Steve Earle On The Making of Terraplane Blues … And Then Some

So are you still working on a memoir? And did any of that book bleed into these songs?

Yeah. More of it’s current. It’s a good time for me to make a blues record.

So is this a break-up album too?

It’s that. And it’s about the whole state of that and of just lonesome in general. But those songs are here, and they were going to end up somewhere. People were tired of my fucking happy songs anyway.

I’m pretty transparent, the way I write isn’t that cryptic most of the time. But also, people still make the mistake of thinking everybody singing in one of my songs is me. And when they guess that it’s me, even people that are cognizant enough to think that there’s a difference between songs that are me and songs that aren’t, there’s always some of it that’s me. That’s how you write, even when you’re creating characters.

“John Walker’s Blues” is a really good example. I created a character based on what I knew about John Walker Lindh. But the song is really about my connection to a picture I saw of him on television and the connection with Justin – my son’s exactly the same age as John Walker Lindh. And John Walker Lindh’s still in prison. They were both 20 at the time, and Lindh’s still in prison. He’s going to be in prison until he’s 40.

Guantanamo? 

No, not Guantanamo. He’s in a federal prison in Indiana. And he was promised in his plea-bargaining deal that he would never leave California, and they reneged on it within a year. But he can’t do anything because all they’d do is return him into the general population and those people would kill him.

So was that 2002? When did the John Walker Lindh stuff go down?

He was captured in 2002, but he wasn’t sentenced until a year and a half after that. I guess he must have gotten time served. But you can’t tell with this stuff because we’ve forgotten about every other part of due process and the existence of Guantanamo – Guantanamo’s always existed. We’ve always sent people to Guantanamo to keep them outside of our criminal justice system. But usually there were three people there. Now there’s 300.

So are there any overtly political numbers on this record?

I guess there’s not. That’s a good question. Nope, not really. Pretty self-centered record. There’s a few things that are kind of … I don’t know what’s going on. There are more tracks than we really need. Not very many more, but there are a couple of things that are kind of extra. I recorded “Give My Love To London,” which is a song Marianne Faithfull and I wrote. It’s actually her new album title. It’ll probably end up being an extra track, but it’s a pretty cool track. It’s not strictly the blues, but it’s not the blues either in the context of some other stuff on the record. But it probably won’t be on the main vinyl.

To me, I’ve gone back to thinking of my main format as being vinyl. And eventually I think I’m heading for vinyl and download as the home base format. But I’m starting to think about sequenced records in two halves and all that other stuff, just I like I did when I started making records.

Have you followed what Jack White’s been doing with vinyl and his whole operation? 

Yeah, it’s really cool. But it’s aimed at hipsters and mine’s aimed at some hipsters and some older people. My audience is kind of strange. I’m just doing it because I sold the fuck out of vinyl. I took vinyl out on the road and I sold the shit out of it. And we got the rights to press the Artemis records on vinyl for the very first time, and we’re still selling the shit out of them.

Stuff like Transcendental Blues? 

Yep, starts with Transcendental and ends with The Revolution Starts Now. And the covers are beautiful and all that stuff.

When you made The Mountain you had a somewhat preservationist voice toward bluegrass and probably turned a lot of people onto it. Is that kind of the idea with this album?

Maybe, and I hope people will go out and buy Mance Lipscomb records and that kind of shit from this, but I just wanted to write some new bluegrass songs and I just wanted to write some new blues songs. I just wanted to see if I could do it. After my book’s finished, my next project outside of my albums is a musical intended for Broadway. I’m gonna do that because I’m a songwriter living in New York and I feel like I have to do it. It’s where the heart of the art form is at sometimes. Songwriters were there because that’s where the money was. In those days, you didn’t have to wake up in the morning and decide you were going to be an artist to be a songwriter, but the best ones still were. Cole Porter was a badass and I just got to do it.

I’m starting with something that’s partially written because it’s going to be based on Washington Square Serenade. I sort of felt like I was writing a musical when I was originally writing those songs in the first place. But it starts with that. About eight of the songs are on that album and I’ll write some new ones. I’ve got a pretty good outline for a book going [in connection with the musical]. I may write the whole book, music, lyrics, the whole thing myself. I at least will be involved in writing the book, whether or not I write the whole thing myself. I may decide I’m in over my head and bring someone in to help me, but right now the plan is to do it myself.