Justin Townes Earle, opening for Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson, live in Fargo, North Dakota, June 18, 2009.
Download the audio of the entire show.
Or, watch this clip on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Uxis9CxEY
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Hopefully you know how great Leeroy Stagger is by now. The good-hearted faithful got an up-close and personal idea just how great he is at The Studome on Saturday June 13, when we saw an amazing, intimate house concert. We’ve known for a long time that Leeroy was bound for greatness, and every indication is that he’s arrived. With the best album of this year, and a top-notch band in tow, Leeroy showed that he’s every bit as good as anyone else, and more. If you missed out, shame on you, but here’s a little taste of what we heard. It’s roughly edited and I missed the first song (my favourite… Red Bandana), but I’m not going to sit on it any longer. Check it out and I guarantee you’ll enjoy. Check it out: http://www.tellthebandtogohome.com/Leeroy.zip.
Fred Eaglesmith will be performing at Shooters in Kenora on June 30th.
In live performance, Eaglesmith brings to mind both Neil Young’s raucous splendor with Crazy Horse and the tender beauty of Young’s acoustic numbers. This summer he embarks on a tour across Canada with his band including annual stops to host his upcoming Roots on the River festival in Vermont (June 11-14) and annual Charity Picnic in Aylmer, Ontario near his home town.
Media outlets have proclaimed his live performances:
“If you’re missing out on Eaglesmith, you’re really missing out: since he left the family farm in his teens and struck out on his troubadour’s path, he’s been prolific and sharp.” (The New Yorker, August 2008)
“Fred Eaglesmith released a self-titled debut album nearly 30 years ago and has won over a strong audience with his country-ish folk rock songs that are sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and always richly detailed. In concerts his between-song banter is worth the price of admission.” (Houston Chronicle, October 2008)
“A prolific singer/songwriter often hailed as a genius at his craft.” (Arizona Daily Star, February 2009)
“His cantankerous, bone-dry humor well tempered weighty stories wrestling hardship with heart. Eaglesmith and his combustible trio fueled new material – particularly the haunted hymnals ‘I Pray Now,’ ‘Fancy God’ and ‘Get on Your Knees’ – with a zealot’s urgency.” (Austin American Statesman, February 2009)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FRED EAGLESMITH NOMINATED FOR JUNO AWARD FOR TINDERBOX
Critically Heralded Album Up for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo
(Los Angeles) Acclaimed and award-winning singer-songwriter Fred Eaglesmith has been nominated for yet another honor in his distinguished nearly-four decade recording career: a Juno Award — the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy — for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo for his 17th album, Tinderbox. The nomination is Eaglesmith’s third time up for a prestigious Juno, which he won in 1997 in the same category for his album Drive-In Movie.
Tinderbox continues to garner critical praise since it was released in May of last year, and was cited on a number of year-end Top 10 lists. San Jose Metro recently hailed it as “one of the best albums of last year.” And the Santa Barbara News Press just named it as “one of the more intriguing albums of the last year… with its hypnotic array of swampy grooves, obsessive refrains, hymns and hollers.”
The CD has been described as an “alternative gospel” album, but Eaglesmith points out that “it’s not a gospel record. This is actually tearing the whole thing [religion] apart and having a look at every bit of it. I was raised in a religious background and we weren’t allowed to question. This album asks every question.”
The Santa Barbara News Press says that Tinderbox sounds “like a field recording from the alternative world of rural Pentecostalism mixed with the artful theatricality and gruff timbres of Tom Waits.” Metro describes it as “Something on the order of Eaglesmith jamming with Tom Waits on a 1930s chain gang full of bluesmen, it’s spooky and dark, with a hint of the metaphysical.”
Tinderbox has already been heralded as a “masterwork” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “exceptional” (Americana Roots), and “beautiful” (Ink 19). The New Yorker says, “Imagine a duet record from Tom Waits and Woody Guthrie,” declaring, “if you’re missing out on Eaglesmith… you’re really missing out.”
