Sometimes, Steve Earle worries people think he’s stopped writing songs.
At 71, Earle’s one of the most prolific writers alive today — best known for songs like his first hit, “Guitar Town,” his generational bootlegging outlaw ballad, “Copperhead Road,” and the traditional Irish music influenced “Galway Girl.” But Earle’s been busy writing a musical for the last few years (an adaptation of the 1983 Robert Duvall film, Tender Mercies), and the character-driven country/rock songs that made him famous took a back-burner as the musical consumed his creativity.
This spring though, Earle wrote a new song. Not for ego’s sake, but rather because he couldn’t not; Earle’s spent much of his career in the music business singing for and about downtrodden and misunderstood characters, and his activism includes campaigning against the war in Iraq and corporal punishment. Watching Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave) and Bruce Springsteen protest I.C.E. activities in Minneapolis, Earle thought, “‘Fuck this. I’m supposed to be the political one, right’?” he says. “I felt like I needed to do something.” So he figured out what to add to the conversation about the current cultural, social, and political unraveling of the United States, singing:
In the swing of a hammer, a lifetime flew by
I raised a family, but now I’m alone
A voy a volver a Celaya
I’m goin’ back home
Though he’s been making commercial music for more than 50 years across 21 studio albums, the new song is easily some of Earle’s best work. "Volver A Celaya" released digitally today, and is out as a 7" on October 16 via New West Records. In the space of two long verses and three scant minutes, through the voice of an unnamed narrator, Earle swiftly evinces the allure of the American Dream and how easily it crumbles under the forces that so often strip immigrant and working-class people of everything that dream promises. Fittingly, Earle invited Los Lobos to Richmond, VA’s Red Amp Studios to record the track. They bring decades of experience — fusing cultures with their heavy-hitting Chicano rock – and their warm accordion and rich bajo sexto to fill out the cross-border tale.
“My gift has always been lyrics; that’s what I was put here to do,” Earle told a songwriting class this spring at the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music in Brooklyn. Whereas so many songwriters might guard their new work tightly, Earle wrote the song concurrently to teaching the class, jotting notes into his phone while walking to and from school drop off for his youngest son, John Henry. As soon as he had a draft, he shared it with the students, playing for them his melancholy, intricately finger-picked demo, and telling them: “I can’t write any better than this, guys…I’m really super proud of it.”
