Steve Earle Reinstates The Dukes For New Album

The masterful Steve Earle is following up 2011's I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive with album number 15 in a mere couple of months, his new record The Low Highway to be released through New West/Warner on Friday 12 April.

The record is credited to Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses) the first Earle release to do so and the first of Earle's records to credit The Dukes since 1987's Exit 0. The record features the band that Earle tours with in the US - he admitted to us that he simply isn't able to afford to bring them to Australia - including musicians Chris Masterson, Eleanor Whitmore, Kelley Looney, Will Rigby and Allison Moorer (who is also Earle's wife).

Earle has admitted that this is very much his "road record", saying that there are few things on the planet that inspire him more than setting out on a tour of his home country with his band in tow. Unsurprisingly, the way he describes it is utterly poetic.

“I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view," he says. "I've seen a pretty good chunk of the world and my well-worn passport is one of my most prized possessions, but for me, there's still nothing like the first night of a North American tour; everybody, band and crew, crowded up in the front lounge, eating Nashville hot chicken and Betty Herbert's homemade pimento cheese, swapping the same tired old war stories half shouted over the rattle and hum of the highway.  And I'm always the last one to holler good night to Charlie Quick, the driver, and climb in my bunk because to me it feels like Christmas Eve long ago when I still believed in Santa Claus.  God I love this.”

You can get a taste for the record by checking out the film clip for Invisible here.

Earle also revealed to us exclusively last year that he would be writing a memoir. More details on that have surfaced today, with Earle confirming the book will be split into three different sections.

Firstly, he will focus on meeting Townes Van Zandt and the complicated friendship and music mentorship that the two artists shared. 

He will then move on to how he bottomed out while living in Nashville, a period of his life which ended with him serving a prison sentence.

The third and final part of the book will focus on his recovery, which happened around the time he was making the brilliant 1995 album, Train A Comin'. 

Watch our interview with Earle from BIGSOUND 2012 below: