Caught Live: Steve Earle

Tonight’s performance is part of a tour in memory of Townes Van Zandt, a songwriter of preternatural insight under whom Earle served a lengthy and informal apprenticeship. Just old enough to fall the other side of the watershed separating the folk era from the hermetic world of the modern singer-songwriter, Earle’s fluency and charismatic ability to command a stage are testament to a craft born of close collaboration and the nightly challenges of small and often disinterested audiences. That Townes was something of an omnipresence throughout Earle’s turbulent development, the closest of all musical companions, means that the covers littering tonight’s setlist are often rendered with a familiarity and earnestness that belies their authorship. He has, as he’s eager to point out, been playing some of these songs all his adult life.

 

So it is that Townes compositions like ‘Pancho and Lefty’ (“the biggest motherfucker in the yard…”), ‘Lungs’ and ‘To Live Is to Fly’, come to sit comfortably alongside originals like ‘Someday’, ‘Taneytown’ and ‘My Old Friend The Blues’. Stripped to their essentials, everything refracted through the rhythmic and intuitive lens of Earle’s finger-picking, they’re separated only by degrees of pop sensibility and the most subtle of personal idiosyncrasies. In tandem with the anecdotes and observations that punctuate the setlist, from the spontaneous to the stylised, they succeed in blurring the line between biography and autobiography.

 

The poignant subtext to all this, of course, is that Earle has succeeded in conquering his demons, or at least in striking an uneasy truce with them, having emerged from heroin addiction and homelessness the possessor of an honesty and confidence that has proven the making of him, whereas Townes eventually succumbed to the attritional dissolution of alcoholism. Uniquely attuned to the asperities and inconsistencies of fate, Earle has this evening marshalled us unobtrusively along the darker corridors of his personal experience. Though we’re released into the night with an upbeat encore of ‘Galway Girl’, ‘Down in the Yard’ and ‘Copperhead Road’ still hanging in the air, it’s the fatalistic circularity of ‘Fort Worth Blues’, Earle’s musical tribute to Townes, that really endures.