It is very easy–and often false–to think that the past was somehow better than the present. But in terms of country music, the idea carries some weight. Turn on any Top 40 country radio station, and it will be almost impossible to reconcile what you hear with Hank Williams, or Loretta Lynn, or Townes Van Zandt or Willie Nelson. But, even in country’s darkest hours, there have always been musicians who carried the torch. Perhaps no one did it better than Steve Earle. His body of work kept the soul of country music alive even as he ventured into other genres. But, Earle is much more than just a musician. He is a writer of fiction, and he recently published his first novel. He is also an actor, appearing on the HBO series The Wire and Treme. Earle talked to Thriller about this and more.

*FEATURES AUDIO/MULTIMEDIA*

When Thriller caught up with Steve Earle, the renowned singer-songwriter-writer-actor had just released a new album and his first novel, both titled I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, after the Hank Williams’ song. Perhaps he used the title twice because it was particularly meaningful–Earle had just lost his father and uncle, and death was on his mind. During the interview, he spoke in the same way he writes songs–direct, honest, no bullshit–and he opened up about everything from his relationship with Townes Van Zandt to his years of drug abuse.

Your most recent album and your first novel are both named after a Hank Williams song, and they’re both about death, God, eternity—big subjects.

I think as any kind of artist, your job is to keep practicing your craft until you get good enough to tackle stuff like that.  There’s the odd prodigy that’s born able to do it.  My curve has been more like, I wrote “Tom Ames’ Prayer” and “Ben McCulloch” when I was nineteen or twenty years old.  But there were lots of songs that weren’t as good as that in between songs that were that good when I was twenty.  It took me until I was thirty-one to make my first record.  I don’t think that’s a function of me being a misunderstood genius.  I think it just took me a while to get interesting enough as a recording artist, as a singer-songwriter.  The reason for taking on that stuff at this point is obvious—I lost my dad a few years ago, and I’m at an age where I’m starting to lose friends.  I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in, and I’m trying really hard to stay here because I got a ten-month-old son.  There’s a certain amount of just arrogance that goes with this job.  Every once in a while you just sort of have to step up and weight in.  I’m pretty much self-taught when it comes to everything because I just didn’t stay in school, so some of the curve is a little backwards with me.  I didn’t know what this record was about.  It has the same title as the book because I looked up when I finished it, and I went, “Oh my God, it’s about the same things that the book is about.”  I recorded “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” as an extra track just as something that would be an interesting extra track, and I thought we could use it in helping promote the book.  I had no idea that I was going to call the record that at the time I recorded the song.

Were you close with your father?

We were really close.  I look so much like my father that it’s scary, especially with this beard that I can’t shave off because HBO won’t let me.  I’ve passed mirrors in the last three years and scared the shit out of myself.

Do you feel comfortable dealing with such morbid subjects?

It’s definitely about death, but I’m not sure that morbid accurately describes it.  Or, at least my attempt was for it not to be morbid.

Actually, I agree. Morbid wasn’t the word I wanted, because the album actually has a hopeful feeling even though it is talking a lot about death.

You know, I’m not Hank Williams, and I’m not my dad, and I’m not Townes [Van Zandt], who died on New Year’s Day, the same day that Hank Williams did.  [The album] really is an attempt to try to understand death as part of life.  I think we constantly trip over the Western concept of death, if that makes any sense.  I watched my dad and the people that loved him go through losing him.  I’m the oldest of the five kids, so I was kind of on the tail end of the Hippies, because I was fourteen years-old in 1969, and I had an uncle—who died yesterday morning . . .

I’m sorry to hear that.

Yeah, it was a drag.  He gave me my first guitar and was a lot of the reason that I did this.  But, it’s a recurring theme.  I’ve seen other friends of mine that grew up with different ideas about spirituality than just the Judeo-Christian, “Live in this world, struggle in this world, and then you’ll get your reward in the next one” approach to spirituality.  I’ve seen people outside of that that weren’t as scared as my father, and their loved ones weren’t quite as heartbroken.

Did that influence how you made the album?

