music
SWING LOW Steve Earle had a rough year in 2013, but managed to release one of the best albums of his long career in The Low Highway. He reminds Dan Condon that we’re living in hard times.
T
he Low Highway sees people’s poet Steve Earle once again take the weight of the world on his shoulders and somehow speak for an entire society with far more clarity than any one man ought to be able. Tales of destitution, hope, anger and spite as seen through the window of his tour bus are brought to life by a stunning band to make for one of his most poignant records to date. “This record was more about what I saw out the window of the bus while travelling through North America,” Earle explains. “I was seeing something a lot closer to what Woody Guthrie saw; times that were as hard as what Woody saw. I’ve written a lot of songs about hard travelling and hard times, but I was doing that forensically, basically.
lot of other people do so I think I should do it. I don’t make any judgments about what anyone else should do artistically – apart from write the best songs they can write. Don’t try and put anything past me where you’re not even trying. “I learned to do this from Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark; I’m emulating those guys and Bob Dylan and Lou Reed even. I’ve always known that what I was doing could and would be art if I just paid attention to that. Just say the truest thing that I can think of at the time, that’s at the core of what I’m trying to make.” There is something about the performances
“We realised we had a great band that deserved to be recorded so we made The Low Highway with the band you’re gonna see on stage,” Earle explains. “It’s live – there are almost no overdubs on it – it’s just a really good band playing in a studio with good microphones, it’s that simple. We made it in five days; the mixing went on three times longer than the recording did.” As mentioned, Earle brings his band The Dukes to Australia for the first time in over a decade (The Low Highway is the first album to carry the Dukes name in over 25 years), but he’s thrilled to be able to bring them at all. Before his most recent solo tour of the country he said it simply wasn’t affordable to bring the band so far across the world, but Bluesfest boss Peter Noble changed that when the two met following Earle’s keynote address at Brisbane’s BIGSOUND music conference in 2012. “You know what? Peter Noble rose to the occasion and worked out a way that would make it financially feasible for me to bring the band,” Earle says. “He just put together a tour that made sense and you have Peter Noble to thank for that, he just stepped up to the plate. I was there for BIGSOUND, I flew over to speak and flew back – I was literally in Australia for 48 hours at most – I ran into Peter there and we had a conversation. I said I wanted to bring the band but I just didn’t see
“I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT WHAT I WAS DOING COULD AND WOULD BE ART IF I JUST PAID ATTENTION TO THAT.”
But now things are tough out there, they really are. And that’s what The Low Highway is.” The opening title track speaks of abandoned houses and factories, growing lines of people waiting to be fed. Burnin’ It Down is a scathing attack on the policies of the enormous Wal-Mart chain of department stores and Calico County is a fucked-up tale of broken homes, meth labs and a life in and out of jail. On top of all this, Earle has his own problems. His battle with drug addiction has been well-documented in the past and, on Pocket Full Of Rain, you can almost hear him toying with the idea of turning back to his old ways. He hasn’t. “I’ve been clean nineteen years as of September 13th and I’ve had kind of a rough year – it was hard. I still go to meetings and call my sponsor and do all that stuff; that’s how I stay clean. My little boy was diagnosed with autism, Allison [Moorer, Earle’s wife] and I are separated and a lot of stuff has happened that I thought I’d never have to go through again. That song came along as I was processing all of that.” When asked if he feels he has an obligation to shed light on the state of world in a political and social sense, Earle says he’s aware that he does it better than most. A songwriter’s only obligation, he says, is to write with truth. “I have an obligation to do what I was put here to do; I do the topical stuff and the political stuff better than a 12 • THE MUSIC • 19TH MARCH 2014
on this record that set it apart from much of Earle’s most recent work. He’s never made a badsounding record and has always surrounded himself with players of the highest calibre, but, even when listening to it without any knowledge of how the record came together, it’s clear that this band know each other well and are able to play to each others’ strengths beautifully. The record was made with old partner Ray Kennedy – as the “Twangtrust” he and Earle have made some brilliant records, including Lucinda Williams’ classic, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road – in a manner that would be as unobtrusive as possible to the quality of the band they had assembled.
how I could make it make sense and he stepped up to the plate; it’s all Peter Noble in this particular case.” He might not always be able to bring the band to Australia, but Earle says he won’t stop coming here. While he admits he enjoys being in our country, the fact is he doesn’t believe he could afford to lose us as fans. “It’s an English-speaking territory of the world and what I do is so much about language that I can’t afford to let an English-speaking territory go,” he laughs. “It’s a long way out, but I love coming and I love Byron especially, it’s pretty much my favourite festival. It’s where it is and it’s all bands I wanna see – it’s my favourite beach town and my favourite festival. “It’s exactly the same band [that plays on The Low Highway], but without [estranged sixth wife] Allison, Allison is not touring. It’s the best band I’ve ever had – it’ll blow your mind. The rhythm section has been with me a long time and have been to Australia with me before. Will Rigby, the drummer, has been with me since [2000’s] Transcendental Blues, and Kelly Looney’s been with me since [1988’s] Copperhead Road. “Oddly enough the guitar player is Chris Masterson, who I met in Australia at Byron. He was there with Wayne Hancock in ’97 or something like that and I met him in the catering area behind the main stage when it was at the old football grounds in the town. Chris met Eleanor Whitmore who is a great fiddle player from Texas, they got married and lived in New York for a while and Chris