Steve Earle Sees The Light

Spirituality isn’t as prominent a feature of Earle’s oeuvre as, say, songs that agitate against the death penalty or, as he lightheartedly puts it, “songs about girls.”Sure his controversial character study “John Walker’s Blues” was laced with Muslim devotional language, and the Eastern-inflected pop of “Transcendental Blues” evoked an overarching sense of spiritual restlessness. Never before, though, had he written anything as straightforward and personal as the not-at-all-bluesy “God Is God”.

“I wrote ‘God Is God’ for Joan [Baez] to sing, but it’s my song,” he emphasizes. “It’s me talking. And I told her when I taught her the song … ‘People are going to think you’re in the program.’ (As in, 12-step recovery program.) Because there’s a huge amount of recovery speak in that song, which is my orientation to spirituality, 12-step programs … I don’t go to church – I go to meetings.”

You can’t help but feel the contrast between the narrative unfurling in Earle’s life – not to mention in these songs – and the doomed artist archetype embodied by Hank and Townes, who died on the same day (New Year’s) during separate years (1953 and 1997, respectively). There’s no missing the fact that Earle came back from the brink to be phenomenally productive, and very much alive.

In the novel, Earle doesn’t portray Williams (or, technically, Williams’ ghost; it’s set ten years after his death) as an especially romantic figure. Early in the book, he comes off as a whiny apparition; someone who’d had “the luxury of an incurable chronic infirmity to cry about every time [he] got a hankering for a shot of dope.” He’s haunting the ex-doctor who’d served as his supplier, dubbed “Doc” by Earle and very loosely based on Toby Marshall, a guy with dubious credentials who’d doped Williams up in real life.

Lest there be any confusion, Earle’s book is grounded in realism – and enriched by his own experiences – but it’s still very much fiction. “Toby Marshall wasn’t really a doctor,” he points out. “I had gotten so married to the idea that he was a doctor that by the time I actually discovered that he wasn’t, I just thought my idea was better, to tell you the truth. I thought it was more interesting fiction than a guy that was a quack that thought he could cure alcoholics with chloral hydrate.”

The way Earle brings to life Doc, the specter of a country legend and other likeable and unlikable characters from San Antonio’s Latin underbelly in his prose recalls his ability to create and inhabit characters so convincingly as a singer-songwriter that people have occasionally failed to realize they are, in fact, characters.

Earle’s editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jenna Johnson, hadn’t worked with a songwriter-turned-fiction author before. “I’ve seen other people write novels for the first time,” she says, “but usually they were setting out to become a novelist for years. Watching Steve teach himself and learn the process of writing a novel has been a privilege. He goes at it with such energy and enthusiasm … I mean, I wouldn’t shy away from working with another songwriter for that reason alone.”

It was one thing for Earle to feel his way through writing a novel; the short story collection Doghouse Roses was his only previously published work of fiction. But, veteran recording artist that he is, he wasn’t as keen on tackling an album without a mapped-out plan. “It bothered me a little bit,” he concedes. “I was a little uncomfortable.”

The one thing he had a sense of was the quality of lyrics he was after. “I felt like I was starting to hit this other level literarily,” he explains. “And it dawned on me that was because I was in high gear because I’d been working on the book.

“All I knew about the record by the time I wrote those first three songs was I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push ‘em, right up until I recorded them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was.