Steve Earle is the epitome of Americana.
And since you can't spell that musical genre without using the word American, it's not a stretch to say he's the epitome of an American songwriter.
On his latest CD, Jerusalem," Earle's get his juice from the lineage of Woody Guthrie and his musical heir, Bob Dylan.
Like Bruce Springsteen, another performer who started out emulating Dylan and by extension Guthrie, Earle tells his tales without patriotic sugarcoating. Earle sings about a warts-and-all America. He doesn't shy away from brutal truths - he exposes them to the light of day. In doing so, he helps us cope with the post Sept. 11 world rather than hiding behind empty slogans and jingoistic anthems.
Jerusalem is not a record about Sept. 11. But it is marked by it. It's also marked by the fight for civil rights and the Vietnam War. As Earle writes in the liner notes, it is important to remember those who defended the principles of the Constitution "by insisting on asking the hardest questions in our darkest hours." Earle asks those questions.
With the 11 songs on Jerusalem, Earle joins the names he cites in the liner notes - Franklin, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.
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The songs on this disc are more upbeat than say, Springsteen's Nebraska, but they have a flinty precision both lyrically and instrumentally that gives each song an urgency that few, if any, musicians muster these days.
Earle covers a lot of ground in 11 songs. He articulates many points of view and gives voice to many constituencies - not just John Walker Lindh, as he does on the already infamous "John Walker's Blues. He gives voice to mainstreamed '60s radicals, conspiracy theorists and the disillusioned of all creeds and social classes.
While "John Walker's Blues" is evocative, it's hardly the high point of the album. The song is emotional, but not nearly as powerful as the album opener, "Ashes to Ashes," "The Truth" (in which Earle embodies an introspective jailed man) or the title track.
Earle really hits his stride on these songs, as he does with the Tex-Mex flavored "What's A Simple Man To Do?" and the free-swinging "Go Amanda."
In the end, "Jerusalem is not a classic disc because of Earle's personal views. It's a classic because it takes the essence of the time it was created - the first unstable year of the 21st century - and distills it into 11 finely crafted pieces of songwriting.
Like Guthrie, Dylan and Neil Young, Steve Earle puts his fingers on the pulse of our times and then translates the beat into music that moves, lyrics that touch and emotions that sing over the cacophony of American pop culture.
