Making classic bluegrass records and railing against the death penalty don t often make for easy bedfellows. But then again Steve Earle s always defied the stereotype that s dogged denizens south of the Mason Dixon line.

Five albums in five years ain t bad for an ex-con, ex-junkie and ex-husband to numerous women.
He s grown up a lot in the last few years. Gone is the motorcycle emptiness of Copperhead Road. These days Steve Earle s singing Transcendental Blues, like he s got reasons to be cheerful.
These days Steve Earle s resumi encompasses a heck of a lot more than songwriting. With a collection of short stories (Doghouse Roses) due for publication in Spring 2001, and his stewardship of a new theatre company (in cahoots with Sara, his partner) called The Broad Axe prompting him in the direction of playwriting, Steve Earle s hardly going to be visiting the dole office in the near future.
You probably won t see me quite as quickly again after this (tour), he avers. I m not taking a break. I m concentrating on writing prose and poetry for a while.
But while he s quick to cite the similarities between prose and songwriting, Earle hints that embarking on poetry writing is a dance of an entirely different rhythm.
Writing poetry is really hard and really different. I don t write poetic songs that much, he insists. My songs are usually narrative, but when I write something like My Old Friend The Blues or Valentine s Day , I was always much prouder of those than I was of Dixieland songs. You know there was a time when I limited myself, when I thought I was only good for writing songs but a lot of that was because I only have an eighth grade education, and I thought I couldn t do it. But then I got clean and suddenly I didn t have to find $500 worth of dope when I woke up in the morning. So I found I had a lot of energy and a lot of time!
Making no bones of the fact that Transcendental Blues unashamedly chronicles his latest relationship intimately, Earle figures that hanging their laundry out for the world to scrutinise doesn t have to be cringe-inducing.
When Sara and I listened to the album, we realised that this song cycle of our relationship had emerged. And that s kinda interesting, but it doesn t have to be a negative thing.
Transcendental Blues is as introspective an album as you ll encounter this side of a yoga session. Remarkably its lyric sheet and sleeve notes reflect a songwriter who s matured dramatically, someone who s no longer running to stand still.
I find that for me, for now, transcendence is about being still enough long enough to know when it s time to move on, Earle declares in the sleeve notes. He adds later: this relationship is different to anything else I ve ever had in my life. I write differently. I work differently. I m a different parent than I ve ever been before.
And his list goes on. Earle has just finished a two-month teaching job in the Old Town Folk School in Chicago, a job he took mostly so that he could spend some time with his eldest son, Justin. It seems like Steve Earle s priorities are changing fundamentally these days.
One thing that hasn t changed though and that s Earle s passionate political stance against the death penalty. His theatrical debut as a playwright will be titled Carla after Carla Fay Tucker, the first woman to be executed in Texas in 100 years. Add to that his impassioned pleas for the banning of land mines and his full-frontal support for the protesters jailed during the World Trade Organisation demonstrations in Seattle late last year and it s clear that Steve Earle s passion hasn t waned, his heart hasn t faltered and his spirit is still in the right place.
Earle and the Dukes are embarking on a European tour next August though he hasn t quite filled his dance card with Irish dates yet. Still, he s in no doubt about the need to expand his itinerary beyond the Pale this time round.
We want to play 4 gigs this time round, he declares, and I have been reliably informed by a Galway woman that the word lynching did originate over there, so I guess that doesn t leave me with much choice really, does it?!
Steve Earle s latest album, Transcendental Blues is distributed by Sony Records