ROCK’N’ROLL CONFIDENTIAL
STEVE EARLE
The Hardcore Troubadour talks Jerry Jeff Walker, politics and staying sober.
Lone star:
Steve Earle has located his inner Chet Baker.
Danny Clinch
STEVE EARLE’s latest album, Jerry Jeff, (as in Walker) is the third in a trilogy of tributes to mentors following 2009’s Townes (as in Van Zandt) and 2019’s Guy (as in Clark). The prodigious Earle has also been acting in a musical called Coal Country for the past two years (pandemic permitting) about 2010’s Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, for which he also wrote and performed the songs, heard on 2020’s Ghosts Of West Virginia. Then there’s the novel he’s writing, a memoir on hold, a musical based on Horton Foote’s screenplay Tender Mercies and fathering duties for his 12-year-old autistic son John Henry Earle. He’s a busy man and he likes it like that.