Time: 8 p.m.
Cover: $45-$80
Tickets go on sale Saturday, May 24 at Blueprint Lethbridge, CASA and www.geomaticattic.ca
$80, $65 & $45 plus $2.50 service fee and GST
The Geomatic Attic will also be selling tickets Saturdays 10am to 2pm
and Monday to Thursday 5pm to 7pm until the show sells out.
Steve Earle http://www.steveearle.com
http://www.myspace.com/steveearlemusic
http://ilike.com/artist/Steve+Earle
http://twitter.com/steveearle
I'LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE.
We're working on a bio for the new album. Stay tuned.
TOWNES
“Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll
stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” -
Steve Earle
Steve Earle’s new album Townes, is his highly
anticipated follow up to the Grammy Award winning album Washington
Square Serenade. The 15-song set is comprised of songs written by
Earle’s friend and mentor, the late singer-songwriter, Townes Van Zandt.
The songs selected for Townes were the ones that meant the most to
Earle and the ones he personally connected to. Some of the selections
chosen were songs that Earle has played his entire career (“Pancho and
Lefty,” “Lungs,” “White Freightliner Blues”). He learned the song
“(Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria” directly from Van Zandt. Earle taught
himself “Marie” and “Rake” specifically for making this record. Earle
recorded the New York sessions solo and then added the other instruments
later on in order to preserve the spirit of Van Zandt’s original solo
performances to the best of his recollection.
The track
“Lungs,” was produced and mixed by the Dust Brothers’ John King and
features Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine/The Nightwatchman on
electric guitar.
WASHINGTON SQUARE SERENADE
“The
city hasn’t changed as much as real estate agents would have you
believe,” Steve Earle explains about his adopted hometown of New York
City. “Specifically, my neighborhood hasn’t changed that much. I point
people in the right direction so that they can take their picture like
the cover of Freewheelin’ all the time.”
That’s easy enough for
Earle these days, because he and his wife, singer-songwriter Allison
Moorer, now live on the very Greenwich Village street on which the
famous cover shot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962) was taken. In
that photo, Dylan and his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo huddle against the
cold as they walk along a snowy New York street. It’s an indelible
romantic image that captures the idealism of the folk revival that was
gathering momentum in New York at the time.
Steve Earle’s
gripping new album, Washington Square Serenade, is a loving tribute to
that era, that movement, that music and the city that gave them all a
nurturing home. “That period changed pop music,” Earle says. “It made
lyrics much more important. Rock & roll could have become a subgenre
of pop if it hadn’t been for that literary aspect, which completely
came out of a four-block area in New York City in one brief instant of
time.”
Like Freewheelin’ itself, Serenade is an album that
combines songs of love and protest, a stirring chronicle of both the
connections between people that make life worth living and the things
that must be changed in order to make such connections more possible for
everyone. “I knew it was going to be pretty personal,” Earle says about
the album, which he recorded at Electric Lady Studios, the famed
Greenwich Village recording complex that Jimi Hendrix built in the late
Sixties. “The best part of my personal life was going so well I knew
that chick songs were going to be no problem. As for political songs, I
don’t think I’ve ever made an apolitical record. The last two before
this [The Revolution Starts … Now (2004), Jerusalem (2002)] were overtly
political, and unapologetically so. This one is unapologetically
personal.”
Washington Square Serenade opens with “Tennessee
Blues,” which updates the title track of Earle’s 1986 debut album,
Guitar Town – and establishes the sense of another fresh start. The new
version is acoustic, more introspective and more rhythmically charged –
all traits highly appropriate for the tale of an artist “bound for New
York City” and leaving Tennessee behind. “It’s continuing a narrative –
the state of me,” Earle explains. The “chick songs,” as Earle describes
them in apt period slang, include the lovely “Sparkle and Shine,” which
echoes both early Dylan and the Beatles, and “Days Aren’t Long Enough,”
which Earle co-wrote and sings with Moorer. “I’ve written duets for
Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Iris DeMent and my sister Stacey, so
there was no way I was going to get away with not writing a duet for me
and Allison,” Earle says, laughing. “I had to – I’m married! But we’ve
been singing together as long as we’ve been together, and I wanted
something that was a love song about us.”
On the other end of
Earle’s passions, “Steve’s Hammer,” which the singer dedicates to Pete
Seeger, is an uplifting political anthem, a statement of Earle’s
conviction about the role that music can play in achieving social
justice. “One of these days I’m gonna lay this hammer down/Leave my
burden restin’ on the ground,” he declares, and then makes clear when
and only when that day will come: “When the air don’t choke you, and the
ocean’s clean/And the kids don’t die for gasoline.”
As we all
know, that time has not yet arrived, and “City of Immigrants” makes that
point forcefully. A paean to New York’s long history of welcoming
people from other countries, the song had a very specific inspiration
for Earle. “I knew I wanted to write a ‘Fuck Lou Dobbs’ song,” he says
about the CNN anchor who has defined anti-immigration politics as his
signature issue. “There’s no excuse for it – it’s ugly and it’s racist.”
Supporting Earle on the song is Forro in the Dark, the super-charged
neo-folk Brazilian band that’s based in New York.
Washington
Square Serenade concludes with Earle’s scarifying version of Tom Waits’
“Way Down in the Hole,” which will serve as the theme for the next
season of the HBO series “The Wire.” Earle has a recurring role on the
show – “I play a redneck recovering addict, so it’s not acting,” he
deadpans.
“It’s daunting to cover a Tom Waits song – he’s one
of the best of my generation of songwriters,” Earle admits. “But, then, I
once sang ‘Nebraska’ to an audience that I knew Bruce Springsteen was
in. It’s not that stuff like that doesn’t scare me – it’s just that
doesn’t mean I won’t do it!”
Overall, Serenade is imbued with a
deeply intimate feel, because all of its concerns, public as well as
private, are essential to who Steve Earle is. That intensely personal
quality, however, is deftly complemented – both underscored and
unsettled -- by John King’s production. As one half of the Dust
Brothers, King has worked with the likes of Beck and the Beastie Boys.
As a result, rhythms continually percolate, bump and simmer beneath the
largely acoustic instrumentation, fashioning a folk/hip-hop hybrid that
sonically unites two of New York’s finest musical traditions.
Asked how he would like listeners to respond to Washington Square
Serenade, Earle, characteristically, is ready with a bold answer. “If
you feel like you don’t know what America is all about right now, and
you want to reorient yourself to what America should be about, it’s a
really good time to come to New York City,” he says. “I needed really
badly at this point in my life to see a mixed-race, same-sex couple
holding hands in my own neighborhood. It makes me feel safer.”
“I’ve been pretty heartbroken about the way things have gone politically
in this country the last few years, and I seriously considered moving
someplace else,” he concludes. “Then I figured out that I didn’t have to
leave the country. All I had to do was come to New York.”
Washington Square Serenade – in its commitment, its values, its musical
intelligence, its beauty and, finally, its very American optimism about
the possibilities for a better world – demonstrates why.
- Anthony DeCurtis