Steve Earle has a number of events he can point to in his life to mark 50th anniversaries, but he’s clear about what’s sending him on his Fifty Years of Songs and Stories tour that kicks off May 25 in Decatur, Ala.
“It’s the 50th anniversary of me signing my first publishing contract – me officially in the music business,” Earle tells Billboard. That was in Nashville when, after a good six years of tooling around in Texas – including playing in his songwriting hero Townes Van Zandt’s band – Earle was working by day and playing at night, including as part of Guy Clark’s group. The song publishing company Sunbury-Dunbar made him a staff writer, though Earle would subsequently head back to Texas and then return to Nashville, where he became an artist in his own right with the 1982 EP Pink & Black; his career really took off with 1986’s Guitar Town, which hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart.
Earle, 70, has been going ever since, with hits, misses and a brief incarceration during the mid-‘90s for cocaine and weapons possession. Others – including Joan Baez, Travis Tritt, Robert Earl Keen and Stacy Dean Campbell – have recorded his songs, but Earle has remained determinedly and defiantly his own man, winning three Grammy Awards along the way and delving into other projects such as production (for Baez and Lucinda Williams), acting (HBO’s Treme and The Wire, off-Broadway’s Samara ) and theater (the Drama Desk Award-nominated Coal Country). His social and political activism led to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s shining star of abolition award in 2010, and in 2020 he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Clearly, there will be a lot of stories to go with the songs when Earle hits the road (his shows will be mostly solo, though he’s playing a few dates with the band Reckless Kelly). “It’s not strictly chronological; that’s the backbone of it, but some songs I play are based on memories, so something I wrote a little later may pop up earlier in the show,” Earle explains. “It’s sort of built around telling stories; I try not to talk too much, but I’m good at that thing. I started in coffee houses, so that’s basically the deal.”
Earle is hoping to finish work on his next musical, a stage adaptation of the hit 1983 film Tender Mercies, while he’s out on the road. “I want to finish at least three songs so I have a draft,” he says. “These things take years to (complete). I’m just trying to live long enough to get the f–kin’ thing up.” He also appears on Willie Nile’s upcoming new album The Great Yellow Light and has recorded a “cosmic country” song, “Dead or Gone to Dallas,” for a split single he’s doing with Reckless Kelly. “It would work on Guitar Town,” Earle notes. “I was talking to Miranda Lambert; my family’s from the same part of Texas as she’s from, and she asked me if I ever went up there. I said, ‘Everyone I know is dead or gone to Dallas.’ She said, ‘Don’t write that with anybody!’” Earle has also finished “a big chunk of” a memoir as well as “a little bit of” a novel.
“I really mean to finish them before I die,” he says, noting that after turning 70 “you think about it even more. You wouldn’t think one number would make a difference more than any other number. But my father was only 74 when he died and my grandfather only lived to be 63. One uncle was 80 but the other died younger than my dad. And you get to be a certain age and your friends start dying. On my radio show [Hard Core Troubadour on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Channel] I used to do tributes occasionally; now it’s more often than I’d like.”
As he gets ready to hit the road with his Fifty Years of Songs and Stories Tour, we thought we’d get Earle to tell us the stories behind five key songs in his career. Check out Earle’s tour dates here.
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“L.A. Freeway” (Guy Clark, 1970; covered by Steve Earle in 2019)
“I lean towards Guy’s (original) version, although I love Jerry Jeff (Walker)’s version, too. ‘L.A. Freeway’ is the one I wish I’d written. I learned a lot from that. It’s funny, because Guy wouldn’t talk about it. He’d show me how he’d play the song out on the page, but he didn’t talk about meter or alliteration. He worked really meticulously on his songs; he was college educated and he had a diploma. Art director at a TV station was the last real job he had. He just did things methodically. He would tell me, ‘You can’t co-write a great song.’ He told me, ‘Never use a rhyming dictionary. Never use a thesaurus.’ I ignored those two things, and at the end of his life he was using both, and he was co-writing. But I learned from him. I have discipline. I write something every day. I try my best to just get to work every day to have a shot at coming up with something. As I get older, it gets harder.”
