Jacob Blickenstaf
Audio By Carbonatix
In 2004, Steve Earle released The Revolution Starts Now, a fiery, pointed collection of songs aimed directly at the George W. Bush administration, just as it was about to easily win a second term in the White House. Although the record won the 2005 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk album, it was full of the sorts of raucous, fully plugged-in tunes the songwriting legend and Texas native had long been known for.
Cuts such as “Condi, Condi,” “Rich Man’s War,” “Home to Houston” and, of course, the title track, made it plain to even a casual listener that this was indeed a political album with a very specific focus born from a key point in time. But that was then.
Thanks to the native Texan’s outspoken nature and his long-held left-wing political views, it’s at least a little surprising that in the years since Donald Trump – an enemy of socialist folk-singers if there ever was one – Earle, a 67-year-old who has lived in New York City since he was 50, hasn’t released an album full of darts heading for a Trump-shaped target.
“My attitude has changed,” Earle says over a Zoom chat from Los Angeles during a two-night stint at the iconic Troubadour in West Hollywood. “I’m no less radical than I was, but I’m watching our democracy fall apart, and I think it has to do with how we will not listen to each other.”
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He also says that “not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is an asshole or a racist,” before adding, “There’s plenty of those people who did, and I do think he’s an asshole and a racist, but I get that people voted for him who didn’t feel like their lives improved during the Obama administration.”
To be fair, Earle’s stellar discography, even before 2004, is full of political songs. It’s not as though he was a news junkie zealot for a couple of years before giving up that type of songwriting. From his celebrated debut album Guitar Town in 1986, to Copperhead Road in 1988 and especially to Jerusalem, his somewhat controversial 2002 album, Earle has displayed a novelist’s touch in weaving political and social messages with vivid, poignant storytelling.
Since Earle hasn’t fixated on unleashing a torrent of Trump protest tunes in the recent past, it would be reasonable to guess that it’s because he’s placed the focus of his work around something else, something beyond life itself. Death has been at the core of Earle’s most recent releases, including tribute albums for heroes who turned into friends Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker, as well as a tribute album for his own son, Justin Townes Earle, who died in 2020 from an accidental drug overdose.
Even his 2020 album of original material, Ghosts of West Virginia, deals in death. Written for an off-Broadway play of the same name, the record revolves around the horrific 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, in which 38 miners were killed. So, maybe Earle’s in a hardcore phase where death has surrounded him and he’s leaning into that with all he’s got? Not really.
The tribute albums to Clark, who died in 2016, and Walker, who died in 2020, were natural extensions of the Townes Van Zandt tribute album he released in 2009, and are as much celebrations of those artists’ music as they are anything else. The album of Justin Townes Earle songs raised money for Steve’s granddaughter, Etta.
The thought of his own death isn’t commanding much of Earle’s time.
“I’m no less radical than I was, but I’m watching our democracy fall apart and I think it has to do with how we will not listen to each other.” – Steve Earle
He is writing songs for a musical called Tender Mercies, with Daisy Foote.
“I’ve been working on that for a year and a half, so that’s where most of my new songs have gone,” he says. “The way I’m hooked up to death, in general, is different than most people. My guru was Ram Dass, who wrote mostly about death and dying and aging for the last 35 to 40 years of his life. Justin’s death is a different deal. That’s a hole I’ve got to walk around with for the rest of my life. But I’m probably less preoccupied with my own death than just about anybody. I think about it, but it’s not really a big deal to me.”
What is a big deal to Earle, more so than the former president, is how people who see life differently can ever truly come together or, at the very least, entertain the notion. He doesn’t use his prominent spot on the stage or in the studio to preach, but he does aim to use it for the good of those who hear his words.
“This job of mine is about empathy,” he says. “It’s about people feeling like they’re heard. People don’t give a fuck about what happens to me, they care about what happens to me if it’s a common experience that I have with them.”
And like many complex issues facing the world today, the answer to the political divide isn’t a mystery, as much as is the question of how to bridge it. Earle’s job isn’t only to rage against the machine by simply raging. He’s a storyteller who wants people to be open to hearing each other’s stories.
And naturally, he knows just how to discuss the dangers of a society that refuses to live with consideration and empathy.
“Until we can have a conversation with someone we assume we’re going to disagree with,” he says, “we’re fucked.”
Steve Earle performs on Tuesday, Aug. 30, at the Kessler in Dallas.
