Steve Earle Cares
T
By Chris Biddle
here’s a scene in the fourth season of HBO’s
The Wire, where the character Waylon,
played by legendary American roots musician Steve Earle, tells an audience of recovering drug addicts, “I’m in here with y’all talking
sh-t about how strong I am, how strong I feel, but
my disease is out there in that parking lot doing
pushups, on steroids, waiting for the chance to kick
my ass up and down that street again.” At the end
of the sentence, his voice cracks in a sort of half
chuckle, half sob, and the line between character
and actor blurs. It’s the sort of authenticity of experience, further conveyed in Earle’s breathlessness
as his speech progresses and the tired, world-weary
din of his eyes, that makes Steve Earle one of America’s greatest living artists.
After a stint in lockup in the 90’s, a subsequent
44 • CIDER MAG • cidermag.com
twenty years of uneasy sobriety, and the recent failure of Earle’s seventh marriage, the artist released
Terraplane last February. The new album was
recorded with Earle’s longtime backup band, the
Dukes. The mostly blues record features a diverse
slew of breakup songs - moving quickly from the
jaunty, shoulder-shrugging “Ain’t Nobody’s Daddy
Now”, to the decidedly more melancholy “Better Off
Alone”. The two tracks tell the same story, but from
different voices, a dichotomy of relationships which
Earle explores further with “Baby’s Just as Mean
as Me” and the album’s opener “Baby Baby Baby
(Baby)”.
It’s this tug between good and bad, the desire for
everything to be just fine but the acceptance that
it’s just not, that country and blues music does best.
Earle nails it on this record in the way only a sea-
Winter • 2015