  Steve Earle at the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto on April 28, 2011 to promote his new album, I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive. (MICHAEL PEAKE/QMI AGENCY) |
Country renegade Steve Earle's latest album, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, is named after the 1952 Hanks Williams single.
But despite the title, Earle insists it isn't one of his more depressing collections.
"I think if I was the same person that I was 20 or 30 years ago, it would be hard to be optimistic," said the friendly and forthcoming Texas-born Earle, in a Toronto hotel recently.
"I just had a child on purpose at age 56, I'm pretty f---ing optimistic," he adds with a laugh.
"Keep in mind, I grew up literally going to strip malls and seeing fall-out shelters for sale. What's going on in the world right now, it doesn't seem anywhere near as scary as 1962 did to me. I don't see this as that dark a record. You want to hear a dark record, listen to (1990's) The Hard Way. That's a dark record. I was dying. I don't think (this album) is dark. It's pretty heavy stuff. I see it as optimistic and redemptive."
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And yet Earle admits most, if not all, of the Alive songs are about mortality, triggered by the death of his father at the age of 74 three years ago.
"It's a really, really personal record, there's no doubt about that," he said. "It was tough because he had a hard time leaving here. He died of heart failure and he had his first heart attack and his first quadruple bypass when he was 48 and then another triple bypass 13 years later. At the end he was basically in a wheelchair and he couldn't walk and he could barely breathe. It was really, really hard to be around, hard to watch, 'cause my father, of all people, he liked to go places, He liked to travel, he liked to drive, and he liked to walk around and he liked to see new things. It was probably crueler for him to get his wings clipped and to be an invalid to some extent the last few years of his life than it was probably for just about anybody."
In the liner notes for Alive, Earle, the eldest of five siblings, says he was the only one who couldn't remain in his father's hospital room when the machines keeping him alive were turned off.
Even now, he fidgets taking about it.
"I just couldn't do it," said Earle, a death penalty abolitionist. "Part of it was I witnessed an execution in Texas and seeing my father in a hospital bed with a bunch of tubes coming out of him, looked a lot like (convicted murderer) Jonathan Nobles being executed to me, that was part of it."
Not surprisingly, Earle, a former heroin addict who spent time in jail on drugs and firearms charges, has a great respect for life.
"I'm really, really lucky to be here at all and I don't forget that," he said. "I do believe that I was probably spared for a reason but I'm no longer arrogant enough to think that I'm going to necessarily know what it is if I do it. So I just wake up in the morning and I suit up and show up and I try to do whatever presents itself that looks like art."
Earle, who is currently on tour with The Dukes and Duchesses featuring Allison Moorer (his wife), will make its first Canadian stop on Sunday night in Medicine Hat, Alta.
He and Moorer's son John Henry -- who they welcome into the world last April -- will be on the road too.
"It's going to be John Henry and the dogs and everybody on the road in two buses and it's going to be Mad Dogs and f---ing Englishmen."
Earle steps into author shoes
Singer-songwriter, playwright, actor and activist Steve Earle is a renaissance man as he's more than proved again by the June release of his debut novel, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, also the title of his most recent album.
The book is about the troubled life of the fictional Doc Ebersole, who is haunted by the ghost of his former patient and friend, Hank Williams, who died in 1953.
"I always heard stories that there was a doctor travelling with Hank Williams when he died and when I did the research it turns out there was a guy travelling with him, he may have been with him, but nobody's never ever known," said Earle. "But the guy's name was Toby Marshall and he wasn't a doctor at all, he was a quack who claimed he could cure alcoholism with chloral hydrate, which is a barbiturate. By the time I discovered he wasn't really a doctor, I decided my idea of a real doctor was more interesting and so I started building this character."
Earle said it "was frustrating at times," because it took him eight years to write the novel. During that time he wrote and produced a play, and made three albums.
Now Earle is writing his next play about folk singer-songwriter Pete Seeger's testimony before The House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.
The seven-times married (twice to the same woman) former heroin addict who spent time both homeless and in jail says has no plans to write his own memoir, until the very end.
"The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe," he said with a laugh.
jane.stevenson@sunmedia.ca
