Alive And Kicking

We haven't seen Steve Earle in Australia since late in 2008 when he was touring in support of 2007's Washington Square Serenade. He mentions he tried to get here on the back of 2009's Townes, but it wasn't to be. “The only reason we missed coming on the Townes tour was Treme,” he says from his home in New York City's Greenwich Village, referencing the HBO drama series in which he stars. “The filming schedule hit right around Byron Bay [Bluesfest] and to make this make sense financially you almost have to have at least one festival.”

He returns in solo mode, those hoping to see his backing band The Dukes might need to travel elsewhere by the sounds of things; it's just not a financially viable option for them to tour with Earle. “Bringing the band I would have lost x amount of dollars and coming by myself I make almost exactly the same amount of dollars as I would have lost if I brought the band. It was hilarious; it was some kind of weird mathematical coincidence that I don't understand.” But he was determined that we wouldn't miss out on seeing him tour on the back of his excellent T Bone Burnett produced record of last year I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, a record he considers one of his finest yet.

“I'm really proud of the record,” he chirps. “I didn't really want to think about how it sounded – I hired T Bone for a reason – I wanted to really concentrate on the writing and I'm really, really proud of this batch of songs. I think they're, beginning to end, the strongest lyrics I've ever written.”

In recent times Earle produced Townes as well as Joan Baez's 2008 record Day After Tomorrow, but says that relinquishing control in this department was by no means a problem for him. “As I've gotten older I don't feel the need to control everything. Part of it's a recovery thing – I'm just not suffering from the delusion that I control much of anything anymore,” he quips. “Art's kind of an accident, but also, when you're an artist and you've been doing it all your life, you can predict the outcome will be okay when you don't fuck with it too much.

“And I think that's where things go awry, when you become so obsessed with controlling everything that you become someone that second guesses yourself and something that's afraid to release something because you didn't tweak this or that. I'm pretty good at making stuff and letting it go out into the world and then going on to the next thing; it's just healthier for me.

“I've made two records in a row, Townes and Washington Square…, which were arrived at pretty solitarily. It was a lot of me in the studio by myself doing a lot of overdubs and working with beats on Washington Square…. Townes was just guitar and vocal performances where I just closed by eyes and did it and we added instruments later. That was a great way to make that record because it was a very personal record that was very much about my relationship with Townes [Van Zandt]; it's a very intimate record and it sounds like it. But I was ready to do something where I interacted spontaneously with a room full of musicians and somebody else worried about catch the lightning in the bottle. And T Bone's good at that,” he finishes with a chuckle.

He's something of a creative renaissance man these days, but things almost went very differently for Earle. He became a professional songwriter and recording artist in the 1980s, but a long held addiction to heroin took over though and he ceased writing and recording for a number of years in the early 1990s. After a stint in jail he cleaned up his act and has gone on to be more than prolific, as he now lends his creative talents to a huge number of different projects; he's a novelist, a playwright, an actor, a radio host as well as an active recording and touring musician. His plate is full, but he doesn't consider himself a workaholic.

“I'm a person that does something they love for a living,” he says. “I think vacations and even weekends and certainly retirement are unseemly if you do something that you really love doing. Most people work and it's a job they work and maybe it's something they're proud of or enjoy doing at times, but it's work. There may be something they really dream of doing, so they put aside what they've done for a living all their lives and retire and they hope to do something they've always dreamed of doing. I do what I've always dreamed of doing every day.

“I don't think I'm a workaholic, I watch TV and I go to baseball games and I fish; I do make time for some things that aren't my job. I do a lot of stuff, I make records I do some acting, I've got a radio show, I write in more than one discipline – but I like my job. I have to work, there's no doubt about it, I don't have enough money that I can just stop working, so a lot of the reason that I work is because I have to, but I'm okay with that.”

The different disciplines he practices have a positive impact on the way Earle approaches his other endeavours as well. “As an actor I've only ever said words that were written by really great writers like David Simon and Tim Blake Nelson [who wrote] the one feature that I did [2009's Leaves Of Grass] and you learn, you learn a lot about writing by going out and saying words that were written by really great writers.”

As far as the setlists for this upcoming tour go, well, there won't be any. But Earle promises lengthy sets featuring songs from throughout his career. “I can play a lot of stuff and I'm pretty good at it and it'll cover a lot of ground. My shows tend to be, at this point, longer than most people in my audience can stand there in a standing venue so we'll see what happens. I usually don't use a setlist for solo shows, it's one of the luxuries I afford myself is just not to have a structure, I just go out there and see what happens and have a lot of fun.”