Steve Earle learned the haunted ballads of the late, self-destructive Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt from the best possible source: Van Zandt himself. In the early Nineties, when Earle was battling a serious drug problem, Van Zandt showed up at Earle's house in Nashville to lend support. "He said, 'Do you use clean needles?'" Earle recalls. "I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Every day?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'OK, listen to this song I just wrote.' And he played me [the 1994 classic] 'Marie.' It blew my mind. I learned how to write from singing some of those songs."

Earle pays tribute to his old friend with Townes, a collection of 15 covers. To evoke the intimacy of Van Zandt's original performances, Earle recorded spare vocal-and-acoustic-guitar tracks for 12 songs in the living room of his New York apartment, starting with two of Van Zandt's best-known tunes, "Pancho and Lefty" and "To Live Is to Fly." He took the tapes to Nashville, where he added bass, drums and the occasional synth loop — and recorded three extra tracks with a bluegrass combo. Earle says the mix of stark and fleshed-out material demonstrates that Van Zandt wrote with more range than his legend may have it. "It would have been easy for this to be a record to slit your wrists by," Earle says. "But this is one of the best records I've ever made."

[From Issue 1074 — March 19, 2009]