The Blue Note, NYC
Monday, March 12, 2007
Written by Rebecca Carter

Steve Earle has had a diverse career, recording in genres such as bluegrass, rockabilly and country. and has collaborated with musicians from Emmylou Harris to The Supersuckers. Earle’s current live performances have been stripped down to their simplistic form, consisting mainly of Earle and an acoustic guitar, allowing the artist’s powerful and often politically-driven lyrics to take center stage. There is possibly no more fitting and intimate a setting for this than Earle’s debut performance at New York City’s legendary Blue Note Jazz Club.

Earle opened his set with some of his older material: “Guitar Town,” “Hometown Blues” and “Goodbye,” all of which share similar themes of leaving home in favor of the road with a girl or two thrown in here and there for good measure. Always the vivid storyteller, it appeared that even the order of the songs was telling Earle’s personal story of the traveling musician who has come to settle just a few blocks from the Blue Note, which he described before going into “Steve’s Last Ramble.” Midway through the set he switched from acoustic guitar to mandolin for “The Galway Girl” before moving onto his more recent and blatantly political material. Earle’s wife and fellow musician Allison Moorer joined him onstage for Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” an antiwar protest song during which they excluded the “where have all the husbands gone” chorus to honor the women who are currently serving and dying in Iraq. The rest of the set followed suit with more antiwar, anti-current administration songs such as “Rich Man’s War,” “The Mountain,” “Jerusalem” and “John Walker’s Blues.”