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“Guitar Town” (Guitar Town, 1986)
“’Guitar Town’ is interesting because I’d been (in Nashville) 12 years when I started it. Only one song on Guitar Town that wasn’t written specifically for that album was ‘Fearless Heart’; I’d written that at the end of a three-piece rockabilly band I had, but we never recorded it, ‘cause I got dropped. But I’d been in town for a decade and more and everybody had kinda given up on me. People thought I might be something at the beginning but I didn’t get a record deal, I was the baby Outlaw. I was there when all that was going on but I didn’t get a deal. Most people didn’t like my voice. I don’t think I consistently wrote well enough at that time. Noel Fox [of the Oak Ridge Boys] told me, ‘Don’t worry about getting songs cut, just write for you, write what you want to write, write yourself a record,’ and I heard him. Then a friend of mine…he had an extra ticket for Bruce Springsteen, the Born in the U.S.A. tour at Murphy Center ‘cause his wife didn’t want to go. Bruce came out and opened with ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and I watched the show and watched him turn a 20,000-seat arena into a coffee house, and it just popped into my head. I went home and started writing “Guitar Town.” I started writing an album. I wrote ‘Guitar Town’ first. I wrote ‘Down the Road’ second on the trip that me and Jimbeau Hinson and Tony [Brown] had taken down to Bill Golden’s beach house; he supposedly wasn’t gonna be there but he showed up with a bunch of yahoos after we’d been there a couple days but we got a few songs. I wrote ‘My Old Friend the Blues’ by myself there and I wrote ‘Down the Road’ and Jimbeau and I wrote ‘Hillbilly Highway.’ And I wrote it to be an album. That’s the way I’ve written ever since until really recently, with the exception of certain projects, like for films and whatever. But I like those projects.”
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“Someday” (Guitar Town, 1986)
“When I had the rockabilly band I pulled into this gas station in the middle of the night. I’d just forgotten to get gas and was headed out to Texas and I realized I’d left without filling up. So we were trying to find some place open with gas; there wasn’t a truck stop at every exit in those days. I found a gas station that wasn’t technically open. It was about a mile off the road, two miles; it wasn’t as much as I probably sing about in the song. But we had to look for it…And there was a kid working on his own car in the bay in this gas station and he worked there. He was technically supposed to be closed. But we got him to give us some gas and that kid, workin’ on his own hot rod, I just started putting words in his mouth.”
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“Copperhead Road” (Copperhead Road, 1988)
“’Copperhead Road’ really started in the ‘70s. I was working at a pizza parlor in Nashville and I read in the paper there was a woman who was arrested in Elizabethtown, N.C. She was in her seventies and she had a big grow [of marijuana] in a holler in East Tennessee. Actually, it was on the Cincinnati side, and she got popped. It turns out both her sons were already in prison on something else, but the whole family had been moonshiners and then when her sons came back they went into this other business in addition to making whiskey. She didn’t know how to cook mash but she knew how to grow sh-t. Then she got popped, and it stuck in my head for years. I got a hold of a mandolin and got fascinated and I learned two chords on it. That’s when the song finally got written—oh, that’s the sound! It needed to be something that was not so English, not so German, a different kind of instrument.”
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“Jerusalem” (Jerusalem, 2002)
“I know exactly where it came from. When [former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser] Arafat was still alive, I was in Australia. Traveling abroad and seeing news from another perspective besides ours is one of the most educational things people can do. It was just ABC News…. They were showing the footage, they’d just gone in and bottled up Arafat in that building and were just bulldozing all around it in Gaza and he eventually had to leave and that’s when they got him out on an airplane that night and he went to Paris. And it was just that thing that kept going around and around since then. And it’s tough; I’ve been to Israel a couple of times, and I have a friend David Broza; in Israel he’s me, Bruce Springsteen and a bag of chips. It’s one of those deals that was never gonna be solved easily. But I’m an optimist; I saw Belfast in the ‘80s when there were gun trucks in the street and people said it would never end. But it did, and you know why it did? Because young men could get a f–kin’ job. They had a future, and it’s harder to get ‘em to kill each other if they have money and get girls and have a dream of some sort. It just stopped. It had nothing to do with Gerry Adams or Tony Blair or any of those other f–kers. Jerusalem in itself, the whole record was me trying to understand…I wrote ‘Jerusalem’ first, and then I started a rash of reading that was trying to understand why this part of the world I’d never seen was affecting me so drastically. And then Broza eventually made an honest person of me. In 2013 I went to East Jerusalem and made a record with a half Palestinian, half Israeli band (Broza’s East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem, 2014) and we’re gonna release it again, in the middle of all of this. The thing that’s complicated about it is I have friends that are Palestinian and I have friends that are Israeli. I’m a lefty living in New York now so the vast majority of my friends are Jews, but the subject doesn’t get talked about much anymore. David and I talk about it; they’re heartbroken…’cause there are Zionists who are absolutely for a two-state solution, absolutely for peace. It’s a tough one. I don’t know what’s gonna happen now. I love Israel, though. I love to go. I love the food; I can’t eat hummus probably anywhere (else) no more.”
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