Earle's Soapbox Upheld by Musical Expertise
By Amy McDaniel
A&F Editor

Apparently, not all songs about September 11 are welcome. Steve Earle’s newly released album, Jerusalem (Artemis), became controversial months before its release for the ballad, “John Walker’s Blues.” This empathic, first person tune indicts the monoculture of MTV for alienating kids who are a little different. Fair enough, but Earle gets in hot water with the inclusion of Islamic prayers and incantations and haunting lines like, “We came to fight the Jihad and our hearts were pure and strong/As death filled the air we all offered up prayers/And prepared for our martyrdom.”

While much less inflammatory, many of the other songs on Jerusalem follow a similar tenor of overt resistance. Telling in themselves, the track names include “Ashes to Ashes,” “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do),” “Conspiracy Theory” and “The Truth.” Earle adds his customary mini-manifesto to the liner notes. Usually, his introduction to the album gives a little snapshot of his emotional life.

This time, the self-professed Marxist plunges headfirst into contentious politics: “When no enemy presented itself at the gate we began to turn on ourselves, subjecting our own citizens to clandestine scrutiny by our law enforcement agencies’ persecution in our courts of law. Our newfound ‘unity’ became increasingly exclusive and eventually divisive until we fought each other in the streets of Washington, Chicago, Newark, and Watts,” Earle charges and then concludes, “God bless America, indeed.”

Danny Goldberg, the CEO of Earle’s record company, encouraged the political focus from the get-go. In his defense of the release, Goldberg softly echoes Earle’s cultural commentary: “The song does not glorify John Walker Lindh.

It would be a pretty shallow culture if songwriters only wrote about nice people.” Or a shallow culture that would only listen to those songs.

Earle preemptively responded to accusations of un-American sentiment and to comparisons to “Hanoi Jane” Fonda by issuing a press release to accompany the album. In it, he tentatively suggested that his experience of being impressionable and confused when he was young helped him to relate to John Walker Lindh. Earle then wrote, “I’m not trying to get myself deported or something. In a big way this is the most pro-American record I’ve ever made. I feel urgently American.” The liner notes echo this idea but specify that his American heroes are “John Reed, Emma Goldman, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King…those who defended [the principles of the Constitution] by insisting on asking the hardest questions in our darkest hours.”

Earle names another American icon of resistance in “Christmas in Washington,” the opening song on El Corazon (Warner Bros., 1998), an album that finds Earle at his very best. He croons, “Come back Woodie Guthrie to us now/I followed in your footsteps once back in my travel in days somewhere/I failed to find your trail.” With Jerusalem, the artist can finally feel redeemed in his emulation of Guthrie.

Like the folk ballad master of the 1930s, Earle never neglects the crafts of songwriting and musicianship in favor of his political lampooning. Still in the guitar-driven rock mode of El Corazon, Earle plays a grocery list of instruments and experiments more than usual with production, which is alternately frenzied and technically rich, calm and naturalistic.

Already a critic’s darling, “I Remember You” features a characteristically haunting performance by Emmylou Harris. The duet is the album’s simplest in both subject and composition but the expert vocal harmonies push it to the top musically.

Earle’s voice retains its signature grit yet veers occasionally towards the crackly and plaintive. Clearly pain, the latter quality echoes the despair of his lyrics. Even on the last, most optimistic track — the title song — sweat and tears drip from Earle’s voice and remind us again of the weight of the subject matter.