It's the new old Steve Earle

By Walter Tunis Contributing Music Writer

The course of change that Steve Earle plotted on his 2008 album Washington Square Serenade was immediate and resounding.

You hear it initially in the tunes' curiously textured groove — an acoustic guitar melody nudged along by the sort of drum loop that echoes hip-hop.

Then come the ­lyrics. On the album-opening Tennessee Blues, Earle tells of leaving Nashville life behind for a new home in New York. Three words especially underscore the life chapter at hand: ”goodbye guitar town.“

The reference, of course, is to Guitar Town, the album that first shed national attention on Earle's music more than 22 years ago. But Earle, perhaps one of the most restlessly reverent Americana voices of recent decades, isn't junking his past. He has simply chosen not to repeat himself.

Sure, he can be as grim and obstinate as ever with the stories in his songs. But as he prepares to return to Lexington for a performance with his wife, fellow songsmith Allison Moorer, Earle is striking a balance between the personal and the political, the traditional and the modern, and at the very core of his music, the light and the dark.

”I think artists have to recharge sometimes by taking care of some personal business,“ Earle said recently by phone during a tour stop in Boise, Idaho. ”I'm lucky, I guess, because I have an audience that has allowed me to do what I needed to as an artist. For the most part, they have been pretty accepting of it. We've lost some of them along the way. But we've also managed to pick up enough new people so that I'm still able to do this after 20-some-odd years.“

Songs of love

Initial inspirations for Washington Square Serenade were twofold. The album was meant to celebrate Earle's New York digs in the heart of Greenwich Village, a haven for folk music in the early 1960s. In fact, the iconic cover to Bob Dylan's landmark 1963 album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was shot on the very street where Earle and Moorer now live. The second inspiration was Moorer, who married Earle in 2005.

”These were basically love songs for New York City and Allison Moorer,“ Earle said. ”But a lot of things happened pretty organically with the album. After moving to New York, I was away from the studio I had recorded in for the last 10 years. Plus, my band (The Dukes) is scattered all over the world now. My bass player (Kelley ­Looney), who has been with me the longest, has lived in Paris for several years. But then, I didn't really want anybody else's fingerprints on these songs as I was writing them. That tends to happen when you record with the same band all the time.

”I just needed a more intimate process for making music.“

So Earle bought a computer, loaded it with the popular digital audio software known as Pro-Tools, and recorded many of his new songs by himself. The resulting instrumentation was lean and heavily acoustic, with Earle playing guitar, mandolin, banjo (”the kind of banjo that scares sheep“), bouzouki and harmonium. From there, he enlisted John King, better known as half of the ultra-popular '90s production team The Dust Brothers. Earle was drawn to the modern momentum that King provided Beck's 1996 album Odelay.

Their first collaboration was a cover of Tom Waits' neo-gospel confession Way Down in the Hole, which was used for the fifth and final season of the HBO series The Wire.

From there, Earle recorded the bulk of the music on his own in New York before e-mailing it to Los Angeles for King's input.

A his and hers show

A similar approach carries over to Earle's current concerts. He performs roughly half of the performance by himself, enlists Moorer (who is also the show opener) for a few duets and then teams with onstage DJ Neil McDonald to emphasize the mix of modern groove and folk tradition that runs rampant throughout Washington Square Serenade.

”It was a little challenging at first,“ Earle said of his current concert approach. ”I mean, I've been notorious for firing drummers for thinking they were in charge of keeping time. That's what drummers who are big studio musicians are taught to do. But this album was made to drum loops. It's the only way I've played this material, so I've adapted to that.

”Mostly, the shows have been about rediscovering all the stuff I started out playing, because I came out of the coffeehouses. My peer group included Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. Those guys didn't start writing songs because they wanted to be Willie Nelson. They wanted to be Bob Dylan.“

The darkness lingers

That explains why, for all its discreet modernism, Washington Square Serenade is still a songwriter's record. And there might be a few glimpses of romantic bliss in songs like Days Aren't Long Enough (a duet with Moorer) and Sparkle and Shine, but there also are deeper, darker tales — some of which eerily echo Earle's tumultuous past.

On OxyContin Blues, he employs minor-key banjo to color a rural tale of drug addiction that is very much in keeping with 1989's Copperhead Road and 1996's CCKMP (Cocaine Cannot Kill My Pain). Earle wrestled for years with serious drug dependencies of his own and views Oxycontin Blues as simply the new face of an old nemesis.

”I was an addict in that part of the world for a long time. I got clean a long time before OxyContin came along, thank God. But it's all the same deal, really. That why OxyContin Blues, CCKMP and Copperhead Road are all kind of the same song.“

Similarly, City of Immigrants is a celebration of the cultural diversity that thrives in New York but is often resisted, even feared, in other parts of the country.

”There was just this realization for me that the guy who owns the deli at the end of my street was born in Korea but speaks better English than I do — plus Spanish, because most of his employees are from Central America.

”I mean, the fact we're going through another period in history where politicians are telling us our problems are due to immigration is crazy. That is always a lie designed to distract us from what is really going on.“

"Lucky' and happy

Life on the road for Earle and Moorer is considerably more inviting. They will travel on a bus with their two dogs as a family in motion until their North American tour winds up with four New York concerts in, quite fittingly, a Washington Square church.

”I've always felt pretty lucky to be able to make a living doing something I really love. Even when things were really bad, I knew it wasn't because I was a victim. It was me that was (messing) up. I never deluded myself when it came to that.

”Today, I basically get to take my home on the road with me, see the world and get paid an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist. Man, I'm one of the luckiest people in the world.“