Given his catalog of original tunes, Steve Earle never has to prove that he’s a genius songwriter. Or that he can single-handedly create a new genre; or be a fresh, creative gale blowing through someplace as hidebound as 1980s Nashville. To say nothing of his inestimable talents in raising hell, marrying women or today, being the latest, ummm, folk singing sage to haunt Greenwich Village.
In fact, like all successful songwriters—and make no mistake, before anything else, artistic or personal, good or bad, the man can write songs—Earle is now fighting age (not so hungry), ideas (running low on good ones) and the glories of his own songwriting catalog. Songs as great as “Fearless Heart” or “My Old Friend The Blues,” make topping yourself a very tall order. And no creative artist can continue to operate at the high level that Earle maintained from his debut,1986’s Guitar Town to 2000’s Transcendental Blues.
While his repeated use of illustrator Tony Fitzpatrick for album cover art implies a certain unity among his records since 2000, Earle’s catalog has been all over the place in recent years: a record of covers of tunes written by his departed pal Townes Van Zandt (Townes) followed by an album of songs about Hank Williams-inspired mortality (I’ll Never Get Out of the World Alive), his best record in many years (The Low Highway) and now a blues record, Terraplane. Through it all, even long time fans are having trouble escaping the feeling that Earle is having difficulty finding something worth saying. Even his sure hand with a melodic hook has grown a little shaky.
With Terraplane he’s made what he and his label are calling his “Texas Blues Record.” While there are bluesy tunes and too damned many clichéd lyrics about turning lamps down low, the ramblin’ kind and “Satan, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub,” this is another Steve Earle folk rock record. As usual, Earle wrote all the songs and they are nothing less than immaculately crafted and tuneful. His band of longtime bassist Kelly Looney, drummer Will Rigby and guitarist Chris Masterson provide expert support. And Earle’s voice is appropriately low down and conspiratorial as befits deals with the devil and ruminating about dirty sex.
And yet there are no ringers here, no pop tunes, none of the anthems or irresistible hooks that make Earle’s songwriting catalog so wonderful. Perhaps anticipating questions about why a blues record, he ends the album’s liner notes with, “And it’s time. Hell, everybody’s sick of all my fucking happy songs anyway."
While I beg to differ, both that he ever really had any joyous numbers and that anybody is sick of hearing his sweet ‘n’ sour classics like “Someday,” or “Copperhead Road,” this record has loads of grit and gristle and flashes of greatness. The talking blues, “The Tennessee Kid,” is wordy and fun. “You’re The Best Lover That I Ever Had,” sounds like Earle recycling riffs and ideas from his own canon. “Go Go Boots Are Back” is the album’s Stonesy-flavored midtempo rocker. “Acquainted with the Wind,” is a rousing number with a fiddle, which uses a familiar rhythmic pattern that’s clearly a nod to John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” a tune that was covered by The Animals and served as the basis for Spinal Tap’s “Gimme Some Money.”
At the heart of much of Earle’s best songwriting is his confessional, heart-on-his-sleeve impulse, which often mixes regret with testosterone-fueled denial. While he couldn’t have failed to understand the point of his son Justin’s new record Absent Fathers, it’s his recent divorce from Allison Moorer, his 7th if you’re counting, that is the shadow inside this album. In a press release for the new album Earle himself said: "Everyone talks about how many times I’ve been married. They don’t talk about how many times I’ve been divorced, maybe that’s what this record is about." A pair of songs hover around this life changer, “Ain’t Nobody’s Daddy Now” and “Better Off Alone.” Taken together they mix machismo like “Used to have a woman/Worry me to death/Hand was in my pocket/And her foot was on my neck”” (“Ain’t Nobody’s Daddy Now”) with more painful truth-telling, “And though/I taught you everything you know/I learned a thing or two myself and so/I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone/But I’m better off alone.”
Being alone has given Earle the time to become involved in a number of projects including an upcoming memoir, I Can’t Remember If We Said Goodbye and a pair of upcoming films The World Made Straight and Dixieland. Produced by R.S. Field and recorded by Ray Kennedy at House Of Blues Studio D in Nashville, Terraplane comes in MP3, vinyl and CD, though the deluxe CD/DVD edition has an especially fine sounding 24/88.2 mix of the entire album as a bonus track.
Blues records usually mark an artist out of ideas, biding time. And while that’s certainly true to some degree here, there is also an artist fighting personal ills and struggling with what makes the blues such a timeless expression.
