BIGSOUND 2012: Steve Earle

12 May 2014 | 8:11 am | Steve Bell

Steve Earle on the ever-changing musical landscape and a few home truths about Australia in the process.

The career – nay, the entire life – of Texan-born roots musician Steve Earle is fascinating on nearly every level. From his early teenage forays into the Nashville songwriting circuit to starting his own career in his early-30s and quickly experiencing both the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, to his period of redemption and more recent phase of experimentation and diversity, he's lived an incredible life, and seemingly always on his own terms.

Which is why his selection to deliver the main keynote speech at BIGSOUND 2012 is a no-brainer – it's not an issue of whether he has any life experience and wisdom to impart, it's more about how he's going to get it across in his all-too-brief allotted time. Fortunately Earle is both highly intelligent and eminently personable, a winning combination when it comes to such scenarios.

“It's a weird one, you know,” he ponders. “I've done panels at conferences before, and I've done more general stuff as well, like being interviewed in front of a college audience or something, but when it's music industry specific – I've done a keynote at South By Southwest, I've done a few of them – then I have to be careful not to piss people off, because these aren't political issues to me. Political issues to me are when people are dying – or in danger of dying – but it is what I do for a living, and it's changed drastically. Like I don't know what to tell [musician son] Justin [Townes Earle], because he's operating in a music business completely different to the one that I started in – I come from the '80s, I come from whoever dies with the highest unrecouped figure wins, and that's not true anymore.

“People like me who are singer-songwriters in the roots field, we existed in the fringes, we always did – we liked to fool ourselves into thinking that we were important in the scheme of things, but we really weren't – but there was just so much fucking money that [industry] people could afford to spend money on music that they actually liked, and we benefited from it. Now you're going to have to figure out how to go and do all those things for yourself. I'm 57 and I'm still working – and I'm probably going to be working until I drop – but I'm not rich, although I make a really good living. I'm probably not rich through some decisions that I made on my own – which I'm okay with, there's probably more money that I could have made – but in some ways the business is probably more democratic than it's ever been, because there's more that you can do to be heard than ever before.

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“I think being a singer-songwriter, or even in a really good rock band that's making art, there's this moment that was created when John Lennon wanted to be Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan wanted to be John Lennon and rock'n'roll became art, and it probably wouldn't have happened otherwise. If it hadn't been for lyrics becoming important as they did, it's arguable that rock'n'roll never becomes art, otherwise it's just loud pop music. It's an important moment, but it's probably over, so we'll never be – in anybody who's going to attend this conference's life – part of the pop mainstream again. It doesn't mean that it's over and we're dead, it just means that we can't depend on that anymore, and you've got to be careful.

“In some ways you don't have to be as careful – for instance you don't have to worry about selling out as much because nobody's fucking buying, but there's other outlets. For instance I didn't use to do ads at all, but kids don't have that luxury to make that decision anymore. I didn't do them for years, now I'm willing to do them under certain circumstances. I don't get very many of them because advertisers are looking for younger audiences than mine, but the fact of the matter is that I woke up every day wondering what Neil Young or Tom Waits would do – for people of my generation they were the people with the most integrity who do my job – and Neil didn't do commercials, he didn't do ads at all, so I didn't do ads at all.

“Then I got to be in my fifties and didn't have any money in the bank, and it dawned on me that Neil Young's been rich since he was twenty. But I don't do alcohol and I don't do the military and I don't do pharmaceutical companies. But my music's been in a few ads, and I'm lucky because I get a lot of TV and film syncs – there just seem to be a lot of fans of mine who do that for a living, put music in films, so I just get synced without really trying. But all of these alternative income streams are important – I go out to the merch table after every show and sign now.

“So everybody's got to figure those things out, wherever they are in their career. The music business has changed, and it changed really fast right out from under us, but it's not over. You can still make a lot of money – you might even be able to get rich – but it's not going to be the way that it used to be, it's not going to be where you can blunder through and piss everybody off and everything will turn out okay: I think you've got to think about it a bit more. And I think being a singer-songwriter now is more like being a jazz musician or a bluegrass musician – it's a lot more specialised, a smaller field. You'll make a living at it, but you're going to have to show up, and you're going to have to be really good. I don't think singer-songwriting careers will be able to be built on one song anymore – you're going to have to have more than one song. For me, I just had a lot of stuff happen, and my deal hasn't been about one song – it's been about three or four songs,” he laughs self-deprecatingly, “but I'm still here, so maybe there'll be a fifth, I don't know. I thought I'd be remembered for [1986 single] Guitar Town, then [1988 single] Copperhead Road happened a few years later, and there's still a lot of people who that's all they care about as far as what I've done.”

One inspirational aspect of Earle's career for young songwriters and musicians is that he's created such a strong body of work despite not making his own tentative first steps as a singer-songwriter in his own right until he was in his early-30s.

“It just took me that long,” he shrugs with a smile. “But I was doing it – I hitchhiked to Nashville when I was nineteen and I wrote for Sunbury Dunbar from 1975 through 1978, and then I wrote for a really small company called Chaparral Music for a couple of years. I had jobs in-between those, and once Justin was born in the early-'80s I had a publishing deal and a couple of jobs because I had a kid, and it just took a long time to convince somebody to let me make a record anywhere near close to the way that I wanted to – I made [1986 debut album] Guitar Town when I'd been in town for pushing fifteen years.

“Part of it is that I wrote Tom Ame's Prayer and Ben McCulloch when I was nineteen, but I don't think that I was necessarily ready as a performer and as a recording artist until I was thirty-one. I made a record when I was twenty-seven, it was a rockabilly record and I'm still proud of it. I've never made a record that I'm ashamed of. I think it's like anything else – it takes as long as it takes – but I think if you learned anything from watching me then the lesson is don't give up. If you're good at this you'll find a way to make a living at it. Just cowboy up and keep doing it. It's not supposed to be easy. People talk a lot about paying your dues and that wasn't made up – you're really supposed to want it really bad, and you're supposed to work really hard. And most of the people that I know who do this do – they're completely and totally obsessed and they work their asses off. I wish that I was a genius – I wrote Tom Ame's Prayer and Ben McCulloch when I was nineteen, but I wrote a lot of other stuff that I don't play any more too. It took me a while to consistently get my writing to a point where I kept every song that I wrote and was proud of every song that I wrote. Bob Dylan pisses me off sometimes when I think about that – he was like really, really fucking good when he was a teenager. But it takes as long as it takes.”

Earle has also gleaned some interesting opinions on Australia as well, having visited our shores consistently over a long period of time.

“Australia I think has a thing in common with Canada – and I've tried to figure this out – but I think there's a real interest in songs there in Australia, that's always been there. To some degree that affects the way that pop music works down there in Australia – I think it's a little more song-oriented – and I think that there will always be an interest in certain types of so-called roots music because there's a tradition in that. I think it's largely the impact of the Irish heritage – a strong oral tradition, which makes people interested in songs. In Australia there's still some arts money, despite the conservative trend all over the world – there's way more than in the States – and there's also this thing where songs that tell stories are part of Australian culture and I think people in Australia gravitate towards that. That's why I think people liked Copperhead Road and why it was such a big deal there, and why I can still get people to pay me enough money to justify buying a really expensive plane ticket to get there.”