Review: Steve Earle – Alone Again…Live
Steve Earle – Alone Again… Live
Format: CD – Vinyl LP – Digital / Label: Howe Sound Records – Missing Piece Group
Release: 2024
Text: Tom Wouters
Outlaw country star Steve Earle surprises us this year with a solo live album recorded during his solo tour in 2023. In his 15 songs, all aspects of the outlaw artist Earle are discussed, his rebellious youth, his addictions, his leftist political beliefs and his adventures with the female part of the population of this planet. The album is truly a solo album aptly titled ‘Alone Again…Live.’ It is Steve Earle accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica.
The album starts off with two Earle classics, The Devil’s Right Hand and My Old Friend The Blues, and after Someday, the next Earle classic follows, Guitar Town, the title song of his first full-length album from 1986. Earle is in good spirits and gets the audience as far as singing the chorus of the song I Ain’t Satisfied.
Then it is the turn of the female adventures in two heartbreaking love songs (Now She’s Gone and Goodbye). In Sparkle And Shine (announced by Earle as “THE chick song of the evening”) it is all about his early youth as a musician (“I was a pain in the ass of every party with my guitar”) and is introduced with a hilarious anecdote about “making music to impress the girls”.
The subsequent South Nashville Blues is announced by Earle with a scientific lecture on music: “You know, there are two kinds of music: first there is the blues and then there is Zipididoodah and this song is zipididoodah”, after which he performs South Nashville Blues in a bluesy voice, describing the women from that part of town (“South Nashville girls, they suit me just fine. As long as I got money they don’t whine”).
But then the fun is over, because with CCKMP (Coke and Canna Killed My Pain) Earle describes his years of drugs addiction and the title song of his 2000 album ‘Transcendental Blues’ is about the psychological problems that come with it. This is followed by It’s About Blood, a politically tinted song from the theatre play ‘Ghosts Of West Virginia’ about a coal mine disaster in 2009. Earle was the musical director of the play that premiered in New York in 2019, but due to the corona pandemic was cut short. Earle uses the intro of the song to express his political views on contemporary America.
Surprisingly enough, Earle ends the performance with three songs in which he has exchanged the acoustic guitar for the mandolin, the instrumental Dominick St., the broken heart song The Galway Girl and the fascinating Earle classic about a Vietnam veteran, the 1988 Copperfield Road.
Alone Again…Live is a beautiful document in which we hear singer-songwriter Steve Earle in all his facets; raw, engaged, explicit and utterly authentic.
Tracks:
01. The Devil’s Right Hand
02. My Old Friend The Blues
03. Someday
04. Guitar Town
05. I Ain’t Ever Satisfied
06. Now She’s Gone
07. Goodbye
08. Sparkle and Shine
09. South Nashville Blues
10. CCKMP
11. Transcendental Blues
12. It’s About Blood
13. Dominick St.
14. The Galway Girl
15. Copperhead Road
Website: http://www.steveearle.com/