Modern Music

For an artist who has been thinking and talking a lot about mortality as of late, Steve Earle’s onscreen death seems to have arrived at an appropriate time.

The singer-songwriter, newbie novelist and part-time actor reported earlier this week that his character Harley, a fatherly street musician on the New Orleans-based TV drama Treme, had shuffled off this mortal coil in an episode that had aired the night before. This fictional demise – which was spectacularly violent – only seems to have strengthened the 56-year-old’s fascination with death.

Combined with the fact that both his new album and debut novel are titled I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive, it might seem that Earle is going through a rather dark period of suffering for his art.

Not so, he says.

“It’s not about death in the sense of doom and gloom, it’s about death as a part of life,” says Earle, in an interview from his tour bus in Edmonton. “I’m a pretty optimistic guy. I started having kids again, on purpose, in my mid-50s. That’s pretty f—ing optimistic.”

That would be John Henry, Earle’s 14-month-old son who is currently travelling and living with his mom and dad on the tour bus. Such agreeable domesticity may seem world’s away from Earle’s raucous early days on the road, where his hard-partying ways included heavy drug use that led to both long-term addiction and a much-publicized stint in prison

But while the birth of his son may have given him a boost of optimism, Earle admits that much of his record and his novel were influenced by the death of his father, which got him thinking about spirituality and mortality. He was already deep into the novel when he began noticing that the new batch of songs he was working on for his 14th studio album covered similar terrain.

“I lost my dad three years ago,” Earle says. “You just think about that stuff when you lose somebody close. And when you lose the generation before you, you’re next. I think I’m trying to make something positive out of that rather than something morbid.”

Based solely on plot points, “positive” is not the first word that springs to mind when talking about Earle’s debut novel. He had already been toiling away at it for five years when his father passed away.

I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, named after Hank Williams’ final single, is about a heroin-addicted physician named Doc who pays for his habit in 1963 San Antonio by performing illegal abortions in the red-light district. Set in the days before and after the Kennedy assassination, the novel blends real-life events with elements of magical realism.

In Earle’s story, “Doc” was Hank Williams’ private physician and with him the night the hard-living country star died. So, our drug-addled hero is often visited by his former employer’s particularly ill-tempered ghost. Other characters include a giant Mexican drug dealer, a violent Irish priest, a hulking transvestite and a saintly young woman who appears to have otherworldly powers.

But while the plot may seem fantastical, Earle says he was actually following that age-old advice to write what you know. From country music, to heroin addiction, to Kennedy’s assassination and even abortion, it can all be traced back to personal experience

“I set it in San Antonio because I know what San Antonio was like in 1963 because I was there,” says Earle, who own reading habits range from J.K. Rowling to Michael Ondaatje. “The Kennedy assassination comes into it because I was there at the airport in San Antonio the day before he was killed because my father was an air traffic controller and called my mother and said, ‘Keep the boys out of school because Kennedy is going to land at 10:30 a.m.’ He thought we’d never get a chance to see that again and it turned out he was right.

“Abortions were illegal everywhere in the United States except for New York State in 1963. When I was 14 years old in 1969 in San Antonio, Texas, I got my 14-year-old girlfriend pregnant and she was able to get an abortion because her dad was a doctor. But for everybody else I knew, that wasn’t the case.”

The book’s most harrowing scenes, however, may be the ones where Earle describes Doc in the throes of his addiction, dutifully covering both the rapturous high after injection and the withering lows of withdrawal.

Earle battled his own heroin addiction for decades. Clean for 16 years, he admits that he gets tired of talking about that part of his life. But again, it came down to writing what he knew

“There’s not much euphoric recall. Doc’s pretty miserable. So that was safe to write.

As for why the book took so long, the restless troubadour says it was mostly due to inexperience and because he was often engaged in other artistic pursuits. He acted on TV, both in Treme and The Wire. He wrote plays. He put out several albums and took on producing duties for other artists, including helming Joan Baez’s 2008 album Day After Tomorrow.

“It’s not my day job and I had never done it before,” he says. “I think if I set out to write another novel tomorrow I’d be able to do it in a lot less than eight years just because I’ve done it now. Same as with the play. I’m writing another play now. My first play took three years to write. Of course, there was some touring and some songs got written in that process too. But, this play is going a lot of faster because I know what to do.”

And for now, Earle is back in musician mode. I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, the album, is a typically assured set of songs that finds Earle straddling country, Celtic and rock sounds with thoughtful tunes that cover everything from spiritual issues (God Is God) to politics (the George W. Bush kiss-off Little Emperor) to his feelings for sixth wife and fellow songwriter Allison Moorer (Every Part of Me).

Since he has been able to maintain a sense of domestic bliss on the road – and since his most recent acting gig seems to have come to an abrupt end – he’s contemplating an extension of his North American and European tours.

Which isn’t to say he plans on limiting his artistic endeavours to just music. While on the road, for instance, he plans on taping an audition for a movie role he’s been offered. He’s also busy writing a play about folksinger Pete Seeger’s testimony before The House Un-American Activities Committee.

“It’s all connected, but you’re using different parts of your brain, different parts of your heart. I think one craft influences the other. I think I’m a much better songwriter than I was before I started acting and painting and writing all this other stuff.”

Earle plays plays Vancouver June 26, Nanaimo June 28, Victoria June 29, Toronto Aug. 20, Fredericton Sept. 5, Moncton Sept. 6

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