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Steve Earle - Washington Square Serenade (2007)

“The new album is political, but not as overtly political as the last two records,” says hardcore troubadour Steve Earle, in the July issue of HARP. “It’s the most personal record I’ve made in a long time.”Earle’s talking about Washington Square Serenade, due September 25 from New West. It’s been three years since we got an album from Earle, and during the break he moved from Nashville to New York City. In that regard, “Tennessee Blues,” the first song on the record, brings Earle full circle as he sings about leaving the “Guitar Town” he first wrote about 20 years ago. The album then celebrates New York City’s diversity with “City Of Immigrants,” featuring the band Forro In The Dark, who bring their style of traditional Brazilian Forro music to the song. Earle’s wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, joins him on the tender duet “Days Aren’t Long Enough,” which they co-wrote. “The album is mostly acoustic instruments, and some of the songs are pretty folky,” he tells HARP. “It’s heavily inspired by my neighborhood. I live on the Greenwich Village street Dylan is walking down on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Recorded at NYC’s Electric Lady Studios, the album is Earle’s first produced by John King of The Dust Brothers (Beck, The Rolling Stones, Beastie Boys)

Track Listings

01. Tennessee Blues

02. Down Here Below

03. Satellite Radio

04. City Of Immigrants (with Forro In The Dark)

05. Sparkle And Shine

06. Come Home to Me

07. Jericho Road

08. Oxycontin Blues

09. Red Is The Color

10. Steve s Hammer (For Pete)

11. Day s Aren t Long Enough (with Allison Moorer)

12. Way Down In The Hole

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“The city hasn’t changed as much as real estate agents would have you believe,” Steve Earle explains about his adopted hometown of New York City. “Specifically, my neighborhood hasn’t changed that much. I point people in the left direction so that they can take their picture like the cover of Freewheelin’ all the time.”

That’s easy enough for Earle these days, because he and his wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, now live on the very Greenwich Village street on which the famous cover shot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962) was taken. In that photo, Dylan and his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo huddle against the cold as they walk along a snowy New York street. It’s an indelible romantic image that captures the idealism of the folk revival that was gathering momentum in New York at the time.

Steve Earle’s gripping new album, Washington Square Serenade, is a loving tribute to that era, that movement, that music and the city that gave them all a nurturing home. “That period changed pop music,” Earle says. “It made lyrics much more important. Rock & roll could have become a subgenre of pop if it hadn’t been for that literary aspect, which completely came out of a four-block area in New York City in one brief instant of time.”

Like Freewheelin’ itself, Serenade is an album that combines songs of love and protest, a stirring chronicle of both the connections between people that make life worth living and the things that must be changed in order to make such connections more possible for everyone. “I knew it was going to be pretty personal,” Earle says about the album, which he recorded at Electric Lady Studios, the famed Greenwich Village recording complex that Jimi Hendrix built in the late Sixties. “The best part of my personal life was going so well I knew that chick songs were going to be no problem. As for political songs, I don’t think I’ve ever made an apolitical record. The last two before this [The Revolution Starts … Now (2004), Jerusalem (2002)] were overtly political, and unapologetically so. This one is unapologetically personal.”

Washington Square Serenade opens with “Tennessee Blues,” which updates the title track of Earle’s 1986 debut album, Guitar Town – and establishes the sense of another fresh start. The new version is acoustic, more introspective and more rhythmically charged – all traits highly appropriate for the tale of an artist “bound for New York City” and leaving Tennessee behind. “It’s continuing a narrative – the state of me,” Earle explains. The “chick songs,” as Earle describes them in apt period slang, include the lovely “Sparkle and Shine,” which echoes both early Dylan and the Beatles, and “Days Aren’t Long Enough,” which Earle co-wrote and sings with Moorer. “I’ve written duets for Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Iris DeMent and my sister Stacey, so there was no way I was going to get away with not writing a duet for me and Allison,” Earle says, laughing. “I had to – I’m married! But we’ve been singing together as long as we’ve been together, and I wanted something that was a love song about us.”

On the other end of Earle’s passions, “Steve’s Hammer,” which the singer dedicates to Pete Seeger, is an uplifting political anthem, a statement of Earle’s conviction about the role that music can play in achieving social justice. “One of these days I’m gonna lay this hammer down/Leave my burden restin’ on the ground,” he declares, and then makes clear when and only when that day will come: “When the air don’t choke you, and the ocean’s clean/And the kids don’t die for gasoline.”

As we all know, that time has not yet arrived, and “City of Immigrants” makes that point forcefully. A paean to New York’s long history of welcoming people from other countries, the song had a very specific inspiration for Earle. “I knew I wanted to write a ‘Fuck Lou Dobbs’ song,” he says about the CNN anchor who has defined anti-immigration politics as his signature issue. “There’s no excuse for it – it’s ugly and it’s racist.” Supporting Earle on the song is Forro in the Dark, the super-charged neo-folk Brazilian band that’s based in New York.

