
I think it’s always been that way. It’s never been a particularly singer-songwriter-friendly town, because singersongwriters are harder to control, and publishers had as much to do with running the town as record labels, originally. And they wanted to be able to get songs recorded. They had the new Tin Pan Alley going, and that’s how they made their living, so that’s how they wanted it to work. I never took it personally. There were people before me that fought the same battles, to varying degrees of success, but mostly, you know, it ended the way that it ended. I wasn’t there to get other people to record my songs. I wanted to make records, and I did, and I got to make them on my own terms, for the most part, and I didn’t stay on country radio very long, but I have a career, so I’m grateful that I had that moment. We refer to it as a Great Credibility Scare of the 1980s in Nashville, and without it, I wouldn’t have anything. So, I’m OK with it.
There aren’t many artists who crossed over between rock and country radio at all. I guess Chris Stapleton might be an example, but it’s very rare.
It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. It’s always been a rare thing. It’s always been a rare thing when people tried to do it on purpose.
Did you have to make a conscious decision at any point, which direction you were going to go in?
I made several of them, just as a matter of self-preservation. I made a rockabilly record [“Pink & Black”] because there was a thing going on with rockabilly, and it got me interested in playing electric guitar for the first time. And I put it out on an independent label, and it got me a major-label record deal. That’s why Epic signed me, and that didn’t work out, but it got people paying attention to me. And I’d been in town a long time. That was ’82 and I’d been in town since ’74. “Guitar Town” didn’t happen until ’86, so it was a long process for me. I think it’s the way it was supposed to be. I don’t have any problems with it. I’m not bitter about any of it. It’s just one of those things. As Minnie Pearl used to say, “I’m just so proud to be here.”
It seems like a lot of the true artists just don’t want to be bound to a genre and make the same record over and over again.
I don’t want to hear the same record over and over again, and probably, that hurts me, you know, because people like to be able to classify stuff, but the truth is, I knew that was true and I made that decision and I’m not bitter about it. I know that I would have probably been a bigger deal if I’d stuck to one thing and I didn’t. I made that decision on purpose and I’m OK with it. I don’t blame anybody. It’s just the way that it is, and I knew that when I did it.
I was thinking of Neil Young in the ’80s and ’90s, just going from one genre to another ...
A lot of that was because a record label sued him because he turned in one record he liked, that he wanted to do artistically, and they tried to sue him on the basis that it wasn’t a Neil Young record. And he sued them and won. And years later, Warner Records dropped me because I made a bluegrass record, and, basically, they tried to force me to make another record and not accept “The Mountain” when I turned it in. And I had it in my contract that they had to take it. And when they didn’t take it, they had to let me go. And our answer was “What part of Neil Young and David Geffen and [expletive you] did you not understand?” But I wasn’t even bitter about that and it got me out. I put “The Mountain” out and that was the only master I ended up owning up to that point in my career. I have my attorney to thank for that. And she’s still my attorney for that reason.
Too bad for them, because that’s one of your finest albums.
I think so. It’s one of the records I’m proudest of, you know. It’s a good record.
Just to circle back: What is the format of this show?
It’s a guitar pool. It’ll be me, Emmy. Larry and Theresa are there as a duo, ’cause they’re really good at it, and Larry also helps me be the band for everybody. We always need a multi-instrumentalist like Larry. Basically, everybody sings a song and then it passes to the next person. We’re in a semi-circle on the stage, and everybody accompanies everybody else and we collaborate. It’s pretty cool. It’s something people don’t get to see every day. It’s based on something we used to do in our living rooms. We used the idea for the Landmine concerts, and we’ve been doing it that way ever since.
The Lantern Tour is at 8 p.m. Tickets are $69.50-$125; Librarymusichall.com.