Steve Earle first met Townes Van Zandt in Houston in the early 1970s, when the former was just a teenager and the latter had a couple of well-made, if not especially strong-selling, albums full of dusty melodies, desperate blues riffs, and heartbreaking metaphors. Teacher and student moved (separately) to Nashville, where they attended guitar pulls with the likes of Guy Clark and Steve Young. With his bone-deep intuition of country's potential for clearly and unpretentiously expressing emotional pain, Van Zandt, who died in 1997, taught Earle well, and you can hear the elder's influences in later compositions songs "Goodbye", "Mercenary Song", and "Everyone's in Love with You". In turn, Earle has lionized Van Zandt, naming him a patron saint of barrooms and benders and even naming his first-born Justin Townes.
So a full album of Van Zandt covers was inevitable-- the culmination of Earle's three-and-a-half-decade admiration. In fact, it's surprising that Townes, as the album is titled, didn't arrive sooner. The concept may be genuine, but the timing seems calculated: For most of the Bush administration, Earle's career has been in a doldrums, and his last album, Washington Square Serenade, was quite possibly his worst. What should have been his ace, however, is not even a face card. Townes might have been inevitable, but it didn't have to be so dull.
Earle keeps things fairly simple, performing stripped-down arrangements with a small group of musicians who function less as a backing band and more as a bunch of friends drinking beer on the front porch. For the most part, it's just Earle alone with these songs, his gravel voice matched to Van Zandt's well-worn lyrics. This approach works well enough on "Pancho and Lefty", which here becomes a headhung lament and thankfully lacks the synths of Willie and Merle's duet. Likewise, "Colorado Girl" and "Marie" re-create the casual intimacy of a late-night guitar pull. These are, along with melancholy closer "To Live Is to Fly" and the bluegrass-stained "White Freight Liner Blues", the album's brightest spots, as if Earle were emphasizing sentiment and performative spontaneity over all else.
But what's lively on some songs is deadly on others. Earle plugs in for the bluesy "Brand New Companion," although it drags ass so much you wish he'd unplug again. "Delta Momma Blues" picks up where "White Freightliner Blues" leaves off, but either the song just doesn't support the playing or this take was not especially inspired. And can someone please steal Earle's drum machine and distorto harmonica? There's something vulgar about the way they sound on this rough treatment of "Lungs", which features Tom Morello. This version trades mordant humor ("Well, won't you lend your lungs to me?") for apocalyptic doomsaying and turns the original's modest blues rhythm into a cartoonish "When the Man Comes Around". Earle is certainly allowed to manhandle these not-quite-canonical songs, but in the rough and obvious way he mistreats them, he leaves little room for subtlety, restraint, or even taste.
As gifted as Van Zandt was, Earle has him on range. Throughout his career, he has played hardy rock, straightforward country, growling blues, rambling bluegrass, and tender folk, and he has played with the Pogues, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Del McCoury Band, Iris DeMent, and too many others to name. He's even published a collection of short stories and is working on a novel. Too bad Townes isn't as varied. There are nods toward certain styles and genres, but they come from the originals more often than from Earle himself, which makes the album sound overall a little too timid. If you're curious about Van Zandt-- and damn, you should be-- Fat Possum reissued several out-of-print albums in 2007, and pretty much any of those is a good place to start. If you're more interested in Earle, give a listen to Guitar Town or Train A Comin' or anything more than 10 years old. And if you're interested in the two of them together, track down the recently reissued Heartworn Highways collection, which features live guitar-pull performances from the 1970s. By comparison, Townes, though well intended, shows neither of these formidable artists in his best light.
