Steve Earle – The Revolution Starts…Now

God bless Steve Earle. You have to love an artist who feels compelled to write about a subject that consumes him, even as he risks marginalizing himself even further in the marketplace. The more narrowly Earle focuses his music politically, the less likely anyone will hear it (beyond those who already share his views) or any radio station will play it. It’s quite possible Earle’s music may not change a single mind about a war he opposes so passionately. So what? An artist has to do what an artist has to do, particularly when that artist is Steve Earle.

Like its studio predecessor Jerusalem from 2002, The Revolution Starts…Now might more accurately be termed a topical album than a political one. Earle has never released an album that isn’t inherently political, but just as John Lennon’s “Imagine” was a political statement and his Sometime In New York City was a topical broadside, Earle here is writing for the day rather than for the ages, addressing issues and naming names concerned with this particular war in this particular election year. If the results don’t have the staying power of Guitar Town and Copperhead Road, which sound as politically relevant today as they did when he released them in the 1980s, so be it.

Earle’s saving grace is that he’s more of a populist than an ideologue, more concerned with the grunts in the trenches than the masters of war. He gets under the skin of the truck driver who makes a promise to himself if he makes it alive back “Home To Houston”. He gives voice to the poor kid sent off to fight a “Rich Man’s War” and to the shadowy operator who “lived like a thief and assassin” in “The Gringo’s Tale”. On the lighter side, he offers a seductive serenade to national security advisor Condoleeza Rice with the sensual, sing-song reggae of “Condi, Condi”.

He also lets the listener under the skin of Steve Earle, with the soulful “I Thought You Should Know”, where the arrangement owes more to Memphis or Muscle Shoals than Nashville and the lyric has the bite of early Elvis Costello. And he teams with Emmylou Harris on the gorgeous “Comin’ Around”, a track that could highlight any Earle album.

From the garage-band urgency of the title-track manifesto (which both opens and closes the album) through the spoken-word soliloquy as Earle goes Shakespeare on “The Warrior”, and from the uplifting (if slightly self-important) anthemry of “The Seeker” to the profane exhilaration of “F the CC” (which somehow evokes both the Ramones and Country Joe & the Fish), an impassioned Earle leaves no doubt he takes his artistic mission as seriously as a heart attack. This isn’t product for Earle. It’s life and life only.