Steve Earle & The Dukes

Steve Earle remembers exactly when he knew he wanted to be a songwriter. He was barely a teenager, growing up in Schertz, Texas, looking over a copy of a Beatles record. “The little line in parentheses next to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’” said ‘Lennon-McCartney,’ Earle says. “I said, ‘I know who those guys are.’ And then I figured out that they wrote the song. And so that was when I started, you know, trying to write songs. They all had girls’ names for titles for a long time.”

Music was a big deal in Earle’s family and his dad, an air traffic controller, played piano. “My dad wouldn’t let me have an electric guitar,” he says. As a teen, he discovered Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Paul Simon and the Johnny Cash Show. “I always say my job was invented by Bob Dylan,” says Earle. “I’m a firm believer that rock & roll only becomes an art-form because of the lyrics. If it hadn’t been for Bob Dylan wanting to be John Lennon and John Lennon wanting to be Bob Dylan, it wouldn’t have been cranked up to the level of literature that makes it OK for rock & roll to be taken seriously.”

JERRY JEFF is Earle’s 22nd album. He’s released nearly an album a year since getting sober in the mid 1990s, LPs ranging from bluegrass to blues to folk to country. One of America’s most gifted living songwriters, he is singing better than he ever has, working harder. At the moment, he’s writing two books, his second play, and hosts his long running The Steve Earle Show: Hardcore Troubadour Radio on Sirius XM. Throughout the pandemic, he also hosted Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, a YouTube series about his massive instrument collection. “I’m just trying to stay out of trouble,” says Earle with a laugh. “If I stay busy, then I’m OK.”