STEVE EARLE : WASHINGTON SQUARE SERENADE

STEVE EARLE : WASHINGTON SQUARE SERENADE

Tennessee Blues
Down Here Below
Satellite Radio
City Of Immigrants (with Forro In The Dark)
Sparkle And Shine
Come Home To Me
Jericho Road
Oxycontin Blues
Red Is The Color
Steve's Hammer (For Pete)
Days Aren't Long Enough (with Allison Moorer)
Way Down In The Hole

Label : New West Records

Length : 42:07

Release Date : September 25, 2007

Review (AllMusic) : New York City has long been more than America's biggest and most fabled city - it's a place that symbolizes fresh starts and new opportunities, and there are scores of songs and stories about folks pulling up roots and heading to the Big Apple in search of a better and more exciting life. Steve Earle wrote one such song on his 1997 album El Corazón, "NYC," in which a nervy kid from Tennessee hitchhikes to Manhattan because "there must be something happening, it's just too big a town," and a decade later Earle followed him, moving to New York to escape Red State malaise. Washington Square Serenade, Earle's 12th studio album and first in three years, deals in part with the sights and sounds of his new hometown, from the red-tailed hawk that lives in Central Park ("Down Here Below") to the multilingual chatter of the streets ("City of Immigrants"), while also taking a look back at the home he left behind on tunes like "Oxycontin Blues," "Red Is the Color," and "Jericho Road." While there's a strength in the familiar textures of the songs where Earle remembers Tennessee, there's a welcome sense of rejuvenation in the album's first half as he shares the details of his adventures in New York (which also includes a new bride, Allison Moorer, who lends lovely backing vocals to these sessions and is the presumable inspiration for "Sparkle and Shine" and "Days Aren't Long Enough"), and the expressionistic imagery of "Down Here Below" and "Satellite Radio" works beautifully in this context. After producing his last few album himself, Earle turned those chores over to Dust Brother John King for Washington Square Serenade, and King brings a welcome collision of the traditional and the contemporary to the music, facing scratchy drum loops against mandolins and dobros while letting a folky simplicity carry the day when it best suits the song, and the sound is crisp and forceful throughout. Washington Square Serenade ultimately sounds a bit less focused than its immediate predecessors, the politically minded Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts...Now (despite the presence of "Red Is the Color" and "Steve's Hammer"), but it also finds Earle trying out some new tricks both as a performer and a songwriter, and it's exciting and encouraging to hear him exploring fresh turf after two decades of record-making, and there's lots of fine music to be had on this set.

