Legends stay legendary.





It's hard to say exactly when songwriter Steve Earle became legendary, but that he is legendary is very much not up for debate. The first telltale sign is by virtue of how people talk about him. When people discuss Earle's place in music's canon, it is with a particular reverence that's also imputed to country music artists like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings. It hasn't been an easy road. Like the aforementioned Cash, Nelson, and Jennings, Earle has grappled with the triumphs and pitfalls of his own story. For every sublime high he's summited in his songcraft, there have been brutally deep lows in his personal life. Earle's importance in Americana has been well-fought and hard-won.





And he's not done yet, goddamit. Armed with one of the best bands in the country music scene and some of the best, most trenchant material of his long career, Steve Earle still has plenty of fire in the belly to direct at a world that needs it now more than ever. With an upcoming show at Paramount Theatre on Tuesday, December 19th, we spoke with Steve Earle about his favorite meal to cook, his disdain for the 24-hour news cycle, his latest album, So You Want To Be an Outlaw, and much more.





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Do512: So You Want to Be An Outlaw has been out for a few months now. What's it like to release your 16th album? Just like tying your shoes?





Steve Earle: The thing about it being my 16th album, you know, I usually have someone else telling me it's my 16th. I'm not so much interested in that. It's just like your age. Oh, I'm 62? How did that happen? I'm really actually almost 63... This record is sort of interesting because I don't think it would be possible without having every other record I've ever made. I don't think I would have been willing to make it without all the other things I've already tried. But, I needed to reconnect. You know, I did know Doug Sahm since I was a young teenager, and I did grow up in South Texas. I grew up with country music that was danceable and had to be danceable and therefore stayed way more connected to rock and roll than what was going on in Nashville. When I got to Nashville, I was sort of part of the folky fashion so I didn't worry about that as much for a long time, but once I started having a band, you know I've got myself wanting to play Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud (Loud) Music again. (laughs) It's just like the blues record before. (With) Chris Masterson being in the band, I knew he could do it, so I could make a blues record. The bar is high for blues, if you're from Texas. And the bar is high for this stuff, too. It's all where I come from, and therefore where I can go from here.





As someone who has watched the landscape morph and mutate in competitive music cities like Austin and Nashville, what would you tell up and coming artists who are trying be successful?





Steve Earle: Well, the first thing is, is not to listen to anybody who tries to tell you how it's going to be because nobody fucking knows. It changes so drastically. You've got to give me some credit and lend some credence to what I say because there are 8-tracks of my records. I've seen a lot of formats come and go. The business collapsing, I've never blamed that purely on streaming. I blame it also on shitty music. I grew up in a generation where music was the most important thing in the world to people, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. Unless you were a soldier or a minister or some other kind of zealot, music was a big part of your life. Maybe even then it was. There was a moment where there was an incredible amount of really great music, and it was sort of everywhere. Texas was a good place for that, a lot of it came from there. I think there was a lot of things that happened, and I think streaming is part of it.





But years ago, I'd been out of jail for a year and a half or maybe two years, when the whole Napster thing started and everybody started freaking out a little bit. Jimmy Iovine was actually one of the first people who sounded the alarm and nobody would listen to him. I heard about it because I knew [Jimmy] Iodine, so I was talking about it, but it's just not my idea of a political issue. My political issues are that people are dying and shit, so I just didn't put a lot of time into going to Washington to fuck around and try to figure out how to get more money for me. Maybe I should've. Other people did it and I supported them, but I didn't do very much of it.





My son, Ian was eight or nine and I caught him downloading something and I said, "Son, why are you engaging in this activity that threatens your chances for a college education?" and he said, "Well dad, most music sucks and I just want to get the stuff that doesn't suck." I think a lot of things happened to where, as an industry, we were charging people more money for records that were becoming more diluted as far as the quality of the material. I think part of that is the quality of the songs themselves. There are singer-songwriters, but not every singer should be a songwriter. I think that everybody knew that most of the money was in publishing, so everybody thought they had to write their own songs, and I think that did a lot of damage. It began in the late '70s and went through the '80s and eventually we wore out the trust of the audience and that contributed to the audience making that choice at that crucial moment in history when they had the choice to download it for free. We basically were giving them a product that was increasingly less worth paying for.













So the basic advice to musicians is... Don't suck?





Steve Earle: It's all about the songs. That's the deal. To have a career, to have people come out, it's always going to be smaller, but I think it's about the songs.





Speaking of newer artists, are you aware that Ed Sheeran has a big song that shares a title with one of your songs, Galway Girl?





Steve Earle: He just took the title and he wrote another song. You can't copyright a title. There's no way he didn't know about Galway Girl, he's English or Irish, so he knows. I can't complain about it. But... on that island, I bet my song outlasts his. My song is played at every fucking wedding in Ireland and its Galway city's team football song and replaced My Own Dear Galway Bay after 150 years. So, they're not going to remember that Steve Earle wrote it, in fact, a lot of people think Mundy wrote it, this kid from the Midlands that actually had the biggest hit on it. Sheeran is one of the biggest artists in the world, and I think some of what he does is cool, but I think it'll be my song that's remembered on that island. Maybe not everywhere else, but on that fucking island, I still wrote the Galway Girl.