Working outside the pop music radar, Eaglesmith had forged one of the most unique and eminent careers in contemporary music. His previous 16 releases have won him comparisons to such major talents as Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, T Bone Burnett and Steve Earle. His songs have been recorded by fellow artists like superstar Toby Keith — who covered Eaglesmith’s “White Rose” on his recent hit album Big Dog Daddy and included his recording of “Thinking ‘Bout You” in the movie “Broken Bridges” and on its soundtrack album — The Cowboy Junkies, Kasey Chambers, Mary Gauthier, Ralph Stanley II, Dar Williams and Todd Snider, and he is the subject of a tribute album by other fellow songwriters. His has also scored a #1 bluegrass song with James King’s recording of his “Thirty Years of Farming.”
Eaglesmith boasts such a fervent coterie of fans that he hosts a number of annual music festivals such as Roots on the River every summer in Vermont; the Fred Eaglesmith Texas Weekend each spring at Gruene Hall, the mother church of the Texas roots music scene; and last year two Roots on the Rail rolling music fests along both historic narrow-gauge railroads through the American West and another into the Canadian arctic. Martin Scorsese and James Caan have used his music is their film projects, and his songs are even included in the course curriculum of two colleges.
Tinderbox was already in consideration for Canada’s Polaris Prize, which is awarded for musical artistic merit. And odds-makers agree with the Guelph Mercury, which suggested in its rave review of Tinderbox that Eaglesmith “better get his tux dry-cleaned in preparation for all the award shows he’ll be attending.”
Fred Eaglesmith tour dates:
5/1 Victoria Playhouse Petrolia, ON
5/2 Bayfield Town Hall Bayfield, ON
5/8 Red Onion Saloon Skagway AK
5/9 Alaska Barn Dance Haines AK
5/10 Resurrection Luthern Church Juneau AK
5/13 St Elias Convention Center Haines Jct, YT
5/14 Yukon Arts Center Whitehorse, YT
5/15 Palace Grande Dawson City, YT
5/21 Tractor Tavern Seattle , WA
5/22 Green Frog Acoustic Tavern Bellingham WA
5/24 Papa G’s Portland, OR
5/25 Harmony House Concerts Sisters, OR
6/6 McGinty’s Meaford, ON
6/11-14 Roots on the River Festival, Bellows Falls, VT
6/16 Kennebecasis Valley High School Quispamsis, NB
6/17 Marigold Cultural Center
6/18 Parkside Pub Dartmouth, NS
6/19 Membertou Trade & Convention Center Syndey NS
6/20 King’s Theatre Annapolis Royal, NS
6/23 Petit Campus Montreal, QC
6/24 The Black Sheep Inn/La Mouton Noir Wakefield, QC
6/25 Tweedsmuir Hotel Tweed, ON
6/26 The Beef n Bird Sudbury, ON
6/27 Speak Easy Pub Sault Ste Marie, ON
6/28 Finlandia Club Thunder Bay, ON
6/30 Shooters Kenora, ON
7/2–5 Dauphin Country Fest Dauphin, MB
7/9 Moose Jaw Cultural Center Moose Jaw, SK
7/10 The Palomino Calgary, AB
7/11 Pembina River Nights Evansburg, AB
7/12 Auditorium Hotel Nanton, AB
7/14 Grandview Stage Resort Rocky Mountain AB
7/15 The Max Drayton Valley, AB
7/16 BJ’s Cue Club Grand Prairie, AB
7/18 The Players Club Camrose, AB
7/21 The Royal Nelson, BC
7/22 Caravan Farm Theater Armtrong, BC
7/23 The Dream Café Penticton, BC
7/24 Creekside Theatre Winfield, BC
7/26 Island Folk Festival Duncan, BC
7/30 Element Victoria, BC
7/31 Mayne Island Agricultural Hall Mayne Island, BC
8/1 Filberg Festival Comox, BC
8/2 St James Hall Vancouver, BC
8/3 Pynelogs Cultural Center Invermere, BC
8/7 Interplay Festival Fort McMurray, AB
8/8 – 9 Edmonton Folk Festival Edmonton, AB
8/14 – 16 15 Annual Fred Eaglesmith Charity Picnic Aylmer, ON
8/23 Music at Fieldscote Ancaster, ON
8/26 Hugh’s Room Toronto, ON
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Last night Leeroy Stagger & The Wildflowers rocked the Studome and we heard some moments from that great show. This week promises more great moments, as The Red River Ex is in town, and bringing some good music with it. Also this week, we take a road trip to Fargo for Justin Townes Earle, Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson! Lots to enjoy and look forward to.
text copied from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jambase/~3/ie7enbBdLLk/headsup.asp
The Monsters. Monsters of Folk – comprised of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and M. Ward – will be releasing their first collaborative album on September 22. The self-titled effort was recorded in Malibu, CA and Omaha, NE, and produced by Mogis. Although these critically acclaimed artists have shared the stage before, this album marks their first recorded output as a band.