Review (Pitchfork) : On his 12th studio album, Steve Earle bids a final farewell to Guitar Town-- his nickname for Nashville and the title of his infamous 1986 debut. Very literally bids farewell: On the opening track, "Tennessee Blues", Earle sings, "Won't be back no more, boss, you won't see me around. Goodbye, Guitar Town." The song chronicles his move from Nashville, where he launched, wrecked, and rebuilt his career, to the decidedly un-country town of New York City, a change that surely would wreck most careers in a business that equates the rural with roots and the urban with uppitiness. But Earle long ago shed any concern for Guitar Town's unwritten rules and continues to define himself as everything the establishment is not: He's a singer and a songwriter, an avowed liberal who plays prison shows and campaigned heartily against Bush, and-- perhaps most impressively-- a rehabbed artist who wrote himself a second career chapter that was even stronger than the first. So his move to Clinton Country doesn't seem too far-fetched. Hell, it almost seems inevitable. Besides, he really, really likes New York. Washington Square Serenade, in addition to taking its title from a Greenwich Village park, contains not one but two paeans to the Big Apple and its people: "Down Here Below", about the divide between the haves in their skyscrapers and the have-nots on the subway, and "City of Immigrants", which features local Brazilian group Forro in the Dark. On every song the city's influence can be heard, whether in a stanza about Joe Mitchell or in the clangorous percussion that mimics the sound of a busy street. But does New York City love Steve Earle back? His municipal muse seems to have led him into downtown traffic: Despite his transparent inspiration, Washington Square Serenade turns out to be his weakest collection of the 00s, which is saying a lot considering his last two lackluster albums. Those two odes to the local underclass are two of the worst offenders. On "Down Here Below" Earle speaks the verses like he's at an East Village open-mic night, and the effect is so grating it makes the sung chorus seem like an oasis, even if it does sound like it's been sutured in from another song. Earle takes a different tack on "City of Immigrants", inviting Forro in the Dark to provide backing vocals over vaguely ethnic city rhythms. With ludicrous lyrics like "City of bone/ City of skin/ City of pain/ City of immigrants", the song presents a redundantly romanticized view of the city and its multicultural communities. When Forro in the Dark start singing "We are all immigrants" over Earle's vocal countermelody, the song transcends the self-righteous and achieves the ridiculous. The rest of Washington Square Serenade ranges from good ("Days Aren't Long Enough", a duet with wife Allison Moorer) to merely serviceable ("Red Is the Color"). Disappointingly, the closing cover of Tom Waits's "Way Down in the Hole" (better known as the theme to The Wire, which features Earle in a small recurring role) sounds slick rather than haunted, especially compared to versions by the Blind Boys of Alabama (Season 1), Waits himself (Season 2), and the Neville Brothers (Season 3). Listen for Earle's version on Season 5. Earle gives a decent performance on "Way Down in the Hole", but what makes his version nearly unlistenable-- and what ultimately sinks this album-- is the production by John King. The former Dust Brother fits most of these songs with a matte surface and programmed beats that sound instantly dated (in fact, they keep reminding me of Billy Bob Thornton's atrocious cover of "Ring of Fire", a comparison no artist should ever court). On softer songs like "Come Home to Me", these beats distract from Earle's simple sentiments, and on faster songs like "Down Here Below", the banjo-and-beats breakdowns can be laughable. Worse, they clash against Earle's rough-edged voice and the mostly acoustic instruments and live drums on "Jericho Road" and "Steve's Hammer (For Pete)", two of the album's best tracks. Ultimately, these beats are a very obvious means of evoking an urban hubbub, as stale as calling New York "the city that never sleeps"-- which he actually does. It's just another wrong turn that gets Earle even more lost in the big city.

