By Jerry Shriver, USA TODAY
NEW YORK � Steve Earle has delivered plenty of potent messages during his turbulent career, but he has never pricked the public's conscience in as many different ways as he will this spring.
By Ted Barron
Hard-core troubadour: Steve Earle is releasing an album and novel, both titled I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. The album arrives Tuesday; the book in May.
By Ted Barron
Hard-core troubadour: Steve Earle is releasing an album and novel, both titled I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. The album arrives Tuesday; the book in May.
The renegade troubadour-turned-renaissance man is employing a new record, his first novel, a dramatic TV role, a full-blown band tour and behind-the-scenes advocacy work to challenge audiences to think about mortality, redemption, addiction, artistic commitment and other soul-searing questions.
"I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie," he says of his restless path.
Since his major label debut a quarter-century ago, that route has led him to reinvigorate the outlaw country movement, spend time in jail on drug and weapons charges, kick a longtime drug habit, walk down the aisle seven times, write plays and publish short stories, champion a death-penalty ban ? and win three Grammys (amid 14 nominations).
Central to Earle's latest ventures is the song I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, the prophetic last single released by tragic country icon Hank Williams before his New Year's Day death in 1953, at age 29. Earle adopts that title for his new T Bone Burnett-produced album, out Tuesday, and for his novel, out May 12 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Though the projects evolved independently, they embrace similar themes. The novel imagines the tormented life of the doctor who may have given Williams a fatal dose of morphine and who is haunted by Hank's ghost. Some of the album's songs were inspired by the deaths of Earle's father three years ago and a musician friend a year later.
Yet Earle, 56, insists the works are "not about mortality in any negative sense at all. They're about mortality in the sense that, this is the one thing we all have to do. You know what they say about death and taxes. But you have the option to not pay taxes. I have done that. And paid the penalty and interest and survived. You have no choice about death whatsoever."
The album ends on an uplifting note with This City, a song about the resilience of New Orleans that Earle wrote for last year's first-season finale of the David Simon series Treme on HBO. Earle appeared in three episodes as a street musician named Harley ("me, without a record contract"), and the song was nominated for a Grammy and an Emmy. "It's one of the best songs I've written ... and represents one of a million second chances I've gotten in my life."
Earle reprises that role this season, starting with the third episode May 8. His character mentors Annie, the talented street-musician violinist played by Lucia Micarelli. Like Earle (who appeared in an earlier Simon HBO series, The Wire), Micarelli is a musician who later branched out into acting, and the two clicked immediately.
"As he has been a mentor to Annie, he has become a mentor to me as well," says Micarelli, 27, who wrote a song with Earle that will be featured this season. "He's very obviously a good man, incredibly bright, kindhearted and generous creatively and otherwise. My running joke is, 'C'mon, Uncle Steve, tell us a story!' We all love him."
Earle likely will soak up plenty of love from his longtime fans when he launches an extensive tour beginning June 9 in Seattle. After years of performing solo and acoustic, he'll play with an enhanced version of his old backup band, The Dukes, with whom he last toured in 2005. The "new" outfit is billed as Steve Earle and the Dukes (and Duchesses) featuring Allison Moorer. He and Moorer wed in 2005 and have a 1-year-old son.
What's different about marriage No. 7?
"It's Allison, for one thing," he says. "And I'm sober. I had never been married sober. It's totally different being married when you're sober. Totally different being a new father when you're sober."
So in spite of the sobering themes of his creative output and his work with Amnesty International on the death penalty, Earle proclaims himself "pretty happy. I make an embarrassing amount of money doing something I really love. I live in the greatest city in the world (New York), and I am looking forward when Treme ends to going to New Orleans on my own and feeling like it's my own.
"I've got nothing to complain about."
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