Monsters of Folk began as folklore of sorts, when James, Oberst, Ward and Mogis did their first run of shows together in 2004. Like the musical revue shows that went town to town when rock ‘n’ roll was newly born, the tour was called “An Evening With: Bright Eyes, Jim James and M. Ward,” although amongst friends and crew, it became affectionately known as the “Monsters of Folk Tour.” While entertaining audiences coast to coast with gorgeous acoustic melodies and world-weary tales, the foursome vowed to make their way to a studio at some point after the tour’s completion. Instead, the songsmiths went on to individually release some of rock music’s most exciting albums of the last five years – Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Cassadaga; My Morning Jacket’s Z and Evil Urges; M. Ward’s Post War and Hold Time. Never ones to forget their promises, when downtime presented itself, they convened in the studio multiple times over two years, with Mogis at the helm of their first recorded effort.
All four members play every instrument on the album, supplying everything from drum fills to cascading backing vocals. The songs – some road-worn fables, some intimate and intricate with electronic elements, some woozy and sun-soaked – are everything one might expect from these four musical minds collaborating together.
Track Listing:
1. Dear God (sincerely M.O.F.)
2. Say Please
3. Whole Lotta Losin’
4. Temazcal
5. The Right Place
6. Baby Boomer
7. Man Named Truth
8. Goodway
9. Ahead of the Curve
10. Slow Down Jo
11. Losin Yo Head
12. Magic Marker
13. Map Of The World
14. The Sandman, the Brakeman and Me
15. His Master’s Voice
CFMA Committee Announces
The Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Canadian Folk Music Awards
and Call for Submissions
Please visit the CFMA media web site at www.folkawards.ca/media
The Canadian Folk Music Awards celebrates its fifth anniversary this year by returning home to the National Capital Region.
The 2009 CFMA ceremony will take place Saturday, November 21st, 2009 in the theatre at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, QC. By popular demand, Shelagh Rogers of CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter and Benoit Bourque of the legendary Quebecois group La Bottine Souriante will return to host the bilingual ceremony. Performers will be announced later this summer. Awards will be handed out in 19 categories, ranging from Traditional Album and Contemporary Album of the Year to Pushing the Boundaries and Young Performer of the Year.
The Canadian Folk Music Awards were founded in 2005, in response to rumours that the Junos intended to cut one of their Roots and Traditional categories. The gala has quickly become Canadian folk music’s biggest night of the year. The awards recognize Canada’s outstanding writers, producers and performers of folk music, and the artists who are expanding the genre in innovative and exciting ways. While the Junos pay homage to Canada’s pop music success stories, the CFMAs celebrate the magnificent diversity of Canada’s musical heritage – from the musical traditions of Aboriginal Canada to Celtic, Acadian and traditional Quebecois styles, singer-songwriter music, blues, bluegrass and old-tyme country and the myriad of global traditions brought to Canada by each new wave of immigration. What’s more, the CFMAs provide an opportunity to draw Canadians’ attention to the depth and breadth of folk music in Canada.
Past Canadian Folk Music Award winners include established artists like Luke Doucet, Corb Lund, Alpha Yaya Diallo, Harry Manx, Oh Susanna, David Francey and Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, and up-and-comers like T. Nile, Kyrie Kristmanson, Brigitte Saint-Aubin and Sarah Noni Metzner.
Call for Submissions
Submissions are now being accepted for the 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards. Canadian folk, roots and world artists who released recordings between June 15, 2008 and June 14, 2009 are eligible to submit.
