The outspoken troubadour responsible for some of music’s most enduring Americana songs has a Massey Hall show Aug. 25.
By Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Steve Earle, the outspoken troubadour responsible for some of music’s most enduring and sublime Americana songs, has a new goal in mind as he creeps toward the age of 70: a Broadway musical.
“I’m writing a musical of Tender Mercies with Daisy Foote, whose father, Horton Foote, wrote the screenplay of the original (1983) movie,” Earle, 68, proclaimed over a Zoom call from Phoenix, Arizona, at the beginning of the month
If that seems a little surprising to fans of the man whose remarkable gems include “Copperhead Road,” “Christmas in Washington,” “Sometimes She Forgets” and “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied,” Earle says it’s been a goal of his to land something on Broadway since he relocated to New York 19 years ago, after spending over three decades residing in Nashville.
“When I first lived in New York, I wanted to write straight plays, because I’ve written a couple of books,” said Earle, whose solo Alone Again tour stops at Massey Hall on Aug. 25 with opener Ron Sexsmith.
“I didn’t think I was interested in musicals.”
But he caught a few and was particularly struck by the musical Spring Awakening, “the one that really put me over the edge.”
“Duncan Sheik wrote the music,” Earle explained. “Somebody else (Steven Sater) wrote the book and lyrics. But (Sheik) was somebody I knew from my world.”
It prompted Earle to conduct a few related experiments of his own, including an off-Broadway score for Uilleann pipes (“Leave it to me to write a score for an instrument that only 40 people in the world play,” he quipped). He was nominated for Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards for 2020’s Coal Country, a play with songs written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen based on a 2010 West Virginia mining disaster that claimed the lives of 29 men.
Earle served as the musical director for the acclaimed play, and the songs he wrote and performed during the event are featured on his 2020 album Ghosts of West Virginia.
Now the three-time Grammy winner is setting his sights higher with what he calls a “book” musical.
“It’s where you have a play that’s a strong piece of theatre and songs that are part of the narrative: that’s an American invention like the blues, and rock ’n’ roll and bluegrass,” he said.
Of course, this being Steve Earle, a musical isn’t the only project he’s working on: there’s a TV pilot and two books — a memoir and a novel — as well as thinking about composing his first original songs since 2021’s J.T., his appreciation of his late son Justin Townes Earle, also a singer-songwriter, who died at 38 from an accidental overdose.
“I just write, you know?” Earle said with the slight drawl he developed after his folks relocated him from his Fort Monroe, Va., birthplace to spend his formative years in San Antonio, Tex.
He’s led quite the colourful life with its fair share of triumph and tragedy. He’s been married seven times (including twice to the same woman). His last marriage, to fellow singer and songwriter Allison Moorer, lasted 10 years and produced a son, John Henry, who is on the autism spectrum and non-verbal.
While Earle still favours romance, he doesn’t see himself tying the knot an eighth time.
“I haven’t had a girlfriend in a long time, but it’s mainly because I’m a single parent and I’ve got a 13-year-old with autism,” he said. “Nine months of the year, that’s what I do: I work on theatre and I take care of John Henry. Then I get on the tour bus in the summertime.
“At my core, I believe in love and relationships. My parents were together until my dad died. On the other side, I created a lot of chaos in that respect of my life … but a lot of that was because I’ve only been married once since I got sober.
“I won’t do it again, because that didn’t work either. I know ‘never say never,’ but if I was a betting man — and I am — I would bet that at 68, no, I’m not going to try it again, especially because I’ve got my hands full with John Henry.”
A recovering addict, Earle was arrested in 1993 for heroin possession, and for cocaine and weapons possession in 1994, and sentenced to a year in jail. Released after serving 60 days to attend an outpatient rehab program in Hendersonville, Tenn., Earle has been sober ever since.
Musically, Earle has also led an adventurous life. He said the main reason he chose to play guitar was “trying to get girls, just like everybody else.”
