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• Mr. Earle's official site
• "Mr. Earle on New West Records"
• Mr. Earle's bio

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Two-time Grammy winner talks about his music and how his career has unfolded because of his style. (2:21)
 

Full interview. (13:11)
 

Tavis: Steve Earle's a talented, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who's getting set to kick off a North American tour in support of his acclaimed - and I do mean acclaimed - new CD. It's called "Townes." The disk is a tribute to the late singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. The critically acclaimed project was the subject of a major profile in this past Sunday's "New York Times," read on the plane coming home. Steve Earle, nice to see you.

Steve Earle: How you doing?

Tavis: You doing all right, man?

Earle: Yeah, I'm doing great. I'm glad I finally got to - I talked about doing this record for years, but being a singer-songwriter and a little on the political side, things always took my attention away from it, like somebody would fly an airplane into a building or the president of the United States would do something that (laughter) I felt like I needed to write a song about.

Tavis: Kept throwing you off.

Earle: So I kept putting it off, and then it turned out to be when Townes was my teacher, he wrote "Pancho and Lefty" is the song that most people know him for that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded, but he was, like, there was a whole group of us that came out of Texas in the '70s and became songwriters that we were members of a cult, there's no doubt about it.

It was really obvious he was something special. He was an alcoholic and he never even got close to thinking about getting sober, and it finally killed him. But the whole separate issue is he's one of the best songwriters that I ever saw.

Tavis: When you say he was your teacher, he taught you what?

Earle: He taught me that - I met him when I was 17 years old, and what I learned really quickly is that I was witnessing someone that was making art for the sake of making art, with absolutely no guarantee that he was ever going to make any money.

He was the first person I ever met that had actually made records, and I figured he had to be rich, he had his picture on an album. (Laughter) And then I met him, and he didn't even live anywhere then. He literally - for eight years he sort of lived with friends and traveled around kind of this big loop between Colorado and Texas and Tennessee.

He was pretty romantic and pretty impressive if you were 17 years old and dragging a guitar around, but I was really lucky. He did do this at an incredibly high level on purpose every day, and he wasn't even thinking about whether he was going to sell records or (unintelligible).

Tavis: What did you take from him musically where the style and substance of Steve Earle's music is concerned?

Earle: More than I thought. I always knew that he was a huge influence, but I've been through so much other stuff because I was played originally on country stations and then I was played on rock stations, and I perform in a lot of different formats, like a really ridiculously loud adult rock band and solo and I have a bluegrass band.

But I sat down to make this record and I was basing it on my memory of him performing these songs solo when I first met him when I was 17 and 18 and 19 years old. So I didn't - rather than record with a band, for the first time I recorded guitar and vocal solo performances, and then I overdubbed everything else. It was some stuff myself, some stuff with other musicians, but the idea was not to negotiate with the rhythm section.

Because that's a collective art. When you play with a rhythm section, they got something to say about how it feels immediately, as soon as you turn the red light on. So I just wanted to get it the way that I remembered it, and, you know, and get the take, and then overdub it. And I found out really quickly that my guitar style is completely and totally 100 percent, when I play acoustic guitar - I'm more Townes Van Zandt than I thought I was.

Tavis: And yet while you're more Townes Van Zandt than you thought you were, you, to your earlier point, can play and have played in so many different genres, so many different styles and types of music. Has that, career-wise for you, has that been more liberating or more restricting?

Earle: Well, my managers and other people that I've worked with probably have considered it to be - probably thought it hurt at times. But for me, it was all about writing songs, and so any time I got to work in another area it kept me interested.

And you know, the proof is for me is I don't sell millions of records, but I do get to make records exactly the way I want to and I've been doing it for, like, 25 years.

Tavis: And is that better, doing it your way versus making the millions?

Earle: Yeah. I make an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist doing something I really love doing. (Laughter) So it's a really good living and I'm really blessed, and a lot of that's Townes.

I didn't - my kids probably would be angry about this in the long run, and it embarrasses me a little bit, but my son was raised on food stamps for the first few years of his life, and I probably wouldn't have - I don't see a point when I would have packed it up. It took me a long time - I was 31 by the time they let me make a record.

I hitchhiked to Nashville when I was 19 years old. And a lot of that was because I was hard-headed and determined to do it kind of the way that I wanted to. But I don't have any complaints about that. I knew that I could make some decisions where I could get to make records faster, maybe make more money.

But then I made the decisions that I did, and I got to make records in spite shooting myself in the foot on several occasions and doing some stuff that had nothing to do with music that got me in trouble - it got me locked up before it was over with, but that's a separate issue.

I made all the decisions I made about making art, and I did. I was lucky. I grew up in an era where Bob Dylan had elevated songwriting to an art form once and for all. If it wasn't before, there was no doubt about it after that. And we all became songwriters because of Bob Dylan. We were in Nashville because of Kris Kristofferson, who became a songwriter because of Bob Dylan, and that's what the chain was.

Tavis: I want to come back to those moments of shooting yourself in the head or the foot or wherever else you shot yourself.

Earle: The foot.

Tavis: The foot, yeah. (Laughter)

Earle: The head would have been bad (unintelligible).

