Steve Earle has learned to compartmentalize. In the twenty-first century he has released an album of Townes Van Zandt covers, a few collections of agit-Americana, and another inspired by the immigrant sounds of New York City—each one so laser-focused musically and thematically that they sound like concept albums. On one hand, the approach gives each record its own distinctive identity within his catalog. When his overarching subject was the idiocy of the Bush Administration he hit paydirt: Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts… Now had a hardscrabble righteousness only intensified by the fact that few other singer-songwriters were tackling that particular subject matter at that particular time. Both have aged more gracefully than their topicality would have suggested.
On the other hand, that urge to cordon off genres and ideas seems particularly odd for an artist who changed the course of country music in the 1980s by insisting that everything could be commingled freely. His 1986 debut Guitar Town and 1988's Copperhead Road melded rock guitars and country songwriting, honkytonk rowdiness and folky gentleness, as if to rebuke the timid conservatism of the Nashville mainstream. Even in the 1990s, he emerged from a four-year stint in the clink with a string of adventurous records that made forays into doo-wop, Beatlesque pop, Civil War storytelling, and twangy psychedelica. That eclecticism was—and still is—rousing, yet nowadays each of those creative impulses would get its own neat album.
Earle's latest is also his most specific: Terraplane is his Texas blues album, an homage to the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Robert Johnson and Stevie Ray Vaughn, Freddy King and ZZ Top. There are no cheeseball Blueshammer theatrics, which often accompany blues records made by non-blues artists. Earle's more interested in craft than ostentation, and his touring band the Dukes keep things raw and wiry, as though everything was caught in one take during Shiner runs. Only on "Baby's Just as Mean as Me", a he said/she said duet with Eleanor Whitmore, do Earle's blues sound less than casually persuasive.
To his credit, Earle understands that Texas is a big place and therefore Texas blues is a broad term that encompasses various sounds and song forms. Terraplane volleys from acoustic to electric, from solo delivery to full-band performances, from pop melodies to spoken-word verses. He conjures some fire and brimstone on a talking blues called "The Tennessee Kid", which would be one of the best songs here if it didn't so readily buy into some of the persistent myths orbiting the blues: reaching the crossroads, meeting the devil, selling your soul. These seem like tired tropes, equivalent to naming your album after a Robert Johnson song, yet Earle brings so much grit and wiliness to the song that you almost don't roll your eyes when he name-drops "Bob Johnson."
The blues is often mischaracterized as uniformly worried and woeful, as though a hellhound were on every strummer's trail, yet that is only one facet of the form. It can also be funny, or randy, and it's this last trait that Earle taps into most eagerly, as Terraplane is his lustiest album in a long while. Sex is the major theme, and Earle beholds his hard-on with a self-effacing chuckle. The first song is called "Baby Baby Baby (Baby)", and that parenthetical aside is not only his best punchline but a winking nod to the ridiculousness of it all. Casting him as the leering oldie, "Go-Go Boots Are Back" may be his most frivolous song yet, but its lack of gravity is freeing, even funny. Nevertheless, the concept framing Terraplane also reduces its scope and limits its impact. It's good for what it is—better than it needs to be, in fact—yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations.