This record is really weird because I worked longer on the songs than on any album I’ve ever made.  “God is God” and “I Am a Wanderer” were written for the Joan Baez record that I produced three years ago.  They were written literally as my dad was dying, the last few weeks of his life.  I was working on Joan’s record, and I was in Tennessee, which is where he died, running back and forth literally between the studio and the hospital.  And then, the rest of them have been written since then.  I was writing right up until the end.  I think the last song was probably “Molly-O,” which was written about four or five days before I left for L.A.  And then “The City” I wrote last April because I was asked to write it for the last episode of Treme, and then we recorded it in May.  The rest of it was done in four days in L.A. with one half-day of overdubs.  It’s very much a live record.  T-Bone [Burnett] fucked with it off and on for a couple of months after that, but I worked on this record for five days, total.  I went back out for some of the mixes, and then T-Bone remixed some stuff, but the recording is all live.  The only thing I overdubbed, personally, was I punched in one word where I sang the wrong lyric on a song.  I can’t even remember what it was.  The rest of the vocals are all done live.  Basically, the idea was—all I knew about this record when I started looking toward it was that I wanted to make a record with T-Bone Burnett.  I didn’t want to be a producer at all.  I didn’t want to make any demos more elaborate than a guitar and vocal demo.  I wanted to concentrate on being a singer and a songwriter.  I had already decided that when I was at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass watching [Robert] Plant and [Alison] Krauss perform, and watching T-Bone perform with that band.  I started a couple of days later trying to make that happen.  I’ve known T-Bone for a long time, but then we had to get both of us in the same city at the same time for long enough to do it, which took a while.

You seem to be a storyteller, for the most part.  Your songs are oriented around lyrics that tell stories, and when you’re doing the more country-tinged stuff especially, you’re working in a genre that is just full of great storytellers.  How do you find the space to tell new stories or carve out your own voice in that area?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* Story songs come easier to me than stuff that’s a littler more introspective and a little more poetic.  But, I had really good teachers, and one of them was maybe the greatest story songwriter that ever lived, and that’s Guy Clark.  That’s his specialty.  Townes was more poetic.  Guy, basically what he wrote was prose that just happened to rhyme.  They were stories with a beginning, middle and end.  He didn’t lean toward the historical stuff, except autobiographical stuff.  “Desperadoes Waiting For a Train” is him just recalling his childhood.  “Texas 1947” is him just recalling his childhood in this incredibly vivid detail, and I learned to do that.  The difference between Guy and Townes was, Townes would tell me to, you know, read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and War and Peace, and always put the cap back on the whisky in case somebody kicks it over.  Guy would show me how he mechanically went about writing songs—not necessarily that I had to do it that way; I had to adapt it to something that worked for me.  But, he was much more of a direct teacher.  I learned a lot of that from him, how to structure stories in songs and get them told in three or four minutes.

Were these things that you asked them to do, or did you just hang around and they kind of told you on their own?

I just hung around, but I think they knew.  They realized that some of us—I think me and some of the guys that were younger—I think Guy and Townes and John Hiatt and some of the guys that were older knew that we were paying attention to everything they did, and I think they understood some of the responsibility of that.

Was it challenging to go from the format of writing a three-minute song or a short story to a novel-length story?

Because I don’t do it every day, the challenge was just trying to not give it up too fast.  That’s the challenge when you convert from a short form to a long form.  I did it gradually over a period of ten years.  I wrote some short stories and published them, and then I started a novel, which because it’s not my day job, it took me seven or eight years to write this book.  I wrote a play in there too, and I’m working on another play now.  It’s so hard and so much different getting up every day and putting your butt in a seat and working on the same thing – and for me, that process got interrupted several times by a tour or something that I had to go do in order to, you know, support my overheads.

It seems like writing is a much more solitary thing than making music.

It is, but I’m not a good co-writer.  I’ve co-written with a handful of people over the years, but all of us, I think of my generation—the Texas songwriters that ended up in Nashville—we were all taking money under false pretenses.  I think there were people in those days willing to give us money thinking they could convert us into staff writers, but there were publishers in the generation before the publishers that are there now.  Bob Beckham, who ran Combine Music, he knew that you had to let Kris Kristofferson write “The Silver-Tongue Devil” if you wanted get “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” a song that was recorded over and over and over again simply because it was just so fucking good.  They’ve lost that in Nashville.  That’s kind of gone.  I don’t think anybody’s going to be covering [Garth Brooks'] “Low Places” over and over and over again.  I just don’t think that the quality of work is there anymore.  It was always commercial, and there were always bad records coming out of Nashville, but there were moments of really great songs, and that’s why the whole world came to Nashville for songs from time to time.  That doesn’t happen as much as it used to.