“It was the Beatles and then Elvis before that, and my uncle, who was five years older, called me and told me to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and the Beatles. But my dad wouldn’t let me have an electric guitar. So I gravitated toward the Beatles and Stones and Kinks songs — they had acoustic guitars in them — and I heard a lot of country music, too, that had cool, acoustic guitars because of where I was.”
He started on the coffee house circuit when he was 14 and played Oblio’s Strut in Killeen, Tex., in the bar “where Vietnam Veterans Against the War was founded.”
“That’s why music and politics have never been separate for me,” said Earle, who calls himself a “socialist who votes with the Democrats.”
“I just grew up with it that way in that era.”
At 19, he played bass with another Texan, Townes Van Zandt, and eventually moved to Nashville.
Earle had no qualms about his songwriting destiny.
“I thought I was good at it before I was good at it,” he said. “I always felt like I was put here to do it. I have a gift. I have a calling: I’m a songwriter.”
For Earle, lyrics are key to his success.
“We were all post-Bob Dylan songwriters — the first in Nashville was Kris (Kristofferson) — and we all came out of coffee houses. I believed that lyrics elevated rock ’n’ roll to an art form. And people will say, ‘What about virtuoso guitar playing?’ Well, Jimi Hendrix was a pretty f—king good lyricist, too, and then covered Bob Dylan songs to find his own footing as a lyricist.
“I think there’s a moment in 1965 when Bob Dylan wants to be John Lennon and John Lennon wants to be Bob Dylan, and that elevates rock to an art form. Otherwise, it’s just cars and girls.”
When it comes to his own catalogue, of which songs is he most proud?
“I have different songs for different reasons,” Earle replied. “‘My Old Friend the Blues’ sticks out. I’m pretty proud of ‘Copperhead Road’ and ‘The Galway Girl,’ because those two songs will definitely be remembered after I’m gone.”
He said that “The Galway Girl” has become a standard in Ireland.
“Every wedding, every time there’s a session at a pub, that song’s played every single day, millions of times, on that little bitty island,” he said. “And after I’m gone, they’ll still be playing it; I’m convinced of that.
“‘Copperhead Road’ has survived — it’s the only surviving line dance … There are YouTube videos of college girls doing the ‘Copperhead Road’ line dance in dorm rooms. It keeps going down. They don’t have any idea who I am and have never listened to another song of mine, but that’s where immortality comes from: not the people that have every one of your records.”
When I mention “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied” being my Earle favourite, he replied that the first time a crowd sang along to that song “was at the Diamond, which is now the Phoenix in Toronto.”
“That’s kind of like a football song, that’s what I finally figured out. And the first time it happened in Scotland, I thought it was like (the film) Braveheart: I thought they were getting ready to storm the stage. They were kind of freaking me out.”
Not only is Canada Earle’s top market in the world for music sales and concerts, he confirmed that Massey Hall “is probably my favourite concert hall in the world.”
“You can play solo there and it sounds great; you can play classical music and it sounds great and, unlike Carnegie Hall, rock ’n’ roll sounds great there, too.”
Steve Earle is very familiar with his opening act, Ron Sexsmith, for whom he co-produced the 2001 album Blue Boy.
Earle insisted he was the very first to champion Sexsmith back in the early ‘90s.
“I knew about Ron before anybody else in the States did, long before Elvis Costello did, and long before Mitchell Froom and any of the people who signed him,” said Earle. “Because the first time I saw Ron, he was about 18 and he had a residency in that downstairs room at the El Mocambo.
“I was probably writing songs for Copperhead (Road) by that time. I was with a guy who worked with the label, and he and I would just go and see hard rock bands together. He wanted me to see Ron, so he brought me to the El Mocambo and Ron knocked me out.
“I talked about him and tried to get people to sign him for the few years I had left before I slipped off the face of the Earth. And by the time I got out of jail, his first record was out and he was hanging out with (Elvis) Costello. So I was right.”