What have you lost interest in as time as gone by?





Steve Earle: Lot's of things, but not because they're... It's because I'm getting old and I can only concentrate on a certain number of things, and I work a lot. I don't get a lot of time to focus on anything except for getting on stage every night. I've lost interest in mainstream country music completely, not that I was ever really into it. Except for the women, I think the women are the most interesting part of it. Miranda Lambert's last album was stunning, it was really, really good. I think Kacey Musgraves is great at what she does. She sings her ass off. She's a performance artist and she puts a lot of thought into what she does and she's worth paying to go see. I understand why people go to see her. She holds my interest when I go see her. I don't listen to her records all the time, but I've been on the same stage with her a lot and I always stand there and watch her whole show.





I don't have as much interest in the 24-hour news cycle as I used to. I'm still addicted, so I still turn it on in the morning, but I turn it back off way quicker than I used to. I used to leave it on all morning. I'm a little more concerned by what happened in the last election. I'm really down on reality television and I think it's one of the things that caused the trouble that we're in. But, I'm starting to think that the 24-hour news cycle is reality television for people that think they're too good for reality television, like me. I'm trying to subject myself to a little less of it. And I don't know what the answer is, I'm looking for other sources of information, but I'm not sure what they are. I've never done any social media, which puts me at a disadvantage and I realize it. I'm not judging anyone for it, I just don't have enough time as it is to do the things I need to do. You know, I'm just trying to protect myself from becoming a hopeless old fart, but without abandoning things that I hold to be true. Look, if you don't believe that reality television is real and Fox is news, then Donald Trump isn't possible. It had as much to with MSNBC as it did with anyone else, too. Trump being president - that ball got rolling with Morning Joe. The rest of the shows started taking his calls because Morning Joe was doing it so they had to do it too to be competitive. I have trouble looking at those two now, 'cause they're going off about him and they're up in arms about him now but...









They're culpable.





Steve Earle: They were staying in his fucking house on New Year's Eve before the election! They are culpable. And we all are! This isn't about them, it's about us letting our culture devolve to the point that we collectively thought this was going to be a good idea. And in a democracy, 'collectively' is all that fucking counts. I road down from the elevator with this woman who was going on and on, and I wasn't talking to her. I didn't want to talk to her because I knew that she wasn't happy just by looking at her. She was going, "I wanted to vote for Bernie, but I couldn't." And I was the same person, I would've voted for Bernie Sanders as long as he was in the race. The Revolution Starts Now played at every Bernie rally I ever saw. I just didn't want to have the conversation with her. I voted for Hillary Clinton and I thought we were going to elect the first woman President of the United States. We ended up electing the first orangutan President of the United States. I was in total shock, and this woman said, "I voted for [Jill] Stein, how could you vote for Hillary Clinton? She's such a terrible person. My vote is my expression.." and I said, "Stop. A vote is not a fucking expression. It's not art, it's math. There's a result, a fucking consequence for how you vote, and we all have to live with it." You know, it's your right, but it's not an expression, it's about what happens.





I'm starting to write the next record now, and it's just as country as the last record, because I think I have maybe the best country rock band in the world right now. They're pretty fucking good. But anyway, it's going to be way more political. I've written two songs. This is a situation I never thought we'd be in. I'm a person who's making a living for the rest of my life in a business that's collapsed and living in a country where it seems like democracy has collapsed. I think it's salvageable, but I think you need to accept the consequences of democracy. You can't sit around and say "It's them." It's not just the Russians. The Russians are a big deal and it needs to be talked about. But it's also about lefties needing to get in touch again with the working class people they're supposed to be working for. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to try to listen to those people and do that on this record. If I'm going to make a fucking political record, that's the kind of political record that I need to make.









Photo Credit: Chad Batka









Time for kind of a different question, Steve. What smell reminds you of your childhood?





Steve Earle: Woah, um. Probably mesquite burning. I grew up in South Texas and my dad used it for everything to do with cooking. I actually think it's kind of bitter, you know, I think there's better Texas smoke stuff, but I smelled a lot mesquite burning when I was growing up. You know, you smell it almost when you're not even burning it when it's really fucking hot. It has an oil to it.





Is it a pleasant smell for you?





Steve Earle: Yeah, because it means my dad's cooking out, or one of my uncles. Cooking's a big deal for me. The men are all big cooks in my family. I'm kind of a late bloomer, but I've got a seven-year-old now. When I'm home I cook stuff for his lunches. I got a big pot of bolognese and a pot of risotto going at the same time the other night so I could freeze lunches for the whole time that I was home. I started out making chicken fried steak and chili and I've branched out from that now. Cooking is therapeutic for me. The smells of cooking and the social thing of cooking. I have a black-eyed pea party at my apartment in New York City on New Year's day. I make two big huge pots of black-eyed peas. Originally it was for displaced southerners, but now there's forty or fifty people there in my 1100-square-feet apartment. I've been doing that for fifteen years.