Tavis: Yeah, a bad place to get shot. We'll come back to that in a second. I want to ask, though, right quick, as you look back on your career, not the mistakes you've made but the deliberate choices you made about your music that kept you from being able to do a record until you were 31. Do you regret any of those choices? Looking back on it, would you do that thing, would you do it the same way all over again?

Earle: No, there's some things that if I had - that I've thought about where I might have forgotten that Neil Young wasn't rich when he was 20 years old and maybe made some decisions that probably wouldn't have hurt me that much, where I could have made a little bit more money.

But as far as making the records that I made, the kind of music that I made, and the political music - I'm not a political songwriter. I'm a songwriter that grew up in the '60s and the '70s and started in coffeehouses, and it never occurred to me to separate politics from art.

I thought artists were supposed to comment on the society that they lived in - that's the way I was taught to do it. So when I die they're going to figure out I wrote a lot more songs about girls than I did anything else, (laughter) and like most songwriters.

But the last few years, people tend to think of me as a political songwriter, but - and the last two records have been more personal. This is definitely personal because they're not my songs, they're Townes', and it's about me - I'm paying a debt in some ways, but it turned out to be a gift to me because this has allowed me to finish a novel that I've been working on for years, just not having to take the two months to write the songs for this record. That's what finally kind of pushed it up to the front of the schedule.

Tavis: So what do you make, then, Steve, of the fact that this project is receiving - I used the word three times already, I can't think of a better word - receiving all the acclaim, the love. Everybody is talking about this, everybody's' writing about it. This is going to be one of the most talked-about albums of the year, I think.

Earle: It's humbling. It hurts a singer-songwriter's feelings a little bit when he makes a record that gets more attention definitely than the last record that I made, which was all my songs. But this is my teacher. My son is named after Townes, and he's a songwriter. He just called me, and thank God I didn't think - he's playing in Boston tonight, I didn't think he was going make it.

But he seems to have sorted it out and figured it out. (Laughter) I still get those emergency (unintelligible) phone calls. But it's humbling; it's probably good for me. As far as the press goes, I've always depended on press. I can't always count on radio airplay because of some of the musical decisions I've made. Then again, the press - I don't read it.

I know when it's good and people let me know because I figured out a long time ago that probably wasn't good for me. There's no way not to take it personally if people don't like what you're doing, and it hurts your feelings. And if it's good then you're in even greater danger of believing it, and just me being around as long as I have and being a person in recovery, I've discovered it's healthier for me to try to avoid reading into this stuff as much as I can.

Tavis: Speaking of recovery and being healthy, let me go back now to those moments in your career where you battled with drugs. You have a teacher, you have a mentor, a hero, Townes, who has his own addiction, his own battle. How did you not avoid that, number one, and number two and more importantly, how did you find your way to sobriety?

Earle: Well, I'm really ashamed of this more than probably anything else in the whole picture, and that is that at first, like everyone else around me, I emulated Townes and I tried to be Townes in every way possible.

Then I figured out that it wasn't a good idea and that I couldn't keep up with him. I couldn't do - some of the things that he was doing were going to - the way he drank was scary, and he did scary things. Most of the time he only endangered himself, but sometimes other people, just by virtue of proximity, were endangered as well.

There was a point in my life when I can remember thinking, I'm okay because I'm not in as bad a shape as he is. Now, I did separate the art. It never made me think any less of him as an artist. It was really tough, and I did - later on I discovered that what the truth was is that I was what they call a high-bottom addict. I functioned for longer, but eventually all that stuff that happened to all those other junkies that I thought I'm not as bad as them, all that stuff happened to me.

Before it was over with, I was 38 or 39 before I ever caught a drug charge, and I started taking drugs when I was 12, 13, 14 years old. And then I caught a drug charge and then I ended up in jail, and then all my guitars ended up in the pawn shop and the only thing I had left was a house, and I couldn't figure out how to get it in the car and take it to the pawn shop, or it would have been gone, too. (Laughter)

I pawned motorcycles, I pawned some pretty big stuff, but I couldn't - the house was still there. By some miracle, I still own that house. I don't live there anymore, it's in Tennessee. I don't know why. There's a lot of survivor guilt in this record, and it might be part of what makes it - it's a lot more powerful thing than I thought it would be. The experience of (unintelligible) I knew it would be okay.

I have a special connection to these songs. Some of them I've known all my life and sung all my life. And he's my teacher; there was a reason for me to do it. So I knew it would be all right. I knew it wouldn't be a bad record. And if I was ever going to make a record of covers, this was the one for me to make.

But I was not prepared for as soon as we started recording the first night how powerful the experience of making it was going to be, and this whole thing, this reaction to it, I think it's because of something real.

Tavis: Well, you love - I certainly do, and I know you do as well - I love to see people who have come through a difficult period in their lives and in their art and their gift to the rest of us gets to shine through.

Steve is doing that. Take your pick - bam, there you have it.

Earle: (Unintelligible) vinyl, I can't believe that. (Unintelligible)

Tavis: Yeah, I love the vinyl thing, man.

Earle: That's a cool thing.

Tavis: The new project from Steve Earle is called "Townes." Everybody's talking about it, and shame on you if you don't get a copy of it. Steve, an honor to have you on the program.

Earle: Thanks, appreciate it.

Tavis: It's good to see you, man.

Earle: Good to see you.

Tavis: My pleasure.