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Folk column: New York stories

The new album from Alison Krauss and Robert Plant (pictured) is one of the folk records of the year. As is Steve Earle’s remarkable ode to his adopted New York.

Greg McAteer, 06 Dec 2007

There’s something about the end of the year that seems to suit the crusty old warrior types. Albums surface that you would never see hit the shelves during the summer months and live dates sneak onto the schedule before the trees start to get their leaves again. Like lizards hiding from the heat of the midday sun, there’s something about the cool and the shade that can tempt an old storyteller out in to the daylight.

So it is that hot on the heels of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand album we’re being treated to releases by a handful of the most significant performers on the folk and acoustic scene over the past couple of decades.

Making most waves I guess is Steve Earle’s Washington Square Serenade which marks Earle’s first recorded offering since he decamped from ‘guitar town’ to the ‘big apple’ about a year ago. Living on the street on which the cover for Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album was shot over forty years ago, Earle finds a type of comfort in the fact that New York hasn’t actually changed as much as the hype would have you believe. 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 ‘n’ 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, chronicling 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 Ladyland Studios, the famed Greenwich Village recording complex that Jimi Hendrix built in the late ’60s. “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.”



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Greg McAteer

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