You’ve always struck me as among the last songwriters who have a direct connection to the royalty of country music, through people like Townes and Guy Clark, who were connected themselves to people like Hank Williams and others.  Especially through the ’80s and ’90s, it seems like no one was doing it the way those masters used to do it, and you were one of the only people carrying that torch.

I think there’s people around that do it.  Nashville isn’t the place.  You used to be able to make a living, or at least use Nashville as a base of operations to do that.  That’s harder to do than it used to be.  You’re just as well off being in Austin or San Diego in today’s music business.  Nashville, when I got there the cool thing about it was that there was a concentration of songwriters who could really write, and it was sort of a university for songwriters.  It was the last Tin Pan Alley.  I don’t think it’s so much that I was the last of anything; I think it’s that the situation ceased to exist.  You know, there’s a new model singer-songwriter, and it’s folky, but it’s a little less melodic, and a little more abstractly introspective and doesn’t really demand a lot of detail.  Or, maybe I’m just too old and don’t understand it.  But I think my son’s best songs are as good as anybody’s.  I think Willy Mason is a real old-school type of songwriter that just sits on the edge of the bed and writes great songs when he’s on.  It’s still being done, but unfortunately there’s less of a place for people like that to congregate and make each other better.  *CLICK TO LISTEN* In 1974 and ’75, I spent a lot of nights in a room and there would be me, and David Olney, and Mark Germino, and Rodney Crowell in a room with Guy Clark, and Dick Feller, and Jerry Jeff Walker, and Neil Young would turn up and come through our lives.  It was really democratic.  I had Jerry Jeff Walker wake me up in the middle of the night to drag me out and sing a David Olney song once because they couldn’t find Olney, which kind of pissed me off that it wasn’t one of my songs.  He knew I knew the song.  He couldn’t remember it, so he woke me up and dragged me out, and I went.

One thing I notice about a lot of your fiction is that it seems to deal with music.  You’d think that as someone who has spent a lifetime around music, you might want to write about different subjects.  Is writing fiction a way for you to explore yourself as a songwriter in a different way?

Sure it is, but you have to be careful.  I hate songs that are about feeling sorry for yourself because you’re riding around on a bus that costs more than other people’s houses.  But, “Real Rock ‘n’ Roller” and “Guitar Town” on my first record [Guitar Town], you know, I was a little self-conscious about those songs and wasn’t sure whether I should have written them, and then truck drivers came up to me, and they thought those songs were about them.  And that’s the deal.  That’s when you’re pulling it off.  It’s the common experience that makes you connect with an audience.  If you write stuff about yourself that nobody else gives a shit about, then people aren’t going to get it [laughs], you know?  It’s one of those things.  Human experience is pretty narrow when you get right down to it.  We all are kind of concerned about the same things.  We’re all just trying to get through a day, take care of our children as long as we have children to take care of, eat and keep ourselves occupied enough so that we don’t get in trouble.  Or, at least that’s what it is for me.  I think I was lucky I had good enough teachers that I was able to do all that stuff before I really realized what I was doing.  Now that I’m older, I can do it on purpose.  *CLICK TO LISTEN* I have to do things to keep writing that I didn’t have to do when I was twenty-five or thirty years old.  You have to dig a little deeper.  I use rhyme dictionaries and a thesaurus now.  I didn’t when I was twenty—I thought they were for pussies.  But, you get older and maybe not as mentally agile, and you’ve written seventy-five per cent of everything already.  My main goal on this record was to push the poetics as far past the decimal point, and I never stopped fine-tuning these lyrics until I sang the song.  I was writing right up to the last minute.

Let’s talk about drugs.  There’s definitely a perception that they enhance creativity, and you did some of your best work while addicted to alcohol and heroin.  What is your experience now being sober?