The deadline for receipt of submissions at the CFMA office is Friday, July 3, 2009. Forms and eligibility guidelines can be found on the CFMA web site at http://www.folkawards.ca.
Nominees will be announced October 7, 2009 at a media conference in the capital.
The full list of categories is as follows:
· Traditional Album of the Year
· Contemporary Album of the Year
· Children’s Album of the Year
· Traditional Singer of the Year
· Contemporary Singer of the Year
· Instrumental Solo Artist of the Year
· Instrumental Group of the Year
· Vocal Group of the Year
· Ensemble of the Year
· Solo Artist of the Year
· English Songwriter of the Year
· French Songwriter of the Year
· Aboriginal Songwriter of the Year
· World Solo Artist of the Year
· World Group of the Year
· New/Emerging Artist of the Year
· Producer of the Year
· Pushing the Boundaries
· Young Performer of the Year
Featuring a talk with Leeroy Stagger about his fabulous new album, Everything Is Real and his cozy upcoming show. We just had to hear a bunch of his great songs from his already impressive career. Also coming up this week is the CD release/bake sale for Winnipeg’s own Western States at WECC, so a couple from them. And, a ton of great new music that’s come in recently.
We’re hoping to chat with Leeroy Stagger today, although he’s on the road in the mountains of BC, so we’re not at all sure it’ll work, but we’re going to try. If it doesn’t work out today, we’ll try again on Thursday. Of course, Leeroy and his band will be in Winnipeg on Saturday, June 13 for a very exclusive engagement at The StuDome. Should be an amazing show. In case you haven’t been keeping up with the blog or the show (shame on you!), Leeroy has an AMAZING new album called “Everything Is Real” which I’ve already called Album of the Year. If you haven’t got your copy yet, hopefully you’ll pick one up on Saturday, or, if you’re really, really lucky, you might even win one on today’s Tell the Band to Go Home! Tune in, 2-4 pm central on 101.5 UMFM in Winnipeg or at http://www.umfm.com to listen live online around the world.
Changes Coming to the Folk Grammys
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (June 3, 2009) — Due to the increasing growth of traditional music, The Academy has split the category Best Contemporary Folk/Americana into two categories: Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Americana Album. Additionally, the Folk Field has been renamed American Roots Music, which will now include the Best Traditional Blues Album, Best Contemporary Blues Album and Best Bluegrass Album categories. In the Latin Field, the Best Latin Urban Album will now be combined with Latin Rock or Alternative into Best Latin Rock, Alternative Or Urban Album. To ensure the Awards process remains representative of the current musical landscape, the Best Polka Album has been eliminated, which brings the total number of GRAMMY categories to 109.
For more info, and a complete listing of Grammy categories, check
out: www.grammys.com
Freeing a Mentor From His Mythology
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
Published: May 7, 2009
WOODSTOCK, N.Y.
SINCE he released his first album in 1968, and especially since his death in 1997, the country songwriter Townes Van Zandt has been a prototypical cult figure. Though his songs have been recorded by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and the Cowboy Junkies, Van Zandt never sold many records himself, and he battled addiction and depression for decades. His songs, at once lyrical and unsentimental, depicted love, and life itself, as experiences to be enjoyed free from all (inevitably disappointed) expectations. In the world of alternative country and beyond, to announce yourself as one of Van Zandt’s fans helps establish your critical discernment — and, by implication, indicts an undiscerning public that allowed a genius to die essentially unknown.
The singer-songwriter Steve Earle is having none of that. Something of a cult figure himself, he was Van Zandt’s protégé and remains one of his most ardent champions. But he is not interested in sustaining the myth of Van Zandt as a beautiful loser. “When somebody’s as good as Townes Van Zandt was and more people don’t know about it, it’s Townes’s fault,” Mr. Earle said at his home here. “For whatever reasons, he shot himself in the foot every damn chance he got. ”
Mr. Earle has put himself in a tough emotional spot. Recording “Townes” (New West), an album of songs by Van Zandt set for release on Tuesday, forced him to confront the tangled history he shared with his idol. After all, Mr. Earle is one reason why the adjective “legendary” clings to Van Zandt as if it were his first name. On a promotional sticker on one of Van Zandt’s albums Mr. Earle declared, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”
That statement embarrasses Mr. Earle today. “Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan?” he asked wearily. “No.” For Mr. Earle, Van Zandt was both an inspiring and bedeviling model, a man who put his art above all other considerations but who sometimes seemed to regard success itself as inherently compromising. Though far from a superstar, Mr. Earle has earned two gold albums and two Grammy Awards, and he views such recognition as a valuable reward for hard work. “I don’t think Townes was a victim,” Mr. Earle stated. “Part of him didn’t consider himself worthy of anything.”
