How to bounce back after your band quits via email: New solo live album and tour.

Walter Tunis

August 26, 2024 at 5:59 PM·6 min read

That Steve Earle opted to title his new album “Alone Again ... Live” would suggest a sense of truth in advertising. The recording is a solo acoustic compilation surfacing this summer pulled from concerts performed last summer.

It’s also a plain-speaking, present-day performance reflection from an artist rooted in the folk tradition of such master Texas songsmiths as Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark who now stands as one of the foremost multi-Grammy winning songwriters of his generation.

Of course, necessity played a role in the performances that made up the tour, the album and an additional summer concert trek that nears its end with a return performance at the Lexington Opera House. After all, the title says it all. Alone. Again.

Following the 2023 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco, Earle’s long-running band The Dukes, an ensemble responsible for Springsteen-ian levels of rock ‘n’ roll fervor during the 1980s and wildly far-reaching Americana adventures in recent decades, jumped ship.

“They quit by email the day after Hardly Strictly Bluegrass that year,” Earle said. “It hurt my feelings. It’s not the way you do that because I tried my best to take care of everybody. But I don’t dwell on it. I like to tour solo because I’m good at it. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to put this live record out. Acoustically, you really hear the song, and that doesn’t always happen when you’re out playing with a band.”

Steve Earle will be at Lexington Opera House on Aug. 27.

The beauty of concert recordings — “live albums,” as they have long been termed — is that they are often anthologies of sorts, overviews of a career as presented by an artist through a single or brief series of performances. “Alone Again ... Live” manages the remarkable feat of condensing over 50 years of Earle music into a 15-song recording that clocks in at just under an hour.

It begins with songs penned even before his 1986 career breakthrough album “Guitar Town” introduced Earle as one of the leading renegades in a new traditionalist country movement. It continues with compositions forged through crippling drug addiction, resultant incarceration and an astonishing personal and professional renewal during the latter half of the 1990s. Capping everything is the new album’s review of the stylistically varied run of quality studio albums he has issued from 1995 onward.

Take for instance two songs from 2000’s “Transcendental Blues” —the Celtic-accented “The Galway Girl” and the title tune, along with a third song — an instrumental from the same album sessions called “Dominick St.” that wound up on the orphaned songs collection “Sidetracks” in 2002.

“‘Transcendental Blues’ is my biggest-selling record since I got out of jail in ’94. There was a lot of stuff going on then. The band was transitional at that point, so it wasn’t really a Dukes record. There was some bluegrass stuff on it. With ‘Transcendental,’ I could write anything. For the last several records I made, I was trying to write for my band. The best thing about this last band was it was pretty versatile, but I still ended up writing for the band instead of just going out there and writing a (expletive) song. So it goes back to that.”

In contrast, “Alone Again ... Alive” also revisits a pair of tunes — “CCKMP” and “South Nashville Blues” from 1996’s “I Feel Alright,” one of Earle’s first albums after emerging a survivor from the addictions that grounded his career, and nearly his life, a few years earlier.

“I wrote “CCKMP” (translated in the song’s chorus as “cocaine cannot kill my pain”) when I was still using. It sort of sat there, a song from a very dark period in my life. ‘South Nashville Blues” was written retrospectively and is way more upbeat — emotionally, anyway.

“One thing I’ve discovered is I have an easier time dealing with stuff that’s pretty far away from what I’m feeling right now because I’ve done a little acting in the last 20 years (including a recurring role in the HBO series ‘The Wire’ playing a recovering addict/drug counselor). I think I inhabit songs when I’m in the process of performing them maybe better than I ever have. I’m present in them always. I don’t find myself trying to figure out where I am in the role of the songs, which is pretty easy to do when you do a bunch of shows. I’m really trying to inhabit whoever I can be to the audience.”

Fans of the hits won’t be disappointed, either, with what “Alone Again ... Live” offers. It includes three songs from “Guitar Town” that have been staples in Earle’s shows ever since the record was released 38 years ago — “Someday,” “My Old Friend the Blues” and the title tune. Earle says he doesn’t tire of the songs mostly because his audiences don’t.

“A lot of it is just because people love them. It’s very easy to feed off of that. I’ve seen people ... I mean, I don’t understand Radiohead not playing ‘Creep’ (the vanguard British band’s debut single from 1992) anymore. I’m a big Radiohead fan. I love all their stuff. They could never be too progressive for me. But I just don’t understand how you would not want to play that because it’s a great piece of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s what gets you there.”

While Earle may be spending the summer alone onstage, he is very much in a collaborative mode off the road. He is currently working on a musical version of “Tender Mercies” with Daisy Foote, playwright daughter of the screenwriter who took home an Oscar for fashioning the story into a famed 1983 film of an alcohol-beaten country singer rebuilding his life.

“The songs I’ve been writing for the musical are some of the best I’ve ever written. They’re hard to write, too, because they’re so situational. They’re like a Rubik’s Cube. They more we put them together, the harder it is to match pieces. Still, I like the challenge.”

Until his summer tour concludes on Sept. 8, though, Earle will be singing the songs that make up his own reclaimed life onstage. Alone. His band may be gone, but his devotion to performing is undiminished.

“It’s how I validate myself. The (COVID-19) lockdown convinced me I am the poor, pitiful (expletive) that needs the immediate feedback of a live audience to justify his existence. Sorry. That’s how I am.”