My experience is it gets better.  Look, I wrote “Tom Ames’ Prayer,” and I wrote “Guitar Town,” and I wrote “My Old Friend the Blues” when I was drinking and using drugs.  And, toward the last when the wheels were starting to come off, I even wrote some pretty good songs.  But, “Goodbye” was the first song I wrote sober, and I’m really proud of some of the stuff on this record.  I’m really proud of “This City,” I’m really proud of “Every Part of Me” as a writer.  I’m not going to necessarily be impressed with the same things that the audience is.  The audience’s favorite songs aren’t always going to be the songs I’m proudest of.  I believe the audience.  I play “Copperhead Road” every night.  I play “My Old Friend the Blues” pretty much every night.  I play “Goodbye” pretty much every night.  “Guitar Town,” I had no idea that would be a hit record.  I wrote that song for one purpose:  To open the record.  It was kind of a utilitarian throwaway to me when I wrote it, and it shocked me that it became the first hit record I ever had.  I thought they were crazy when they released it as a single; I argued with them.  I think my audience is pretty smart, and collectively, sometimes they’re smarter than I am.  Sometimes they’re not.  I pay attention to all those things.

I find that people often get upset when an artist gets clean.  It’s like they think the artist has lost something essential by giving up drugs.

That’s usually the members of your audience that take a lot of drugs and drink a lot trying to reinforce their own behavior.

But do you think you could’ve written all of those songs sober?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* Yeah, I could’ve written them better and I could’ve written them faster.  I’m an addict, and I would’ve been an addict if I’d been a carpenter.  It runs in my family.  My uncle was an alcoholic all his life.  He died yesterday morning, and he died because he never could quit smoking cigarettes more than anything else.  He was a heroin addict until he was locked up and went to prison the second time—this is the guy who put my first guitar in my hands, gave me my first Beatles records.  He also gave me my first shot of dope.  I’m a little sad I didn’t see him as much as I should have; he was living in a nursing home.  It’s one of those things.  Nobody does anything better because they’re fucked up.  Here’s the best contemporary example.  Compare the work of Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and the people that didn’t die, the people that found some sort of equilibrium. I don’t think Allen ever had to get sober because it wasn’t as big an issue for him.  He didn’t have the same diseases that I’ve got and obviously Kerouac had.  It killed Kerouac pretty quickly, and there’s only really moments in what he wrote, as big as his name is—people are fascinated with him because he was probably the vanguard of that group of people who were sort of in the vanguard themselves, but he also was an alcoholic, and it diminished his skills really quickly and then it killed him.  And, you go back and look at his body of work, and then look at Allen Ginsberg’s body of work.  People are going to know who Allen Ginsberg is for a lot longer than Jack Kerouac just because the body of work is greater.  I think Howl is every bit as important as On the Road, and so is America, which was written after Kerouac was gone.  I think there’s dick point zero correlation between creativity and being fucked up.  I think the percentage of people who get fucked up is a little higher among artists, but that’s only because it is a little more socially acceptable and the hours aren’t regular.

Did acting help you get clean?

Absolutely.  The Wire was my very first acting job.  I was playing a recovering redneck drug addict.  There was no acting really required.  I learned to do it a little bit, and I got to go out and say great words.  I have the luxury, because it’s not my full-time job, I don’t have to take stuff that isn’t necessarily all that great.  All the words I’ve ever said were written by David Simon and his writers, who are incredible, and Tim Blake Nelson, who is kind of a genius.  I did a movie that Tim wrote and directed.  I’m a better performer than I was.  I use skills from playing music—I brought those to acting.  But, I’m probably a better performer when I play music now than I was before I was an actor, and I’m a better writer.  And, I paint.   It’s a recovery thing.  Since I got sober, I started branching out and doing other things.  That’s when I started writing short stories, and then I ran into Terry Allen, he’s a friend of mine, and I told him I was working on a play, working on a book, my next album, and he goes, “Cool, man.  Don’t you do any visual arts?”  He’s one of the people that instilled in me that doing all these different things—him and Tony Fitzpatrick, the guy that does all my album covers—just doing all these things, one craft reinforces the other.  But, I’m still a songwriter, first and foremost.

It seems like you’ve had teachers come along at some really crucial points in your life.

I’ve been really lucky about that.  I think everybody is, if they’re paying attention.  Teachers are out there.  I think students have a responsibility to learn.

Back in a clear patch of an old-growth forest just east of Nashville where the foothills aren’t quite yet mature enough to be called mountains rests a weathered cabin that could easily be mistaken as an offspring of the forest itself. Sitting rigidly in a straight-backed chair cut from the same set of trees as the framework of the old house is a grey old man. He’s using the fleshy part of his arms just above his elbows against the table before him as crutches. There is just enough room . . . between his chest and the table for the off chance of a deep breath.

