Steve Earle: I Feel Alright : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It seems like a couple of lifetimes ago that Steve Earle appeared destined to become the Bruce Springsteen of country music. Introducing himself with 1986's Guitar Town, Earle arrived on a wave of "new traditionalism" that extended from the terse conservatism of Randy Travis to the hillbilly flash of Dwight Yoakam. While others in the class of '86 found popular acceptance more quickly, Earle showed the most potential. His Southern populism and unbridled rebelliousness offered a bridge between the hard twang of rural country music and the harder dynamics of rock, reinforcing the strengths of both camps rather than settling for a dilution more typical of the Eagles.

After continuing down the same road with 1987's Exit 0, an album almost as strong as Guitar Town, Earle took a metallic detour. Both Copperhead Road (1988) and The Hard Way (1991) buried some inspired material beneath too many guitars, undermining the country side of his music. As Earle began to attain greater notoriety for his drug use, divorces and tattoos than for his music, his oncepromising career looked more like a highway wreck and was viewed with apprehension by those who slowed down to gape at the carnage. It was said that Earle couldn't even get arrested in Nashville – until he hit bottom after a 1994 crack bust.

I Feel Alright sounds like the album Earle should have made after Exit 0, although its songs are fired by his struggles in the years since. As innocuous as the title sounds, Earle makes it seem more like a threat, a dare directed at those who "would live through me/Lock me up and throw away the key/Or just find a place to hide away/Hope that I'll just go away." He follows with a defiant "huh!" as if the tail-between-his-legs contrition that his detractors might have expected is about as likely as a dog learning to play guitar.

Though last year's acoustic Train a Comin' was widely (and, at the time, rightly) hailed as a renewal for Earle, the harder-edged conviction of I Feel Alright makes its predecessor feel like the musical equivalent of a halfway house. On Train a Comin', Earle recast himself in the tradition of Texas troubadours, paying proper respect to his elders (Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt in particular) while acknowledging his excesses in such songs as "Goodbye" and "Angel Is the Devil."

With I Feel Alright, Earle has returned full force with an electric vengeance. While such songs as "Hurtin' Me, Hurtin' You" and "Hard-Core Troubadour," with its playful quote from Springsteen's "Rosalita," sound like they could have been highlights from the best of Earle's early albums, there was nothing in his past work to predict the Beatlesque buoyancy and yearning harmonies of "More Than I Can Do," the bare-bones bluesiness of "CCKMP" ("Cocaine Cannot Kill My Pain") and "South Nashville Blues," or the string-laden, gospel-tinged heartbreak of "Valentine's Day."

The latter song is indicative of the album's production strength, in which streamlined arrangements provide just enough context for the naked emotion of the material. Whatever sentimental treacle a title such as "Valentine's Day" suggests, the ballad is as hard as any of the rockers, with the gospel legends Fairfield Four and a string section providing exquisite complement to Earle's ravaged vocals. In its wasted tenderness the performance is as uncompromising as "The Unrepentant," the tougher cut that follows.

Where so many self-styled outlaws succumb to bad-boy posturing, Earle allows equal opportunity to the women in his songs; the protagonist of "Now She's Gone" and the distaff half of "Billy and Bonnie" show a wildness that puts the men to shame – and leads them to ruin. There is an air of romantic recklessness within even the more conventional love songs. On "More Than I Can Do," Earle pledges to a resistant lover: "You said you're gonna call the cops/But I ain't gonna run/Because you're the only one."

On "You're Still Standin' There," a duet with Lucinda Williams that ends the album, such constancy seems more like a promise than a threat. Though much of the album offers a tour of one man's hell – with Earle as a roadhouse Dante – the songwriter's creative resurgence ultimately supplies his redemption. With an album that hits as hard and deep as I Feel Alright, the future looks bright for Steve Earle. Again.