Math
An outstanding album, as one can rightly expect of Steve
Earle. Worldly worn and worldly wise, politically astute and acerbic, can rock
your fucking socks off, passionate and romantic.
A song that has been given quite a bit of attention from this latest release is Burnin’ It Down where Earle imagines
torching a Wallmart store. Whilst the sentiment is angry enough, there is a
beauty in the song itself and a resignation in the empathised rationale for the
act which tempers the idea somehow. What I mean is there’s more pathos in the ‘why’
of the thought than considering the violence of the act.
Allison Moorer adds great harmony, and accordion, to the
slight TexMex of That All You Got.
This, Love’s Gonna Blow My Way – with
violin by Eleanor Whitmore – and After
Mardi Gras are a trio of fine songs written by Steve for his appearances as
a character in the equally fine New Orleans-set TV drama Treme.
Earle’s weary Texas drawl is such a distinctive sound, and
when he talks low and painfully through Invisible
– a song about being itinerant/dislocated/disconnected – there is such an
authenticity it hurts. This quality is heightened with the album closer, the genuinely emotive Remember Me, a song Earle has written for his baby son, John Henry,
as he a father of 58 anticipates the inevitable separation his age will cause
so much earlier than he would have wanted. It could be a maudlin moment, but
the honesty with which Earle has always written and sung his songs wrests this excellent one from that possibility.
On a bootleg of a recent Berlin gig, Earle talks about
having kids in his mid-fifties, and he says he ‘started doing the math’ and figured
out ‘the best I can hope for is to just try to really take really good care of
myself and try to be around long enough to see this one grow up’. I’m sure John
Henry will want his father around for as much as possible of the journey ahead, but what a poignant, loving song and
sentiment to fill that void when the math does exert its inevitability.
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