CD Odyssey Disc 395: Steve Earle

I am about to review another album by one of my favourite artists, but first a word on one of my favourite poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

I’ve been reading his Arthurian-inspired series of poems, “Idylls of the King” for about a month now.  It is taking a while, and at places where I’m seen periodically with a book in my hand (the local Subway, my office cubicle at lunch, etc.) I feel oddly embarrassed it is taking me so long.

The truth is, to read Tennyson too quickly would be a mistake.  He is one of the greatest poets of all time – top three in my books – and the master of sound and rhythm.  If I take a little longer to let his words roll around in my head, or read passages twice, it is only because I want to grok him in his fullness.  As an example, here’s a piece from “Lancelot and Elaine,” where Elaine has just told her family she is fine, but in truth she continues to pine for Lancelot, who will not love her in return:

“But when they left her to herself again,

Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field

Approaching thro’ the darkness, call’d; the owls

Wailing had power upon her, and she mixt

Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms

Of evening, and the moanings of the wind.”

And that whole piece of glorious writing is a single sentence.  It’s enough to want to give up as a writer, knowing I’ll never equal it.

Instead, I will press on, and review an album that like “Idylls of the King” I gave a bit of extra time, so I could enjoy it all the more, and let it soak in for the hundredth time.

Disc 395 is…El Corazon

Artist: Steve Earle

Year of Release: 1997

What’s Up With The Cover?:  Another piece of cover art by Earle collaborator Tony Fitzpatrick.  I’ve often maligned Fitzpatrick’s covers, but this one works.  In fact, it makes those Valentine’s Day hearts and arrows look positively foolish by comparison.  Fitzpatrick’s heart is real and beautiful, wound and all.

How I Came To Know It: I’ve known Steve Earle since his first album in 1986 (“Guitar Town.”  However, after “Copperhead Road” I lost track of him for a while.  “El Corazon” was my reintroduction to his work, after I saw a music video on CMT for “Telephone Road” and loved it.  Since then, I’ve not only been faithfully buying every release since, but I’ve gone back to get the four I missed.  So yeah, “El Corazon” is a big deal in my relationship with Earle’s music.

How It Stacks Up:  Very well, despite stiff competition.  I have sixteen Earle albums, but one is live and another is an album of Townes Van Zandt songs.  Though both of those are excellent, they don’t really stack up.  Of the remaining fourteen, “El Corazon” ranks 3^rd or 4^th best, depending on how I’m feeling about the equally brilliant “Exit O,” but more on that one when I roll it.

Rating: 4 stars, but close to 5

“El Corazon” starts out with a somber song about U.S. politics and ends with a somber personal song about the death of his close friend and mentor, Townes Van Zandt.

In between these opposite poles of Earle’s inspirations, he treats us to expressions of failing and failed love affairs, and the varied dreams and experiences of the far-from-ordinary man.  Musically, he ranges from the early influences of Hank Williams, through bluegrass, barber shop, rock and roll and various combinations of each of these.

At no time, however, does this record ever sound disjointed or patched together.  Through it all, Earle is still Earle, his southern twang weaving stories in your mind, vocally better than you expected and with more emotion than you’ll find in ten years of new Nashville country clones.

The opening track is “Christmas In Washington” a song that simultaneously celebrates the re-election of Clinton in 1996, and bemoans that the American dream is still eroding (Earle is unapologetically left wing and his political rants at his concerts are legendary).  It is a slow, introspective song, that calls for social activists no longer with us like Woody Guthrie to “tear their eyes from paradise/and rise again somehow.”

As is often the case with Earle’s political songs, he overstates his case, but does it so beautifully you not only forgive him for it, you genuinely appreciate it.

Next up is “Taneytown” a song about racism and violence.  A gritty song about one man’s willingness to stand up to discrimination, and the tragic consequences, what caught my attention this time was that the song features a “Randall knife” which had me thinking of Guy Clarks’ masterful song, “The Randall Knife.” I could probably research the connection, but as long-time readers will know, I like the CD Odyssey to be more personal and Modernist in its approach, so I’m just going to let that notion roll around unresolved in my mind instead.

The song that first caught my attention was “Telephone Road” which is Earle once again mastering the subject of young men caught in small towns with few prospects.  This song features a fellow who is “working all week for that Texaco cheque” only to have his buddies ‘convince’ him to blow it all at the honky tonks on Telephone Road.  It reminded me strongly of the classic “Someday” from the “Guitar Town” album, which also features a gas worker with big dreams, going nowhere.

My MP3 player has little space, and a lot of it is taken up with my decision to keep large chunks of the last thirty albums I’ve reviewed on it.  That leaves me about 200 other songs I can fit on there, selected from over 900 albums.  Competition is fierce, but “El Corazon” has three stalwarts that never seem to get removed, and “Telephone Road” is one of them.

The second is “N.Y.C.” which is a hands-down five star rock anthem about small town southern boys thumbing his way to one of the world’s greatest cities, if for no better reasons than he’s “heard the girls are pretty” and “there must be somethin’ happening there, it’s just too big a town.”  The song is a powerful rock anthem, and Earle makes the clever production choice to slightly distort his vocals so they blend perfectly with the killer guitar riff as he kicks out the first few lines:

“He was standing on the highway somewhere way out in the sticks

Guitar across his shoulder like a 30 ought six

He was staring in my headlights when I came around the bend

Climbed up on the shotgun side, told me with a grin

‘I’m goin’ to New York City.”

Simple as this song is, I never get tired of it lyrically or musically.  It is just too real and raw to ever feel dated, even after hundreds of listens.

The final song that always sticks with me is “Ft. Worth Blues,” an introspective and simply-arranged eulogy for Townes Van Zandt, who had lost his battle with alcohol a few months earlier, not long after Earle himself had successfully gotten clean.  Earle’s album “Townes” is a brilliant, full length homage to the late great Townes Van Zandt, but “Ft. Worth Blues” puts all those heavy emotions into a single song, delivered in Earle’s own words.  It begins:

“In Ft. Worth all the neon’s burnin’ bright

Pretty lights, red and blue

But they’d shut down all the honky tonks tonight

And say a prayer or two

If they only knew.

You used to say the highway was your home

But we both know, that ain’t true

It’s just the only place a man can go

When he don’t know

Where he’s travelin’ to.”

It isn’t Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” but when set to music, and with Steve’s slow and reverent voice drawing you in, it gets close.  “Ft. Worth Blues “ends the album, and in the liner notes is followed with a simple dedication, “To Townes:  See you when I get there, maestro.”

“El Corazon” may start off getting your attention with political protest, but it holds you strongest with its honest and open emotion.  This is a great record, and space permitting I’d talk about almost every song, but I don’t want to go on too long, because I want people to actually read this one, and maybe get inspired to buy themselves a copy.

Best tracks: Christmas in Washington, Telephone Road, Somewhere Out There, N.Y.C., Here I Am, Ft. Worth Blues.