Steve Earle “I Feel Alright”
So what was it really like? Was it like Kurt with faded pink hair in a green thrift store cardigan? Or was it more like Britney and Christina and Backstreet and NSYNC? Was it Lollapalooza or Banana Republic? Was it Twin Peaks or Saved By the Bell? Not that my kids ever ask me these questions—in fact I assume that they assume it was all of those things. But for some reason—and even though I lived through it—I’m still hung up on the misremembrance of the Nineties. And I’m especially hung up on the misremembrance of Nineties music.
The Nineties were briefly Alt—for most of 1992 until midway through 1994. And they were partially Pop—for about half of 1997 and then for the rest of the decade. As a child of the Eighties and young adult of the Nineties I can confirm the mind altering, eye popping sensation of Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction—underground bands seizing the overground. I can also bemusedly recall the “sure, whatever” eyerolls that masked my more honest “I can’t stop singing this” reaction to Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney and Christina. But in both cases—Alt and Pop—the seasons passed. By the end of the decade, Alt Rock was not simply regressing, it was conforming. Two glorious years and then on to Creed and Limp Bizkit. And as for all the Teen Pop? As weird and weirdly good as it sounded in 1998, it quickly grew up and grew out, leaving behind a string of bleached blonde tips and belly button rings.
Much more than it was an “Alt” or “Pop” decade, the Nineties were when Hip Hop and Country Music crossed over. Lollapalooza—once a celebration of anti-sellouts selling out—survives today as a nostalgia brand, closer to “Friends” than to Punk. And those PG-13 pop stars eventually, awkwardly transitioned into stunted adulthoods and Vegas residencies. But the mainstreaming of Hip Hop—Dre, Snoop, Tupac, Biggie, Puffy, Nas, Wu Tang? And the stadium sizing of Country music—Garth and Shania? Those were the seismic shifts.
If Nineties Alt was a comet that was actually a blip and if Nineties Pop was a rainbow with a bad haircut and more skin, Hip Hop and Contemporary Country were the real climate events. Hip Hop moved East to West and then back again while Country migrated South to North and then back again. These were culture altering forces that affected populations and politics, culture and commerce. And yet, neither was the music that really defined the Nineties. The music of that decade—the grist of airwaves and mall stores—was the music of Steve Earle.
Kind of. It was sometimes called “Roots Rock.” And other times it was called “Heartland Rock.” Or “Adult Alternative Rock.” Or even, occasionally, “Alternative Country.” It was the jangle of Hootie and the Blowfish, Matchbox Twenty, Goo Goo Dolls, Counting Crows, The Wallflowers and The Gin Blossoms. It was music to be played on multiple radio formats, at chain restaurants, in elevators and dressing rooms. Snoop and Dre and Biggie and Tupac and Garth and Shania got the headlines, but Roots Rock got all the oxygen. It had many antecedents—REM, The Replacements, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan among them. But, ultimately, it was music codified, if not invented, by Steve Earle.
Earle spent the Seventies and Eighties bouncing back and forth between Nashville—where he wrote songs for sale, played with Guy Clark and tested the limits of Music Row—and Texas—where he put together The Dukes, was free to be weird, and chased the living ghost of Townes Van Zandt. He spent more than a decade on his craft, building his reputation as a writer’s writer, a player’s player and quite possibly Country Music’s “Next Big Thing.” But there was one minor problem—Steve Earle was not a Country Music artist. Not exactly. He was kind of Country, kind of Rockabilly, kind of Bluegrass, kind of Album Oriented Rock, kind of College Rock and—gasp—curious about Punk and a whole bunch of other stuff that made Nashville squirm.
In the end (or the beginning, really) talent prevailed. Released in 1986, Earle’s legendary debut, “Guitar Town,” topped the Country sales charts, produced four top forty Country singles and was certified gold. And yet “Guitar Town” was conventional in comparison to “Copperhead Road.” Earle’s third album was a rule breaking, genre redefining, quantum leap. Earle had already lived several lives by the time “Copperhead Road” came out. He’d lost his religion and found some faith. He’s been disillusioned and reimagined. He’d narrowly avoided the draft, discovered Raymond Carver, met his heroes and discovered The Replacements, The Pogues, “Nebraska” and hard drugs. “Copperhead Road” was a summation of all of those influences. It predicted Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo and The Counting Crows and dozens of much lesser bands. It was a hit Country record, a hit Mainstream Rock record and a hit on an emerging radio format called “Hot Rock & Alternative Songs.” It was an unprecedented peak that arrived right before an unimaginable valley.
Following “Copperhead Road,” Earle drifted further from Nashville and towards Springsteen, Carver and—mostly—heroin. Meanwhile, between “The Hard Way,” from 1990, and “Train a Comin’,” in 1995—music finally started catching up to Earle. “Alternative Rock” evolved from Richard Thompson and Tom Waits to R.E.M. and The Replacements to Nirvana and Pearl Jam to Radiohead and Beck. But, from Radiohead and Beck, the road forked. On the one side was more experimental, genuinely alternative music. And on the other was less striving, less challenging, more earnest, more traditional Rock music, aware of that genuinely alternative variety but formally inspired by REM, The Replacements and the guy who bridged the road from Austin to Nashville and Athens to Minneapolis: Steve Earle.
