Something always seemed to get in the way of Steve Earle completing his tribute album to singer-songwriter and cult hero Townes Van Zandt.

For years, country music renegade Steve Earle has been wanting to make an album in tribute to his friend and mentor, Texas-born country-folk singer-songwriter and cult hero Townes Van Zandt, who passed away New Year's Day 1997 at the age of 59 after years of battling alcoholism, drug addiction and manic depression.

Life just got in the way of Earle's recently released collection, Townes.

"Somebody would fly an airplane into a tall building or the President of the United States would do something really stupid or I'd fall in love and I'd find something else I needed a record about -- so I kept putting it off," said Earle, 54, who has been married seven times, currently to alt-country singer Allison Moorer.

"Then I'd have a book that I've been trying to finish for years. And what started this was it donned on me suddenly that if I did this, then I wouldn't have to spend too much time writing material for a record and I could finish my book. So it ended up being a gift from Townes, in every way."

Earle's first meeting with Van Zandt in 1972 was a memorable one. The young upstart Earle was performing at The Old Quarter in Houston, Tex. when Van Zandt began heckling him for not knowing how to perform a certain song. But then Earle silenced him by playing the tricky Van Zandt tune Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold. Poetically, Earle and his son, singer-songwriter, Justin Townes Earle, perform the song together on the new record.

"I mean I had been following him around Texas for a while. I had been kind of stalking him, all of us did. We were members of a cult with Townes Van Zandt at its centre," Earle told Sun Media recently in a Canadian newspaper exclusive.

"I don't know how drunk anybody was (that night). People going out and getting drunk is something that to us at that point was something amateurs did. We didn't think of it that way. We just lived our lives and a lot of it was drunk and a lot of it was on drugs and it was just sort of the way that it was. It wasn't recreational, if any drinking is recreational, I'm not sure I believe in that. I think England and Ireland are islands largely populated by alcoholics and I think it spread to a lot of other places in the world."

Still, Earle knew immediately that Van Zandt was something special. Van Zandt came from a wealthy oil family, had a genius IQ and went to the University of Colorado before flunking out due to binge drinking and bouts of depression.

"It was real obvious to me I was meeting somebody that was making art at a really high level and I'd never saw it done any other way. I never knew any songwriters until I met him. And so the first guy I run into is doing something that not everybody does."

Still, Earle said that Van Zandt didn't become a better known singer-songwriter while he was alive because he didn't care to play the politics of pursuing publishing companies in Nashville.

"Townes shot himself in the foot constantly and it's his fault that he's not better know than he is. No one else, it's his. I think he knew how good he was, but his problem had to do with what he thought of himself as a human being."

Earle, who has a string of Canadian tour date this summer including Massey Hall July 11, says the last time he saw Van Zandt was when they recorded Together at the Bluebird Cafe album with Guy Clark in 1995.

However, this time recording Van Zandt's material was a much more powerful experience than Earle bargained for.

It has also become his biggest-selling record ever in its first week. "It was just much more emotional than I thought it would be," Earle said. "I mean I thought I had processed this a long time ago. I wrote Fort Worth Blues, it's one of the best songs I've ever written, and that's how I deal with stuff and that's how I dealt with losing Townes and it was hard."