By Don Allred
In 2009, eight years after beginning his first novel, country singer-songwriter Steve Earle decided he really had to finish the thing. He also felt the need to make a new album. Earle had moved from his longtime Nashville home base to Greenwich Village at the age of 50, while remaining blessed by:
1. his improbably durable seventh marriage, this one to chanteuse Allison Moorer,
2. having a baby with her, while
3. still keeping up with world news.
Despite such inspirations, Earle was atypically short of original songs. So he came up with Townes, a tribute to his formidable mentor, the late great Townes Van Zandt.
Earle leads off with Van Zandt’s most famous song, “Pancho and Lefty,” in which incorrigible outlaw Pancho takes his last stand, while his possibly treacherous accomplice, Lefty, slips across the border, to linger in the cold shadows of Cleveland. “Townes was both characters,” Earle declared of the ever-mercurial, standard-setting, substance-abusing Van Zandt. Nevertheless, Van Zandt’s crucial advice went beyond reading and writing: “He told me to always use clean needles, “ Earle said.
Earle, who somehow came out of his own lost years to several bracing albums in the mid-to-late 90s,and his 2001 book of short stories, Doghouse Rose, also drew from experience in writing his first play, Karla, the true life and alleged afterlife story of a Texas drug desperado, born again on Death Row.
In Earle’s finally completed 2011 novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Doc Ebersole, based on a nonfictional, even sketchier type who once claimed he could treat Hank Williams’ alcoholism and spinal bifida with drugs, has fled to San Antonio’s backstreets, after the death of Williams. The self-medicating Ebersole is often accosted by the novel’s eerie, jaunty namesake, the last Hank hit released before he died. A decade later, it’s an eternal jukebox favorite of rich men and poor, also sometimes a cue for the ghots of Willams, which can be backed into at any minute, as it pleads for another shot. All of the novel’s characters, while also evoking the songs and struggles of Williams, Earle, and Van Zandt, morph into visions of “how different people come to experience spirituality,” as Earle put it. He defined spirituality as “a one-to-one encounter with God, or whatever word you use.”
Earle’s new album, also titled I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, cobbled together with the help, for instance, of several songs he wrote for Joan Baez’s Earle-produced 2008 Day After Tomorrow*. distills his own brand of frankly 12-step-based, self-observant spirituality. We’re greeted by some wry celebrations: “Even my money keeps telling me It’s God I need to trust/And I believe in God, but God ain’t us.” (Sure ain’t your Baez usual, but she sang it first.) Meanwhile, Earle’s still “walkin’ on the water, ‘cause I never learned to swim.” He and wife Moorer sound at home while gliding through the discreetly psychedelic aura of T-Bone Burnett’s Americana production, especially as they sing (in a song he first offered to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant for the now-cancelled follow-up to their surprise hit duet debut, Raising Sand) , “I love you baby, but I just can’t tell/This kinda love comes from Heaven or Hell.”
In current shows, Earle and Moorer (who also gets her own mini-set) also swing the spotlight to touring guitarist Chris Masterson and multi-instrumentalist Eleanor Whitmore’s dirt road adventure, “The Other Shoe.” Speaking of good story material, these frontliners are aided and abetted by bass player Kelley Looney, the longest-lasting Duke by far, and drummer Will Rigby, also a good songwriter and still member of jangle-wave pioneers the dBs Nowadays, Earle often brings out his recently deceased (at the hands of writer George Pelecanos, as was The Wire ’s Earle incarnation) Treme character Harley’s battered guitar for the indomitable “This City.” Earle & co. tend to include a song associated with the city they’re playing (recently in Houston, hats off to local boyz ZZ Top‘s “Francine.”). So maybe we could request, say, “Big Balls in Cowtown”? Referring, of course, to the old nickname for Columbus, AKA Austin of Central Ohio.
Steve Earle and the Dukes and Duchesses will perform at the Southern Theatre, on Thursday, July 28. Showtime: 8 p.m. Tickets:$29.50 and $37.50. *for comments on this album, see Baez show preview: https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-aprl-2009.html
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