Washington Square Serenade concludes with Earle’s scarifying version of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole,” which will serve as the theme for the next season of the HBO series “The Wire.” Earle has a recurring role on the show – “I play a redneck recovering addict, so it’s not acting,” he deadpans.

“It’s daunting to cover a Tom Waits song – he’s one of the best of my generation of songwriters,” Earle admits. “But, then, I once sang ‘Nebraska’ to an audience that I knew Bruce Springsteen was in. It’s not that stuff like that doesn’t scare me – it’s just that doesn’t mean I won’t do it!”

Overall, Serenade is imbued with a deeply intimate feel, because all of its concerns, public as well as private, are essential to who Steve Earle is. That intensely personal quality, however, is deftly complemented – both underscored and unsettled -- by John King’s production. As one half of the Dust Brothers, King has worked with the likes of Beck and the Beastie Boys. As a result, rhythms continually percolate, bump and simmer beneath the largely acoustic instrumentation, fashioning a folk/hip-hop hybrid that sonically unites two of New York’s finest musical traditions.

Asked how he would like listeners to respond to Washington Square Serenade, Earle, characteristically, is ready with a bold answer. “If you feel like you don’t know what America is all about left now, and you want to reorient yourself to what America should be about, it’s a really good time to come to New York City,” he says. “I needed really badly at this point in my life to see a mixed-race, same-sex couple holding hands in my own neighborhood. It makes me feel safer.”

“I’ve been pretty heartbroken about the way things have gone politically in this country the last few years, and I seriously considered moving someplace else,” he concludes. “Then I figured out that I didn’t have to leave the country. All I had to do was come to New York.”

Washington Square Serenade – in its commitment, its values, its musical intelligence, its beauty and, finally, its very American optimism about the possibilities for a better world – demonstrates why.

- Anthony DeCurtis

Fool for the City

Folk-country icon Steve Earle finds a new home.

By Alan Light

‘I’m too f*ckin’ old to live in Williamsburg,” says Steve Earle. “I didn’t wait to move here until I was 50 so I could live in Brooklyn.”

Earle is a Nashville legend; his 1986 debut, Guitar Town, was the rallying cry for a generation of rebellious “new-country” artists, and he stayed on as their hard-living figurehead. But two years ago, Earle gave in to a longtime fantasy and moved to the West Village. His love affair with his new hometown is documented on his forthcoming album, Washington Square Serenade; the opening track, “Tennessee Blues,” makes Earle’s new allegiance clear. “Bound for New York City and I won’t be back no more,” he sings. “Boys won’t see me around—good-bye, guitar town.”

The album’s shimmering mix of acoustic guitars and supple beats was provided by producer John King, half of the Dust Brothers team that has worked with Beck and the Beastie Boys. “I wanted to make a folk record arrived at by hip-hop rules,” says Earle. The subject matter also represents a shift, away from the overt politics that has defined Earle’s recent work; he’s perhaps best known for 2002’s “John Walker’s Blues,” his sympathetic study of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban.”

“I knew this was gonna be a more personal record,” he says. “It’s not an apolitical record, but it’s also somebody else’s turn. I can’t do that all my life.” He adds that after his 2005 marriage to singer Allison Moorer—his seventh, including two go-rounds with the same woman—“love songs were pretty hard to avoid.”

As his matrimonial history might indicate, it hasn’t been an easy road for Earle. In the past, he’s battled a heroin addiction—“I bought a lot of dope there,” he says about the East Village. “I was banned from 7A for being a junkie”—and in the mid-nineties, he wound up in jail on drugs and firearms charges.

Since being paroled in 1994, though, he has been on a creative tear. In addition to releasing almost an album a year, Earle has worked as an actor, with a role on The Wire (“I play a redneck, recovering addict,” he says. “That’s not acting”); a radio host for Sirius; a fiction writer (Doghouse Roses, a 2002 collection of stories; he’s also at work on a novel); a playwright (Karla, about Karla Faye Tucker, who in 1998 was the first woman executed by the state of Texas since the Civil War); and a progressive political activist, often focusing on protesting the death penalty.

You might expect that Earle would chafe at the gentrification that has engulfed the city, particularly his own newly adopted neighborhood, but it doesn’t bother him so much. The Village has “always been a tourist trap,” he says. More important is its blend of bohemians and students, which provided the spark for the sixties folk boom that remains close to the heart of his music. “That’s the point at which rock and roll becomes art, and certainly when it becomes anything resembling literature,” he says. “So I’m living where my job was invented. I mean, how lucky am I?”

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