In a way, however, Van Zandt’s reward was the legend that followers like Mr. Earle helped foster. To this day he is the subject of tales that are told and retold, embellished and laughed over, whenever anyone who met him has a willing audience. There was the time, for example, when Van Zandt, frustrated that Mr. Earle was fooling with a .357 Magnum during a get-together, picked up a pistol himself, put a couple of bullets in the chamber and spun it around, pointed the gun at his own head and pulled the trigger twice. The gun didn’t fire, but Van Zandt had made his point about bravado.
Such stories established Van Zandt as a doomed romantic figure. Throughout his life he wandered among Tennessee, Colorado and his home state of Texas, often calling no particular place his home. His live performances could be riveting. On good nights he seemed to disappear into chronicles of existential joy and agony like “To Live Is to Fly,” “Waiting ’Round to Die” and “Tower Song,” gently delivering irreducible truths summed up in lines like, “Everything is not enough/And nothing is too much to bear.” On bad nights he would fall off his stool onstage, too drunk or high to get through a set.
With “Townes” Mr. Earle attempts both to pay a debt and to extricate his idol’s songs from the mythology surrounding his life. Mr. Earle, who first made his mark in the 1980s with smart country-rock albums like “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road,” has endured devastating struggles with addiction, was jailed for drugs and weapons possession and nearly died. The romance of Van Zandt’s problems long ago lost whatever allure they may once have had for him.
Mr. Earle’s house here, which he purchased last year with his wife, the country singer Allison Moorer, includes a sleek electric wine cooler left by the previous owners. Mr. Earle displays it prominently by the counter in his kitchen. You won’t be served a hard drink here. Bottles of seltzer and diet soda stock the cooler. Mr. Earle’s rule is that if you bring an alcoholic beverage into the house, you must carry the container out when you leave. “I don’t underestimate my disease,” he said.
The years between 1990 and 1994 that Mr. Earle essentially lost to heroin and crack cocaine constituted a “vacation in the ghetto,” as he has described it, during which he gradually abandoned writing, recording and even playing. That unproductive period has instilled a ferocious work ethic in him. “Townes” is the ninth studio album he has released since he sobered up and got out of jail in late 1994. He has also published a collection of short stories, written and produced a play, performed hundreds of shows, produced albums by other artists and become an outspoken political activist.
He’s now finishing a novel called “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” which is loosely based on the life of Hank Williams. The urge to complete that book, which he has intermittently been working on for eight years, led indirectly to the “Townes” project. “I’ve talked about doing it for a long time,” he said about recording an album of Van Zandt’s material, “and since I didn’t have to write the songs, I thought I could make this record, turn it in and then finish the book.”
The duality of that motivation — expediency partnering neatly with heartfelt desire — suggests some of the complexity of Mr. Earle’s relationship with Van Zandt. Mr. Earle, who was raised in Texas, moved to Nashville and now primarily lives in Greenwich Village, first met Van Zandt in the early 1970s. At the time Van Zandt was the leading light on a Texas music scene that floated between Austin and Houston on a sea of alcohol, drugs and artistic conviction. Now 54, Mr. Earle was a teenager at the time, and Van Zandt was roughly a decade older. Mr. Earle was a well-read high school dropout who believed that in the wake of the Beatles and Bob Dylan it was possible to create songs that might be “literature that you can consume while driving in your car,” as he said at a recent event. Van Zandt’s hard-bitten, eloquent songs lived up to that standard and he was near at hand.
“I met him at his absolute peak artistically,” Mr. Earle recalled. “He had a really horrible reputation because of his behavior, but I also knew that he had made a decision to write songs at a certain level, that how good the songs were was primarily important to him. I committed to making art whether I ever got rich or not by Townes’s example.”