Review (Americana UK) : I have chosen Steve Earle’s 2007 album ‘Washington Square Serenade’ as this week’s classic album. There will be lots of debate as to which is Earle’s best album; this is my favourite. In particular, I find the lyrics on some of the songs very affecting and this makes the songs very memorable. Many of the melodies are excellent too, but this is harder to explain and is just personal taste, really. The album was Earle’s 12th and was sandwiched between 2004’s ‘The Revolution Starts Now’ and his album of Townes Van Zant covers ‘Townes’, released in 2009. Recorded at the famous Electric Lady Studios in New York, it was produced by John King who is one half of the Dust Brothers duo, the other being Mike Simpson “E.Z. Mike”. They are famous for their sample-based music and have produced Beck’s ‘Odelay’ and The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’, amongst others; not your typical americana musicians. King got a Grammy for his production work on this album and the album itself got a 2008 Grammy as Best Contemporary Folk/Americana album. The album starts with ‘Tennessee Blues’ with Earle’s Texan drawl backed with guitar picking and some beautiful lead guitar. This sets the scene for the album, which at times concerns Earle’s life in New York, by describing his wanderlust which makes him leave “guitar town” and move to The Big Apple. It is followed brilliantly by ‘Down Here Below’ which paints a wonderful picture of New York from the eye of a hawk swooping above New York and eyeing up its prey. Although it is the hawk’s voice that speaks here, “He looks up and down Fifth Avenue/ And says, “God, I love this town”, you feel that this is Earle speaking about his affection for the city. He contrasts the life of the hawk with the people living in the city struggling by and ends by bemoaning the gentrification of the city: “Hey, whatever happened to Alphabet City?/ Ain’t no place left in this town that a poor boy can go” Later on, in ‘City Of Immigrants’ Earle describes the melting pot that New York is with all the different languages and the 24-hour-a-day living: “Livin’ in a city that never sleeps/ My heart keepin’ time to a thousand beats/ singin’ in languages I don’t speak”. Although he isn’t explicitly positive about immigration, he paints such a vibrant picture of multicultural New York; I can’t think of a more positive lyric and so find it very powerful. ‘Sparkle And Shine’ and ‘Days Aren’t Long Enough’ are fantastic emotional love songs addressed to his then wife, country singer Allison Moorer. In the first, Earle appears to be besotted with her: “I can’t sleep, y’all, and I can’t eat/ Sparks fly whenever we meet/ I’m breathless ’cause she’s so cool”. In the latter, where Moorer, who had co-written the track, joins him on vocals, Earle celebrates their life together: “Another year has come and gone/ Another circle around the sun/ Another thousand tears have fallen/ I don’t ever count ’em ’cause/ I’m surrounded by your love/ And days are never long enough” Ironically, the marriage didn’t last- married in 2005, they separated in 2012, having had one son, John Henry, together. Moorer has since married Hayes Carll and produced his 2019 album ‘What It Is’. Earle has had a well-documented turbulent love life; he has been married seven times, twice to the same woman. Earle gets more political towards the end of the record. On the rollicking ‘Steve’s Hammer’ he looks forward to the day when he can stop campaigning because the world’s wrongs have been put to right: “When the war is over and the union’s strong/ Won’t sing no more angry songs”. ‘Oxycontin Blues’ tells the story of an addict, starting with the struggles of his father: “Well, my daddy worked in the coal mine/ Till the company shut it down/ Then he sat around and drank his-self blind/ Till we put him back underground” Here and in the apocalyptic ‘Red Is The Color’ we see the blues and bluegrass influences which are a thread which runs through Earle’s work. He goes back to writing about family in ‘Jericho Road’ where the singer meets his mother, father, sister and brother in a dream where they are wearily tramping the dusty road. In the jaunty ‘Satellite Radio’ Earle is getting ready to play on the radio and wondering if anyone is listening. The gentler ‘Come Back Home’ is a tender and heartfelt plea to a lover to return. The album ends with a cover of Tom Waits’ ‘Way Down In A Hole’, which was used as the title song for Series 5 of the momentous TV series ‘The Wire’ about police and gangs in Baltimore. Earle has a smallish role in it as a recovering drug addict. Other favourite Earle albums for me are ‘El Corazon’ and ‘Terraplane’, rather than the more famous ‘Guitar Town’ and ‘Copperhead Road’ for example, but the number of outstanding tracks makes this album stand out from the pack.

Review (Uncut) : Like Tom Russell and Dave Alvin, Earle is a songwriter who sharpens with age. Recent albums “Jerusalem” (2002) and 2004’s “The Revolution Starts…Now” found him politically charged, tilting at Bush & Co. with undisguised revulsion. It was reflected in the music too, which was gruff, tetchy, raw. Now, a move to New York (Greenwich Village to be specific) has given Earle fresh impetus. Produced by Dust Brother John King at Electric Lady Studios, “Washington Square Serenade” feels far more personal. Layering acoustic and electric guitars over vaguely hip-hop beats, much of it sounds like Earle taking stock of his new home and nodding his approval. New York, he admits, was where he was always headed. Nashville just happened to get in the way. “Tennessee Blues” directly addresses his decision to quit Nashville two years ago. Set to bright guitar and skeletal beats, Earle growls “Sunset in my mirror / Pedal on the floor / Bound for New York City / And I won’t be back no more”. And why would you, when you’re nestled in a garden apartment on the street depicted on the sleeve of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”? Elsewhere, there’s a new thrust to most of the other songs too. “Satellite Radio”, bizarrely enough, begins like Portishead, then opens out into an improbable kind of folk rap that’s one of the best moments here. And with traditional Brazilian rhythms courtesy of Forro In The Dark, “City Of Immigrants” finds Earle plugging in to a new strain of urban tropicalia. Of course, this is hardly wholesale reinvention. Wife Alison Moorer duets on “Days Aren’t Long Enough”, while the country boy shines through on the banjo-heavy “Oxycontin Blues” and an old-timey “Jericho Road”. It’s all invigorating, wonderful stuff. Wherever he goes, Earle finds a rich seam of song to mine.