Record Review 17: Steve Earle "Washington Square Serenade"

Steve Earle
Washington Square Serenade





I listened to this CD for the first time in my car on a beautiful trip down to Ozark Missouri to appear in a workers compensation hearing (glamorous legal stuff). One would think it was a perfect day to enjoy a new CD by one of rocks great modern troubadours. Earle has had an interesting if somewhat checkered history. He hit the airwaves by storm as the next big thing and his critically acclaimed CD “Guitar Town” which was about Nashville and “the business”. Later he had a moderate FM hit with “Copperhead Road” which was about his parents running moonshine and about changing the family business to growing weed. Good stuff. he drove his life far off the road, developed some serious drug habits (primarily heroin), carried a pistol and was generally a fuck up on his way to killing himself before... miraculously, he straightened himself out.

He has dropped three or four albums since then that I think are brilliant and of late he was one of the earliest and harshest critics of the Iraq war and our idiot President. So I was really looking forward to this CD which was coming after an unusually long 3 year break from recording. I have seen him live a few times in that period and each time he appeared with a brilliant band which included Eric “Roscoe” Ambel and put on great shows. He moved back to Nashville and it appeared he would live happily ever after there.

Well, that was not to be and this CD is about his move to NYC. Arguably he had already recorded this CD in one song off an earlier album which was aptly titled...NYC. Well, listening to that CD on a beautiful day I started skipping songs and coming back to them and had one unifying thought. This sucks.

It just seemed like there was nothing there. It sounded like Earle but the songs were weak and uninspired. Looking at the jewel box he looked fat an unkept and I figured that he had just moved there to die or something and needed some cash. But, out of respect for his body of work I took it into the office and gave it three or four listens and like all good music, the more I listened to it, the better it got.

This guy is the real deal. A tortured, self schooled artist who creates a lot of his own problems (see prior referenced drug addiction and 7 wives...one of them twice) and although it is a trite thing sometimes it is an all American story, a real American story and his songs as you listen to this album become a reasonably brilliant ode to the midlife crisis by an intelligent guy in a country that our leadership has lost it’s way. It starts out with “Tennessee Blues” which is a not so wistful goodbye to Nashville and Guitar Town as he heads for NYC presumably with new wife Allison Moorer. it is a fine song but it has been done before and he keeps in the same done before vein on “Down Here Below” from the perspective of a metaphorical hawk (at the top of the food chain) in NYC and those living their lives as prey... on the streets “down below”. it laments the loss of the old Coffee House East Village NYC.....yawn.

On “Satellite Radio” where he digs in and starts to ask whether anyone is listening which is always a tough question for a guy who feels like he has a lot to say. The he rolls into the pretty “City of Immigrants” which evokes Guthrie and Seeger in a song that celebrates the diversity of his adopted city. Sure it has been done before too but rarely as heartfelt and timely a manor as this. He follows with “Sparkle And Shine” which is a pretty love song and likely an ode to the aforementioned Moorer. he follows that with a weaker still “Come Home To Me” and then ups the ante.

“Jericho Road” is as good of a song as he has ever written. The Jericho Road was where the parable of the good Samaritan takes place. It was the back road short cut from Jerusalem to Jericho and was famous for lawlessness and danger and Earle takes us down the road where he meets along the way his mother, his father, his sister and his brother and all have a message for him. The Jericho Road is a heavy metaphor and he uses it well. He then tears into “Oxycontin Blues” and from a liberal like Earle you would expect some lambast of poor drug addled demagogue Rush Limbaugh but instead he seems of alcoholism, addiction and self destruction accompanied plaintively but a hard strumming mandolin that evokes some of his best early work.

He backs off and goes into “Red Is The Color” which is a lament...and nothing more but well struck. After that break he takes us to “Steve’s Hammer” dedicated to Pete (presumably Seeger) and he gives us what really seems to be the anthem for this life of his. he will put his hammer down when the world is without suffering and injustice. The song is song with a bright hopefulness that belies the utter hopelessness of the task. it is worthy of appearance on ANY folk collection from the Smithsonian.

“Days Are not Long Enough” is a song he pens and sings with Moorer and it sweet and nice but... it does not really fit and then surprisingly he finished with Tom Waits “Down In The Whole” with some of the spooky voice effect he likes to use sometime. It is a fitting end to a bleak yet hopeful album

This is a guy who could sit back, get fatter and hang out... but he cannot. And somewhere we all need to appreciate an artist who is willing to do what I fail so often to do and that is to speak truth to power. You gotta give it up for that.
9 Slingers Out of Ten