To all but a handful of his closest friends Van Zandt was a remote, elusive figure, apt to disappear and turn up with equal unpredictability. As mentor to Mr. Earle he was hardly a steady, guiding hand, and he was much too stoic to dispense sage advice about songwriting or anything else. The premise of their relationship was something like, if I didn’t think you were good enough to do it yourself, you wouldn’t be here. He did, however, recommend that Mr. Earle always put the top back on the bottle so that the alcohol wouldn’t spill when it inevitably got kicked over and, when injecting drugs, to use clean needles every time.
He also instructed Mr. Earle to read “War and Peace,” though Van Zandt had not read the book himself, as Mr. Earle discovered to his surprise when he dutifully returned with questions about it. “I just thought you
should,” Van Zandt idly told him.
Beyond that, like so many protégés, Mr. Earle was expected to reflect well on, but certainly not to exceed, the master, as he eventually did, at least in terms of commercial success and visibility. To this day Mr. Earle retains an eager, puppyish quality that the softer side of Van Zandt could enjoy. In his cool detachment, though, Van Zandt also understood that withholding his approval would always bring an admiring Mr. Earle back for more. Distance can breed desire, and perhaps Mr. Earle took his mentor’s remove as a challenge; in any case being part of Van Zandt’s circle was important validation for Mr. Earle.
“As in a lot of these kinds of relationships, the hero is the tor-mentor,” said Justin Townes Earle, Mr. Earle’s oldest son and a recording artist in his own right. The origins of his middle name are obvious. “From the day my father met Townes, Townes tortured him,” he continued, alluding to how Van Zandt mercilessly heckled his father from the audience the first time he saw him perform, repeatedly insisting that he play “The Wabash Cannonball.” “Then he became the noogie songwriter who put my dad in a headlock.” Justin suggested that his father may be irked “that Townes never said to him, ‘Great record.’ ”
“Maybe he did,” he added, “but I think if he had, my dad would have told me.”
“Townes will always be bigger than life in his head,” the younger Earle concluded. Steve Earle admitted that Van Zandt never really saw him as an adult. “I was the kid,” he said. “I understand that, and I’m cool with it. But he could be brutal with me. ”
The two men saw each other infrequently after Mr. Earle’s descent into the drug underworld, though Van Zandt once visited him in the depths of his addiction at the request of mutual friends. “I must be in trouble if they’re sending you,” Mr. Earle remarked. Once Mr. Earle became sober, he began recording and touring with a vengeance, and Van Zandt continued his peripatetic ways. But they remained friends, even performing together at a Nashville benefit in 1995. When Van Zandt died of a heart attack at 52, Mr. Earle wrote the ballad “Fort Worth Blues” for him on his album “El Corazón.” “See you when I get there maestro,” reads Mr. Earle’s dedication.
So, given that complicated emotional history, how effective a tribute is “Townes”? In a sense it is the Townes Van Zandt album that Van Zandt couldn’t or wouldn’t make himself, but should have. With rare exceptions, most notably “Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas,” Van Zandt’s overproduced recorded work betrays the extraordinary quality of his songwriting. Mr. Earle sought to remedy that.
“It is a form of channeling at its best,” said Mr. Earle, who recorded most of the album in his Greenwich Village apartment. “What I tried to do is sit in a room by myself for 12 of the 15 tracks and play them as close to the way I remember him playing them.” Van Zandt classics like “Pancho and Lefty,” “To Live Is to Fly” and “No Place to Fall” sit comfortably next to worthy, if lesser known, songs like “(Quicksilver Dreams of) Maria” and “Where I Lead Me.”
Completing a generational journey, Mr. Earle and his son Justin duet on “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” the dense, troubled gambling story-song that Mr. Earle performed nearly 30 years ago to impress Van Zandt the first time he saw Mr. Earle perform. Like the album itself, it’s a tribute that demands respect from its subject.
“Townes’s inability to promote himself and put his dukes up for his own art failed him over and over again,” Mr. Earle said. “But none of us is whole. We all do some things better than others. As a songwriter, you won’t find anybody better. I hope this record will make it a little more apparent just how good these songs are.