News

“Goodbye guitar town” – Tennessee Blues, Steve Earle

In 1999, speaking to The Journal of Country Music, Steve Earle said he was closer to leaving Nashville than he'd ever been. Back then, what he had in mind was to pull stakes and set off for Ireland, where he could write songs, prose, short stories, maybe even a novel – a thousand words a day, he figured. He never made it to that emerald island, but he no longer lives in Tennessee full-time either.

Two years ago, with an Australian cattle dog and his country-singing wife Allison Moorer by his side, Earle moved to New York. “Sunset in my mirror, pedal on the floor/ bound for New York City, and I won't be back no more,” Earle sings on the lilting Tennessee Blues, the first track off his new Washington Square Serenade.

Though it has a few modern beats – Earle has embraced newfangled songwriting software – the album is an homage to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, the near-fabled time and place of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk and the rest. The material ranges from the island-vibe City of Immigrants to Steve's Hammer, a sing-along tribute to Seeger that captures the weariness of a protest singer (“One of these days I'm gonna lay this hammer down.”)

The hard-core troubadour, clean and sober for 13 years, is now 52 – the same age at which his Texas songwriting hero Townes Van Zandt died, of a heart attack, on New Year's Day in 1997.

From his West Village apartment, Earle speaks about leaving Nashville, growing old, Canadian singer-songwriters and living on the same block-long side street made famous by the cover photo of 1961's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. “I spend a lot of time running out turning Germans around to get them pointed in the right direction, so they don't [mess] up their pictures,” Earle says.

In 1986, Earle released his breakthrough debut album Guitar Town. He had arrived then; and now, has again.

“I rented this apartment thinking it'd be the place that I slept when I came to New York. It turned out not to be that way. I'm here a lot more than I'm in Nashville now. I decided to take the time to try and finish this novel that I've been working on, off and on, for five years. I got really, really near completing it. Then I signed the record deal with New West. They gave us a lot of money, so I felt obligated to make a record and turn it in.

Tennessee Blues was one of the first two songs I'd written. It had existed as a finger-picking instrumental. The guitar lick had existed for a while. The lyric came about [“Blue dog on my floorboard, redhead by my side”] because I have a dog that's too big to stuff under the seat in an airplane. So when we make the commute, we rent a mini van. We actually have two dogs. I've had mine for years, and I gave Allison a Chihuahua for her birthday last year. That's a New York City dog, perfectly at home here. This is the West Village – he's not the only Chihuahua in the neighbourhood.

The drive from Nashville to New York is basically the entire length of Virginia. So, Tennessee Blues, like Guitar Town, is a road song. It was virtually written without any paper or computer in front of me. It was in my head. I guess we made the trip four times in two years. It's a pretty trip. With two drivers, we can make it one day.

It's the state of me song. It is a song about me taking my own temperature. It's about getting older, and trying to stay interested in life and what you do. And sometimes you have to take drastic measures to do that.

Moving to New York was kind of necessary for me, for a lot of reasons.

Everything just kind of added up and pointed that way. I'm just glad I'm healthy enough and had the balls to do it. The other thing was that I married a girl with a job for a change. So it finally became feasible.

Nashville was always hard for me, but I wasn't there much. The deciding factor for coming to New York was that I'd got to thinking. I'm 52, and I'm probably in the best health I've ever been in. I finally managed to quit smoking. I've lost a bunch of weight. I take pretty good care of myself because, for one thing, I'm seriously over-married. That'll put a lot of pressure on you.

But what if I did have a heart attack or a stroke? I wanna be in a place, when I get older, where I feel at home. I'm totally okay with being one of these old commies with a walker that I run into between here and the deli in my neighbourhood. I think this place will keep me younger, longer, but I'm totally okay with growing old like that. Washington Square Serenade is a very folky record. I'm living in a neighbourhood that my job was invented in. The only place I can think of that had more to do with the development of the modern singer-songwriter than this four-block area I live in is probably Canada. The idea of the singer-songwriter as mainstream acts stuck, in Canada, in a way that it didn't in the United States. Joni and Neil and people like that. And Lightfoot. There's also Murray McLauchlan, and Ian Tyson, who I have nothing in common with politically, but I still think is one of the greatest songwriters that ever lived.

The move to New York is a jump start. I guess I didn't think I'd be around this long, so I had my first midlife crisis when I was 30. I missed the live fast/die young/leave a good-looking corpse thing – obviously – pretty widely. So now I gotta think up a new plan, and this is a good place to come up with one. People have been coming up with new plans here for a long time.”

Steve Earle, as told to Brad Wheeler