Happy Birthday Steve Earle: Revisiting his 2004 interview with Hot Press

Steve Earle talked to Peter Murphy in 2004 about George W. Bush, jamming in Galway, and revamping Shakespeare for the 21^st century:

Here’s one Texan who won’t see the inside of the Oval Office – at least not in this term.

Veteran country-punk-folk-rock rogue Steve Earle’s new album The Revolution Starts . . . Now allies anti-Bush agitprop, country grit and narrative balladry (‘Rich Man’s War, ‘The Gringo’s Tale’) with MC5-meets-Merle Haggard activist tracts (the title track and ‘F The CC’), while the liner notes reclaim the constitution from the neo-cons.

Earle, a long-time death penalty repeal advocate and anti-landmine campaigner, was also one of the first musicians to break post-9/11 paralysis and speak out against Republican hawkery on his 2002 album Jerusalem, specifically ‘John Walker’s Blues’, written from the point of view of the American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. While his contemporaries were still checking with their booking agents to see how seriously an anti-war stance would impact on their careers, Earle put his money where his mouth is.

“The flak came from people I expected it to come from, so it really didn’t bother me as much as it probably bothered other people,” he says, speaking from the offices of his label, Artemis Records. “I mean, at the time if somebody asked me why I was the only person doing it, I just said I happened to be comfortable communicating in political terms.

“But I predicted then that you’d see more political music as this administration went on and it’s proving to be true. Artists are starting to speak up now. The dangerous thing was that artists were allowing themselves to be intimidated into being quiet, and that should scare everybody ’cos part of our job is about empathy and letting people know that they’re not alone. Occasionally I’ll lapse into rhetoric: ‘F The CC’ is my voice espousing something that I believe ’cos I’m pissed off. But I always try to do it from as human a standpoint as I can. It works the same way as a love song and songs about love affairs that don’t work out. That’s about empathy too.”

And true enough, nestled amidst all the protest songs on the new album are a brace of bona fide heartbreakers; a careworn duet with Emmylou Harris entitled ‘Comin’ Around’ and ‘I Thought You Should Know’, the most potent melding of motel lust and last-chance romance since Billy Bob Thornton’s ‘Starlight Lounge’. Was it hard to place these songs in the context of such a political record?

“It was weird,” Earle says. “I wrote ‘Comin Around’ for a Lasse Hallstrom film called An Unfinished Life with Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez, that’s coming out at Christmas. It’s a very human story, I wrote it for the closing credits. And the character I’m singing and the character Emmy’s singing are characters from the film, but like all that stuff, when I got done with it I figured out very quickly it had more to do with me than I thought it did. ‘I Thought You Should Know’ is more about sex than it is about love, but I’m single – I needed that song on the record! It’s just about that . . . sometimes you’re not quite ready for the next one, and I’m at a point in my life where I may not be ready for the next serious one for a while, so I’m just basically trying to see how many girls I can get in my swimming pool!”

One such filly on the singer’s list is, bizarrely enough, Bush advisor Condoleezza Rice, for whom Earle professes his undying lust in the barefaced cheek of ‘Condi, Condi’.

“Well y’know, there’s no accounting for taste!” he chuckles. “I can’t help it, I think she’s kinda hot! I mean, she does have the usual sort of fashion challenges that Conservatives need to overcome, and she needs to do something about that hair, ’cos damn... but I dunno, she fascinates me, her whole existence. She’s exactly my age and she’s a well-educated black woman who’s ended up being Bush’s coach. But she taught George W to walk on his hind legs; you have to give her credit for that if nothing else. I played an in-store appearance in DC the day before yesterday, I was kinda hoping she’d show up, but alas, it was not to be.”

Earle has plenty to keep his mind off the disappointment. Taking his cue from Steve Van Zandt and Henry Rollins, he’s got his own radio show up and running on the Air America Radio Network, and the title tune of the new album is set to be included on the DVD release of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. More to the point, he’s doing his own tour of the swing states this autumn to complement the Bruce/REM/Pearl Jam package tour.

“There was talk about me being part of one or more of those packages,” he admits, “but what we’ve finally decided to do is play our own tour and stick to swing states until the election and then we’re coming to Europe, so we’ll be in Ireland just before Christmas. My favourite time to be in Galway is ten days before Christmas – all the Riverdance and Lord Of The Dance companies shut down and every fiddle player in western Ireland comes home, and the music’s amazing for weeks and weeks in the pubs. Galway’s absolutely unique in Ireland because it’s the only city . . . like, Dublin’s trying to be a European city and Galway always has been one, it’s the only city in Ireland that doesn’t have a Viking past, it was a Norman city and has always been a little different. The Spanish fishing fleet, just because of the way the currents run, that’s where the Spaniards fished, forever. And there are still a lot of Spanish students there, so you see a lot of really pretty Spanish girls in Galway. If you dig the black hair and blue eyes thing, the west is the place to go.”

I do, as it happens.

“Me too! (laughs)”

Earle is of course a Hiberno-phile, not just as a result of tracing the trad tributaries that feed his bluegrass fetish, but also as a connoisseur of literature. The author of a rather fine book of short stories, Doghouse Roses, he also exercises oratorical chops on a new tune called ‘Warrior’, partially inspired by seeing Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V on television one morning last spring. The singer promptly went online and downloaded the prologue from the play, using it as the template for the lyric.

“It’s in iambic pentameter, 34 lines, which sort of forces you to use more of your vocabulary,” he says. “ To get ten beats out of a line, you have to speak English. I wrote it in about six hours and it was hard but it was really exhilarating, ‘cos y’know I missed all that stuff, I only got through the eighth grade, so I never had any formal training as a writer. I love Shakespeare, but it took me until relatively recently to read him, ten years ago. I really learned a lot. And that’s what I love about Ireland; there’s good theatre in any town of any size. And y’know, you get on a fuckin’ Aer Lingus airplane and Seamus Heaney’s in the in-flight magazine. I was in Galway when Ted Hughes died – an English poet died and it was one of the lead items on the RTE news. Believe me, they don’t give a fuck when a poet dies in the United States.”

Take a listen to Earle’s ‘The Revolution Starts Now’ below: