Steve Earle has a lot of 50th anniversary events to talk about, but he’s very clear about what’s bringing him on his Fifty Years of Songs and Stories tour, which starts May 25 in Decatur, Alabama.
Earle tells Billboard, “It’s been 50 years since I signed my first publishing contract. I’m now officially in the music business.” In Texas, Earle played in the band of his musical hero Townes Van Zandt for six years. That was in Nashville, where he worked during the day and played at night with Guy Clark’s group, among others. Before going back to Texas and then back to Nashville, Earle worked as a writer for the song publishing company Sunbury-Dunbar. It was there that he became an artist in his own right with the 1982 EP Pink & Black. His career really took off with 1986’s Guitar Town, which went straight to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart.
Earle, 70, has been going ever since, with some hits and misses and a short time in jail in the mid-1990s for having drugs and guns. Others, like Joan Baez, Travis Tritt, Robert Earl Keen, and Stacy Dean Campbell, have recorded his songs, but Earle has stayed firmly and defiantly his own man. He has won three Grammy Awards and worked on other projects, like producing for Baez and Lucinda Williams, acting (on HBO’s “Treme” and “The Wire” and off-Broadway’s “Samara”), and theater (the Drama Desk Award-nominated “Coal Country”). In 2010, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty gave him the shining star of abolition award for his work in politics and society. In 2020, he was admitted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Earle will be on the road a lot, playing mostly solo shows with a few dates with the band Reckless Kelly. It’s clear that there will be a lot of stories to go with the songs. Earle says, “It’s not strictly chronological; that’s the main idea behind it. But some of the songs I play are based on memories, so something I wrote later might come up earlier in the show.” “I try not to talk too much, but I’m good at that thing. It’s kind of built around telling stories.” That’s pretty much how it works: I started out in coffee shops.
During his time on the road, Earle hopes to finish his next show, which is based on the hit 1983 movie Tender Mercies. He says, “I want to finish at least three songs so I have a draft.” “It takes years to finish these things.” “All I want to do is live long enough to blow this thing up.” He’s also on Willie Nile’s new album, The Great Yellow Light, which is coming out soon, and he made the “cosmic country” song “Dead or Gone to Dallas” for a split single he’s doing with Reckless Kelly. As Earle points out, “it would work on Guitar Town.” “I was talking to Miranda Lambert. She asked me if I had ever been to the part of Texas where she is from because her family is from the same area. “Everyone I know is dead or in Dallas,” I told her. “Don’t write that with anyone!” she told him. She is also done with “a big chunk of” a memoir and “a little bit of” a book.
He says, “I really mean to finish them before I die.” He adds that when you turn 70, you think about it even more. You might not think that one number would be more important than the others. But my dad died when he was only 74, and my grandpa died when he was only 63. One uncle died when he was 80, and the other died before my dad did. And when you reach a certain age, your friends start passing away. I used to do honors once in a while on my radio show, Hard Core Troubadour on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Channel. Now I do them more often than I’d like.
Earle is about to go on tour with his Fifty Years of Songs and Stories Tour, so we asked him to tell us about five of his most important songs. Find out when Earle is on tour here.
