Steve Earle – Transcendental Blues
Depending on how you keep track — that is, depending on how tight you want to wear your documentarian-geek beanie — Transcendental Blues is Steve Earle’s tenth album. Beginning in 1986, he blew the doors off Nashville with Guitar Town, blew their cover with Exit 0, and blew town with Copperhead Road. The Hard Way arrived with iron filings in the oil pan; subsequent to Shut Up And Die Like An Aviator, the engine froze up. A hiatus ensued. He fingerpicked his way back with Train A-Comin’, rejoiced with I Feel Alright, knocked the walls out with El Corazon, and tipped his hat with The Mountain. Toss in Early Tracks, and you’ve got a collection of music built on a sustained dedication to — or, perhaps more accurately, compulsion for — stylistic and artistic iconoclasm. As a result, Earle has established a broad context for his work, and it seems as though that context is essential to any interpretation of Transcendental Blues.
The echoes are everywhere: “I Can Wait” could have come straight outta I Feel Alright; “The Galway Girl” is a sonic descendant of the Copperhead Road track “Johnny Come Lately”; the bluegrass number “Until The Day I Die” arrives direct from The Mountain experience; the picking on “Lonelier Than This” could have been lifted from “Tecumseh Valley” or “Goodbye” on Train A-Comin’; “All Of My Life” has an El Corazon crunch. And so on. Context is everything — right down to a snarky between-song quip referring to Earle’s recent ill-fated partnership with Del McCoury.
The question: Is Transcendental Blues a product of patchwork or synthesis? Both, one suspects, but it is a deeply rewarding work. There are surprises throughout — I count the simple, fabulous backbeat break in the middle of the title song and the dogged, ragged snare on “Lonelier Than This” as favorites. Lyrically, Earle’s range has begun to reflect his nascent efforts as fiction writer and poet (retained by the New Yorker, no less, for this year’s New York literature festival). “Halo ‘Round The Moon” is driven by that very image; “I Don’t Want To Lose You Yet” is a paean to romantic fatalism; when the protagonist explains why he fell for “The Galway Girl” — because her hair was black and her eyes were blue — Earle proves why the best poets stick to “the lean, spare music of the truth.” The finest parts of Transcendental Blues have less to do with defiance than with acceptance and — surprise! — transcendence. Comes a time in the career of an iconoclast when it helps to demonstrate that you’ve learned something from all those corners you knocked off.
The joy I felt when I heard Guitar Town all those years ago was a first cousin to rage. And I remember standing on the deck of a John Deere B, raking hay with the throttle wide open and Exit 0 on the headphones, my heart impatient, the highway on my mind. I remember the rush I got when Steve Earle lumbered onstage at First Avenue a few years ago, hammering his guitar and launching a resurrection: “I feel all right tonight…” There are no such incandescent moments on Transcendental Blues, nothing that galvanizes you or makes you load up the truck, burn the house, and leave town for good, but there is much to suggest that a little less hair and a little more gut are matters of nuance, and nuance is what it’s eventually all about.
I’m not sure Transcendental Blues is a suitable introduction to Steve Earle, or a vehicle of conversion. But it is socked with good things. It is, above all, an album that will make loyalists glad they’ve been on board for the whole dang oeuvre.
Does that mean we’re gettin’ old? Fine. It feels good.