His Real Name is Mister Earle

The last week or so I've been listening to Steve Earle, always a favorite. Steve is an excellent musician on a variety of instruments, has an instantly identifiable rough drawl (kind of like a male Lucinda Williams - or is she a female Steve Earle?) , and writes great songs in a wide variety of genres.

My long-standing favorite sets of his are:

• Train A' Comin', in which a small group of acoustic musicians hang out, playing a variety of songs, some by Steve, some traditional, some by other writers. It helps that the guys he's hanging out include national treasure Norman Blake and this-close-to-being-another Peter Rowan. It also doesn't hurt that Emmylou Harris does some harmonizing.
• The Mountain, a traditional country/bluegrass album Steve cut with the Del McCoury Band (worth a detour all by themselves). The first time I heard this disc, I thought that I knew several of the songs from my old folky days; turned out that Steve wrote them all - and not back in the days of my youth. "Pilgrim on the Road", which ends the CD, is iconic for me - I wouldn't mind if someone played it at my inevitable funeral, except that I wouldn't be around to hear it.
  
• Transcendental Blues, a mixture of just about every style Steve plays in, including - but not limited to - neo-Beatles, country blues, celtic folk, bluegrass, alt.country, and political folk. This is one great album. Period.
  

Steve's last two studio releases have been heavily and explicitly political. The first, Jerusalem, includes the much-debated John Walker Lindh song, which is worth a listen in and of itself - not so much for its content, which attempts the maybe impossible task of getting into Lindh's head, but for the fact that in this heavily paranoid atmosphere, a commercially viable artists wrote and recorded a song on the subject. To paraphrase Dr. Sam Johnson, it's not so much that it was done well as that it was done at all. The disc on the whole is not totally successful, but more than half the cuts are good ones, and it's definitely worth a listen - though if you're not a fan/follower, I wouldn't make it my first choice; I'd recommend one of the ones above - or the last studio release.

That one was The Revolution Starts Now!, which I didn't love on first listen, but which has grown on me greatly since then. Aside from including the only known love-song dedicated to Condoleezza Rice (a reggae rave-up called "Condi, Condi"), the songs have real passion behind them, and a cynical but persistent idealism. Steve is not quixotic - he observes too sharply for that - but he's not a quitter, neither on himself nor on this country's current state of bedevilment. Tracks like "Home to Houston", "Rich Man's War", and "The Gringo's Tale" work FIRST as songs and then as political statements - which is what makes Steve Earle worth listening to.

If you haven't done that yet, it's time.