New West Records

Steve Earle is no stranger to the blues. He grew up hearing them in Texas – numbed-solid in the double-barreled presence of legends Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins at an early age. He began playing the blues in his teens, chumming with the brilliant/tragic Townes Van Zandt. And he’s had a knack for living the blues – from a junk habit he beat 20 years ago (jail helps) before it nearly cost him everything to a string of marriages and subsequent divorces.

Yeah, the blues have pretty much always been there for Steve Earle – an old skull-faced friend riding shotgun, Lucky clamped in perpetually-grinning yellowed teeth – but he’s always used them mostly as a flavoring for his music while often including a true blues number or two on his albums since 1986’s Guitar Town.

Terraplane changes all that.

Terraplane is the blues, baby – and if you need to slap a label on it, simply call them Steve Earle’s blues. That’ll do it.

The album’s cover sets the stage well, crediting the music within to Earle and his band The Dukes. It’s an honest call: if Earle dipped his pen into his heart, soul and mind to come up with the seeds of these tunes, it’s the combined force of The Dukes that gets the job done. Earle’s longtime rhythm team of bassist Kelly Looney and drummer Will Rigby fly off Earle’s wingtip as one, doling out cool-daddy shuffle just as easily as they lay down a freaked-out heartbeat. Guitarist Chris Masterson lets loose with an array of sounds that range from cool-daddy burble to straight-outta-Hell-itself roar. And Masterson’s wife Eleanor Whitmore adds unique (and spot-on) dimensions to the album’s eleven cuts with her fiddle and vocals.

And the five of them play the blues as if their lives depended on it.

Terraplane offers up Steve Earle’s blues in all sorts of flavors:

“Go Go Boots Are Back” is a rocker, dosed with grease, gristle and grit; “Baby Baby Baby (Baby)” is all swagger and harpsquawk; add some scratches and pops to “Baby’s Just As Mean As Me” and you could easily believe it was a long-lost Mothers’ Best Flour radio show; “You’re The Best Lover That I Ever Had” juxtaposes a bouncy acoustic guitar riff against some smoky-tone slide. “Acquainted With The Wind” brilliantly blends mandolin sweetness with Whitmore’s electrified fiddle (I’ll have my wail with some bristles on it, barkeep) and Masterson’s perfectly-pompadoured-and-duck’s-assed solo.

There’s the yin/yang of the back-to-back “Ain’t Nobody’s Daddy Now” and “Better Off Alone” – the former bops down the sidewalk, bouncing on the soles of his white bucks and swinging a watch on a chain, letting the world know:

I’m free
Can’t nobody tie me down
Nothin’ ever worries me
Aint nobody’s daddy now

But then the sun goes down and the late-night soul-search of “Better Off Alone” sets in. Whitmore’s long, slow fiddle drones and Masterson’s pure-toned guitar convey whatever ache the lyrics might not. It’s almost as tough to witness as it is lovely.

And then there’s the “Tennessee Kid” – Steve Earle’s version of the oft-told scenario of a mortal squaring-off against the Devil hisself, coming to collect on a debt owed. Yeah, you’ve heard the basic tale before, but you’ve never heard a fiddle roar like this (a razor-sharp bow drawn across your backbone) or a guitar quite this frightening (Masterson goes to a scary place that John Fogerty only hinted at in “Run Through The Jungle”). Looney and Rigby lay down an ominous “Spirit In The Sky” groove for the main body of the song while Earle growls out the Tennessee Kid’s last moments. Lord, lord …

You can dig into Terraplane as deeply as you want to, looking for Earle’s thoughts and feelings concerning the end of his marriage to Allison Moorer last year, but this isn’t People Magazine, folks. This is the blues.

They might be Steve Earle’s … but they’re yours, as well.

Enjoy.

*****

Brian Robbins works on his pompadour over at www.brian-robbins.com.