Music

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.

“L.A. Freeway” (Guy Clark, 1970; covered by Steve Earle in 2019)