The whites of his eyes were still pearl the day his father showed him how to line up soulless beer bottles on the cattle fences for target practice. Carefully placing each one equidistant from the other to avoid ricochet and ensure accuracy and consistency. All the while knowing that each target brought his father closer to the rattlesnake he inevitably became. The pearl slowly faded when he saw his first casualty of war. A boy with the ink still wet on his high school diploma. A virgin to women, love, whiskey and loss. By the time he realized all that he fought for was wasted on elitists, also virgins to love and loss and war itself, his eyes had turned to shadows. Those dispirited voids became as black as the blood he drew into the needles he eventually found solace in leaving mine fields along his red-blooded patriotism. Those demons now defeated, it weighs like a ghost on his mind. He glances down at past. His arms began feeling a little numb from the gravity of his own thoughts. He shakes them with intent.

He’s held two of his own children with those arms, trembling with fear that he may drop them, fear that they might grow up to be like him, and fear they might feel his sunken veins and calloused hands and begin to cry out of their own fear, or shame. He’s held countless women with those arms, as well. A few prudently courted and pursued with the vigor of a young man with a green heart. Others with the passion of a single night left on earth. Some he choked with despair and selfish motivation. Resent. Jealousy. Revenge. For the last thirty years, though, more of a crusade in the wake of a lifeboat rocking in the ebb. With equal parts love, desire and companionship. She was gone now too. He had let her go. His arms are heavy now. Jaded and debilitated. He sets the crutches back down with tingly hesitation.

He runs his right hand through his hair. His trigger finger slightly snags on one of his silver locks. A haircut passes fleetingly through his mind. He began wearing his hair long after meeting a man some years ago a hundred miles west of Houston in a juke joint that nested itself along the picking circuit he had been playing on. He would watch the man with agonizing purpose. Following the deluge of each chorus he wasn’t sure if he should keep trying to get better or just give up. He would spend countless hours crafting every word hoping to delight his teacher. It wasn’t until he forced himself from beneath the umbrella of his mentor was he then showered with all the praise and accolades his hard work afforded him. All that rain felt more like a hurricane than a cleansing, for all he wanted was acceptance. A haircut would do more than just shorten his hair; it would distance him from that acceptance. He frees his trigger finger, and holsters it back to its place, where he can keep an eye on it.

Just beyond his slightly spread knotty fingers he catches the glimpse of a finely rolled cigarette. He knows he has a book of matches under a brass lamp across the table. He keeps them there so the humidity from a sieve of a roof and a June full of weather won’t render them useless. He picks up the lamp, grabs a few with the foreshadowing of a misfire and starts to strike the first one across a rough patch on the thigh of his sandpaper dungarees. With a first strike success, he lights the day old cigarette. His initial drag is deep. It creeps over his remaining vocal chords to his sticky lungs. The smoke explores, with great liberty, any possibility of hammering itself into his blood stream. With a slight cough, everything that polluted intruder has found comes rushing out into a thunderhead of dark wisdom. That cloud of smoke, that’s a Steve Earle song.

Steve Earle is one of the reasons I ever put pen to paper for expressive purposes. Whether it musical or prose, his music has inspired me to write for a reason. It has taught me that even being lost in a cavern of a country music cave unable to grab hold of any rock n’ roll roots to pull yourself out, you do not need to sacrifice what you are trying to say. Do not insult the listener. From songs such as “Johnny Come Lately” and “The Devil’s Right Hand,” he exposes the impact and blinding waste that war and weapons lay, to songs such as “Ft. Worth Blues” and “John Walker’s Blues” that delicately and attentively transcend the listener into another person’s soul. A “Being John Malkovich” moment if you will. It’s his “show, don’t tell” technique that completely allows his audience to be led to the exact emotion that he wants them to feel.

Then there is the “Transcendental Blues” album, which from start to finish I feel is his greatest work to date. The way it was recorded and produced, the lyrical content and song construction, and the interludes elevated his status away from his Nashville country peers. Forgoing the single state of mind, the album is supposed to be listened to from start to finish without interruption.

As with any musical suggestion, feel it for yourself.

Thriller contributor, Devon Vlasin, is an accomplished songwriter living in Gainesville, Florida. With his bands, The Takers, The Snake Healers and The Adult Boys Thunderband, Vlasin has created a body of work that is heavily influenced by Steve Earle but also carries his own unique stamp.