On May 12, politically charged alt.country troubadour Steve Earle is set to release his latest album, Townes, a 15 song tribute record honoring the work of his friend and mentor
This one’s for her, whatever the hell her name was,” Steve Earle said with a laugh, before he broke into “Now She’s Gone,” off 1996’s I Feel Alright. It was that kind of night for Earle—a chance to look back, but not dwell on any kind of regret.
I’m going to take you back a bit. Not back when Steve Earle was a guitar town hero in Nashville, hung up on heroin, behind bars, or even “just another country-rock artist.” I’m going to take you back when I first heard a Steve Earle song.
Throughout Steve Earle’s two-hour performance, which began with a stomping version of
Just when you thought 2004 was a year full of so-so releases with a few random bright spots…Boom! Our ears were flooded with so much good stuff that all of sudden a Top 20 list became a serious challenge. But here we have it – our picks for the year’s best – The Glide 20 of 2004.
Emotionally and politically charged, Revolution feels like the freshest batch of songs that have come out of Steve Earle and his band, the Dukes, in quite a while. Speaking in more direct terms than he has ever before, right away we get the feel of a record that is so raw and inexorable that Earle could have sworn that the songs were recorded within 24 minutes, not hours, of their birth.
