Earle's Aloud

"I turned in a book with no ending to my editor before I left on this tour," Steve Earle says as he relaxes in his room at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. “I guess it’s 12 or 14 days in the seat and I’ll be able to finish it. But she got literally a cliffhanger. I just got an email from her: evidently I’m being overnighted a marked up manuscript. It’s a weird book. The way it’s turned out, it’s got not only a ghost but a miracle or two and the Kennedy assassination, and the bad guy’s a priest. It’ll piss almost everybody off. We’ll see what happens.”

The Texan songwriter has been working on his second book (after the 2001 short story collection Doghouse Roses), provisionally entitled I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, for seven or eight years now. His latest album Townes, featuring songs by his mentor and friend, the late, great Townes Van Zandt, was conceived as a means of buying time to finish the novel, loosely based on the character of the quack doctor who accompanied Hank Williams on his last Cadillac ride on earth. If there’s a connecting thread between the two projects, it might be that Van Zandt was always the most literate of country singers, one whose work provides the missing link between Hank and William Blake.
“That’s the thing,” Earle says. “The difference between Townes and even Bob Dylan was Dylan was into the Modernists and French poets and the Beats, and Townes was into Robert Frost and Blake and Shakespeare. And that’s huge. Allen Ginsberg said it’s really important to learn to write meter before you break meter. The poetry that Townes took into stuff based in blues and Appalachian and Irish and Scottish music was more conventional than what Dylan started with, and I think it gives Townes his own voice.”
Writing prose, Earle maintains, is a whole other discipline for a songwriter.
“I’ve been writing songs since I was 14 years old and it’s just second nature to me,” he says. “That doesn’t mean it’s never hard, but I mean, let’s get real, most times if you haven’t got it in a day, it wasn’t anything in the first place, that’s been my experience. Whereas a book just takes time, and every time I stopped working on it, it would take days or weeks to get back in gear again. You’ve gotta put your butt in the seat every day and write the same fuckin’ thing. What’s so frightening about writing prose is you don’t have that instant feedback. Guy Clark told me when I was 17 years old that songs aren’t finished until you play ‘em for people.”
What does he read for pleasure?
“I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction. I’m not that much of a snob about it, I mean, I read Harry Potter books, I re-read Tolkien. I don’t like Tom Clancy books or Michael Crichton, although I like the movies just fine – for those kinds of movies. But the serious literary fiction that I read tends to be pretty concise and musical. I love Michael Ondaatje and Ian McEwan, and I love Patrick McCabe. Is it fashionable to like Patrick McCabe at the moment in Ireland or not? It kind of goes back and forth.”
I think Pat McCabe’s earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants.
“Yeah, and I think you gotta remember about writers that are prolific, they’re reviewed by writers that aren’t prolific a lot of the time. It’s important to remember that nothing separates Stephen King’s best work from Edgar Allan Poe but a hundred years and a heartbeat. In his time Poe wasn’t taken particularly seriously, and neither was Dickens. History teaches us what’s worthwhile.”
All Earle’s work is built on strong narrative lines, the ability to carry a story. He believes that the partition between the written word and the oral tradition – be it epic ballad, court poetry or folklore – is a relatively recent imposition.
“Absolutely, and that’s the thing about Ireland that’s really interesting. Writers have always loved Ireland because of an oral narrative tradition that exists there. Arguably the greatest poets in the English language were Irish, a lot of ‘em Protestant. You’re dealing with a place that didn’t have a written language that directly corresponded to what went down on the printed page for a long time. That dependence on singing is really important.
“Like, ‘The Galway Girl’, despite the fucking cider ad – which helps, no doubt about it – has become a song that’s sung pretty much everywhere you go in Ireland, and that’s huge for me as a songwriter. That’s what you work all your life for. That may be the one song that somebody ends up sitting around and singing in a pub in Ireland a hundred years from now, and nobody will even remember who fuckin’ wrote it. And I’m totally okay with that.
“But now that people are trying to preserve the Irish language – and I think it’s important that they do – it’s interesting to see them trying to sort out how to spell everything. And the reason they have a problem is it wasn’t designed to be a written language.”
Well, this writer was first taught Irish by a Donegal woman, and when I moved into another class they couldn’t understand what the hell kind of language I was speaking.
“Right. I witnessed something on Inis Mór, I just decided to take the ferry out, it was the dead of winter so there weren’t many tourists around, and I was staying in a B&B and I just walked up the street and got coffee, and everyone was speaking Irish, and then the postman came in and everyone started speaking English until the postman left.
"And the woman behind the counter looks over at me and she goes, ‘He’s from Dublin, he married a girl from the island, we go easy on him!’ And there is a whole separate modern version of Irish that was born in the prisons, there’s a Republican Irish that they taught to each other so they would have a way to communicate, it’s become a separate dialect.”
Which is akin to how blues language evolved into hip-hop slang via the prison system.
“Well, the biggest difference between slang in the US and everywhere else I think is almost 100% of street slang comes out of prison. It’s a black thing, but mainly it’s a prison thing, and therefore a class thing, cos it’s poor people who go to prison.”
And also the fashion of having your jeans hanging down around your haunches and no laces in your shoes.
“I was in jail with guys who would press creases in their scrub suits by puttin’ them under the mattresses and then sag ‘em,” Earle affirms. “They were a lot more fashion-conscious in there than I was!”

Steve Earle plays The Town Hall, Galway (November 9 & 10) and Opera House, Cork (11) as part of a nationwide tour. See hotpress.com for more details.