Shaking up the American dream

Steve Earle is a man out of step with his country. His new album, Jerusalem, is his most political yet and has already got him into trouble, he tells John Harris

As if to signal straight away that he is not your average blue-collar American troubadour, Steve Earle begins his morning at London's Grosvenor House Hotel by enthusing about the writings of Karl Marx. He had his first crack at reading Capital - "those three big fuckin' books" - when he was growing up in Schertz, near San Antonio, Texas. "Marx talked in analogies, the way Texans do," he says, with the merest hint of a smirk. "I'm sort of comfortable with that."

Earle, whose appearance has long since settled into an imposing mixture of beard and bulk, has been releasing records for 16 years, each one firmly on the borderline between country and rock. He has also carved out a beguiling myth, founded in some part on his drug-fuelled self-immolation and the four-year hiatus it caused between 1991 and 1995.

Since then, his politics have oozed into his interviews and on-stage pronouncements, but their place in his music has tended to be a matter of allusion and implication. Today, however, sees the British release of his most explicitly political album, Jerusalem, a collection of songs that together form an unsettling kind of State of the Union address.

Inevitably, September 11th and its aftermath are a subtext throughout, bubbling to the surface spectacularly on a song entitled John Walker's Blues, which sympathetically takes the point of view of John Walker Lindh, the lone American member of the Taliban.

News of the song reached the more hysterical corners of the US media in July, whereupon Earle was hurled to the lions. "Twisted ballad honours Tali-rat" was the headline in the New York Post, which roared that Earle had both "glorified" his subject and claimed he was "Jesus-like". Steve Gill, a radio host, said the song put Earle "in the same category as Jane Fonda, John Walker and all those people who hate America".

Earle wrote the song while on tour in Europe, in the company of his 20-year-old son, Justin. "That's my connection to John Walker Lindh," he says. "They're pretty much exactly the same age. And I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anybody's son. Nobody in my country wanted to admit that. It's one of the most American stories I've ever heard: he came to Islam by way of hip-hop, which I find fascinating. He was already looking outside his culture, like a lot of American kids are."

The song's opening verse makes the point: "I'm just an American boy, raised on MTV," Earle growls, in tones he says were modelled on Lindh's encounter with CNN. "And I've seen all those kids in the soda pop ads, and none of 'em looked like me/ So I started lookin' around for a light out of the dim/And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word/ Of Mohammed, peace be upon him."

Earle's contention is that far from being some aberrant Beelzebub, Lindh embodies a kind of alienation that many Americans would do well to understand. As things stand, unfortunately, that is hardly likely to happen. "Americans are very uncomfortable without a bogeyman," he says. "I grew up believing that if I ever met Nikita Khrushchev he would eat me, but we've been rudderless ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It became increasingly obvious to me that Walker was being set up as a warning to any American that got out of line while this war against the new bogeyman was being pursued. I was trying to humanise him, because everybody else was trying to vilify him."

Perhaps the song's most remarkable aspects are its nods to Islamic scripture. Its chorus, in Arabic, is a recitation of sura 47, verse 19 of the Koran: "There is no God but God." Earle also underlines the place of Christ in Islam, in the lines that have landed him in most trouble: "If I should die, I'll rise up to the sky/ Just like Jesus, peace be upon him." The words conjure up the image of Earle being chased out of his adopted home of Nashville like a deep south Salman Rushdie. "I knew how fundamentalist Christians would take it," he shrugs. "But it's a truth: an inflammatory truth, perhaps, but that's effective sometimes."

The genesis of Jerusalem says much about the problems that have bedevilled left-leaning Americans over the past year. The album's creation began with Amerika V 6.0 (The Best We Can Do), a song written for a movie entitled John Q. Directed by Nick Cassavetes, it told the story of a man who, determined that his son should have the heart transplant he needs, holds a surgeon hostage to get around the inadequacies of private healthcare. Earle delivered a snarling treatise on the sidelining of the American ideal by greed. The song was grafted on to the closing credits - until September 11th's after-effects made themselves felt.

"He \ finally admitted that the film's distributors had decided that it was too critical of the Bush administration," says Earle. "They couldn't include it in the film in this political climate, 'while we're at war'."

Encouraged by his record company, Artemis (whose boss, Danny Goldberg, is an American Civil Liberties Union activist), Earle decided to use the song as the mission statement for an entire album. Jerusalem thus grapples with such topics as the illegal immigrants from Mexico, the fall-out from Vietnam, the US penal system and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All of it is underpinned by the idea that since September 11th, the US has been politically sleepwalking.

The album's other abiding contention is reflected in a portentous, biblically phrased song entitled Ashes to Ashes, written in the wake of that most pivotal of days, which may represent an even more courageous conceit than John Walker's Blues. Its third verse has the line "Every tower ever built tumbles", using the World Trade Centre as a brutal metaphor for the idea that, as with all empires, the US's hegemony will eventually collapse.

"Nobody remains the most powerful country in the world forever," says Earle. "And the United States is making a huge mistake by carrying itself as if it's going to be . . . our grandchildren are going to pay for it."

Inevitably, in the context of other musicians' responses to September 11th, Jerusalem is an incongruous record. Back in Nashville, country radio is still hammering out Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), the chunk of boot-cut belligerence that managed to reach the top of the US singles chart. He and Earle probably live and work within a 20-minute drive of one another, yet they seem to occupy completely different worlds.

"That record embarrasses me," says Earle. "But I don't even think there's really a political component in it. It's like playing in Fort Worth and saying: 'We played Dallas last night, and it's sure good to be back in Texas.' It's pandering to an audience. But doing that in this atmosphere is dangerous. I have a fear that someone with dark skin and clothing different to what people wear in Tennessee might get hurt because of that song. It scares me. And it's really poorly written, apart from anything else."

On a slightly more rarefied plane, there is Bruce Springsteen's The Rising, the album that responds to last year's attacks with songs that combine mourning with a gritty optimism. "I think that album is Bruce doing what Bruce does really well," says Earle, in an uncharacteristic attack of rock luvviness. "He's empathising with the vast majority of the American people. Bruce isn't really a political writer - the record's very inclusive, which is totally okay."

You weren't disappointed that, in among the balm, he might have occasionally adopted a more challenging voice? "Well, his approach is absolutely necessary, too. We've got to heal. I am inflaming the situation, but then again, I'm much more prone to reacting politically and speaking in political terms."

The sleeve notes for Jerusalem were written in July. They show Earle's talent for prose; he is author of a recent collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses. The notes convey his sense of being at 90 degrees to most of his countrymen. "Lately," he writes, "I feel like the loneliest man in America."

In the ensuing months, he says, his sense of isolation was diminished - but now, with the prospect of war in Iraq, it has returned. At its core is the idea, surely familiar to any politicised musician, that his limited reach means he can't make the impact his beliefs demand.

"I'm only going to be effective with my audience," he says. "The Vietnam war only ended when 55,000 kids had been killed. We still weren't particularly concerned with the two million Vietnamese who died, but at that point we said 'Enough.' I just hope that people who grew up in my generation remember that . . . My only responsibility is not to not say something." - (Guardian Service)

Jerusalem is on the Sony label.