Empathy is Steve Earle's calling card. Many of the best songs Earle's written find him telling the story of some real or imagined person who has either endured an injustice or been widely demonized or misunderstood. A badass with a bleeding heart, Earle has lent compassion to criminals ("Billy Austin", "Tom Ames' Prayer", "John Walker's Blues") as well as given voice to the kinds of disenfranchised people who rarely have one ("Good Ol Boy (Gettin' Tough)", "Taneytown", "Home From Houston"). Almost all of these are protest songs to some degree, yet by putting a face to an issue and getting you to sympathize with his subject's plight, it never feels like Earle is preaching.
The clear highlight of Earle's 14th studio album, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, is "The Gulf of Mexico", and it fits this mold flawlessly. As you've probably guessed from the title, the underlying issue is the Gulf oil spill, but instead of soapboxing about corporate irresponsibility, Earle illuminates the history of the region by sketching the lives of three generations of men who worked its waters. We meet the narrator's grandfather running a shrimp boat, the father ferrying workers to and from the mighty oil rigs, and then finally the storyteller himself, working on the drilling floor and witness to the catastrophic explosion that "spilled the guts of hell out on the gulf of Mexico." As the three verses progress, the water turns from blue to green to red.
Earle seems to feed off this sense of righteous purpose-- on this album, see also "Little Emperor", a giddy skewering of American hubris. When his subject matter is more nebulous, stylized, or even personally intimate, his songwriting tends to falter. "Molly-O", "Meet Me in the Alleyway", and "The Wanderer" lean too heavily on tropes of the outlaw, the gritty urban denizen and the vagabond, respectively, while trading on the listener's recognition that Earle himself has been categorized in those roles. Conversely, the gentle sentiments of "God Is God" and "Every Part of Me" are deeply felt but hardly profound. It doesn't help that Earle isn't a particularly strong melodist, and rarely will surprise you musically-- here, only "Lonely Are the Free", delicately decorated with acoustic guitar fills, truly measures up to his top-line lyricism. His most effortless mode is charging, attitudinal roots-rock, but only the opening "Waitin' on the Sky" really hits that strutting sweet spot.
Earle's albums have been extremely uneven for some time now. Certainly that indicates he's put out a sizable amount of dross, but it also means he's recorded a bunch of great songs that have gotten lost in the shuffle. It's particularly galling that no compilation of Earle's work released to date has included any post-1997 material. Perhaps the ideal representation of his artistry would be a collection of his best cause-minded story songs. It'd be like a musical version of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and "The Gulf of Mexico" would definitely be on there.