While all this was happening, Steve Earle was caterwauling towards his bottom. Booze, coke and heroin cost him half a decade, meaning that between the summer of 1990 and the first part of 1995, he released no new music, but did spend sixty days in a Tennessee jail. Meaning that he peaked at thirty-three and washed back out around forty. Meaning that while Earle was foundering, popular music was becoming increasingly Earlesque. It’s hard to hear REM’s “Losing My Religion,” Goo Goo Dolls “Iris,” and pretty much anything from The Counting Crows and not hear the influence of Steve Earle. It’s even harder to hear Wilco or Ryan Adams and not hear Earle. And it’s darn near impossible to hear Jason Isbell, friend of Earle’s son, Justin Townes, and not hear Steve Earle. But it’s possible that the artist who most benefited from Earle’s genre-fluid, Springsteen-obsessed, Country-shifting music was not an Adult Alternative artist or an Alt Country artist but a one man industry named Garth Brooks. Steve Earle stumbled his way to the bottom so that Chris Gaines could one day fill stadiums and take over Walmarts.
There’s a quote ascribed to Confucius that goes something like: “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” Steve Earle’s second life began right around the time of his fortieth birthday, when he was out of jail, sober and making music again. By that point, the not so newborn had been married six times (to five different women). He’d heard it all, read it all, seen it all and, though he’d sworn off religion years earlier, had recommitted to faith and resolved to live one day at a time. The young Earle who made the pilgrimage to Nashville was lean and angular, with feathered hair and a strong jaw—he was matinee idol handsome. The guy kicking off his second half looked like an absolute mess—bloated and exhausted. The first guy looked ready to work. The second guy looked like Meat Loaf in 1978 at three AM the morning of a post-tour bacchanal gone terribly wrong.
But none of that mattered. What mattered was that he was still standing—wobbly, but upright. And ready to work again, one day at a time. For however much Earle had changed physically during his lost years, the cultural landscape had changed even more. In the nearly two thousand days since his last record, music had not so much caught up to him as it had distilled his style, stepped on it and blended it into the Adult Alternative zeitgeist. The list of mid-Nineties Earle acolytes—intentional or otherwise—was long and decorated. Counting Crows were a very good band who made a couple of great albums and a handful of wonderful songs. But “Mr. Jones” and “A Long December” would only be high end filler for Earle. Similarly, most of The Gin Blossoms oeuvre and a whole bunch of Wallflowers’ songs are clearly Earlesque, but also are plainly inferior to the genuine article. While all those Gap-friendly Nineties bands were selling millions of Earlesque records, Steve Earle was in the lost and found.
When he did finally reemerge in 1995, it was with a tentative, tender, half-step—like a guy who’d been living under a bridge peering out and feeling the sun on his skin for the first time in who knows how long. “Train a Comin’” was a lovely, minor album, comprised of songs Earle had written in his twenties, plus a few choice covers and “Goodbye,” his first sober song. “Train a Comin’” was a welcome return made during the pink cloud of new recovery. It was an intentionally modest step back from the depth of “Copperhead Road.” And yet it, in more important ways, it was a major step forward.
Just a year after “Train a Comin’,” having shaken off some of the rust, Earle released “I Feel Alright”—his real comeback album. Whereas “Train a Comin’” found Earle looking backwards, unsure, but hopeful for a future, “I Feel Alright” was a completely present album. It was vintage Earle, after the pink cloud had passed—honest, aching, and feeling “alright.” Which is to say he was not feeling great. But also he was not feeling awful. It’s a hedge—somewhere between cautious and optimistic. And it’s the ultimate one day at a time response to the question, “How you doing?” “I Feel Alright” is unvarnished but also appreciative. As a description of Earle’s state of mind, it feels appropriate. As a title for his sixth studio album, it feels like a radical understatement.
While Earle sounds wonderful throughout the record, he’s never better than on the opener, which turns the ambivalent title into a dare by removing the “I” and sticking with “Feel Alright.” “Feel Alright” is “Gloria” by Them, transported from Belfast to a Nashville AA meeting. It teeters between temptation and satisfaction, swaggers for almost exactly three minutes and then moves on, as if to say “that’s enough of a good time for right how.” But what a good time it is.
Having loosened up a bit, Earle starts to feel himself, reminding us that no songwriter—save for Randy Newman and John Prine—crafts characters and places with such economy. “Hard-Core Troubadour” finds him jumping between Asbury Park and the Southern border, singing and playing with a joy and an ease that makes you wonder whether songwriting is really so hard (it is). Meanwhile, “More Than I Can Do” is what we all hoped for but never got from solo Paul Westerberg—a bittersweet jangle from the vantage of an antihero. A breezy two and half minutes that ends just as you realize you’ve been singing along with a possibly criminal, definitely dangerous protagonist.
And they just. keep. coming. "Hurtin' Me, Hurtin' You" is as good as anything Jeff Tweedy or Ryan Adams have ever written—a real tear in the whiskey, country waltz about a guy who’s drunk enough to be honest. “Billy and Bonnie” is a superb, outlaws on the run update of Richard Thompson’s equally superb “Shane and Dixie.” And “You’re Still Standing There” is a buoyant duet with the great Lucinda Williams, whose clear as a bell tone and darlin drawl pair nicely with Earle’s full hearted, half ragged glory. It’s a pitch perfect closer about keeping steady while the world tilts and turns—a real one step, one day at time message for a real one step, one day at a time album.
After “I Feel Alright” Earle’s second life kept rolling on. Seventeen more studio albums (and counting). Grammy awards. Strident anti-war and anti-death penalty activism. Another divorce. Another wedding. A move to New York City, where he spent many days as the full time, single parent of an autistic son. And then, finally, a move back to Nashville, where, in 2020, he buried his first son, Justin Townes.
Today, Steve Earle is nearly seventy years old, which means that his first life began more than twenty-five thousand days ago and that his second one began more than ten thousand days ago. It’s possible he’s actually lived more than two lives. On some days—the better ones—I like to believe that his music will survive many more lifetimes. That it will outlast all of the stuff he spawned—The Gin Blossoms and Matchbox Twenty and even Garth Brooks. I like to believe that they were the blips and that Earle was the comet.