A Liberal Patriot
An Interview With Steve Earle
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior editor for TomPaine.com.
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Steve Earle is one of America’s most-accomplished singer-songwriters. Throughout his career, Earle has written songs with political slants, but speaking of his newest record, “Jerusalem,” he says, “This is a political record because there seems to be no other proper response to the place we’re at.” Earle was interviewed by TomPaine.com’s Steven Rosenfeld about the CD and the current political landscape.
TomPaine.com: You’ve written political songs before and have taken public stands, opposing the death penalty, for instance. But your new CD, “Jerusalem,” takes this to a new level. You criticize the arrogance of U.S. power, question the explanations given by our political leaders for domestic and international crises, and point out that our nation is underachieving on social issues. This is sharp and timely political criticism, which I think is rare in protest music.
Steve Earle: I think saying it’s a protest record, you know, well, it is a political record. And my politics are a little different than most of the politics that you hear about, right now, in this climate.
I subscribe to the Pete Seeger theory that all music is political. Lullabies are political to babies. There’s always a point of view in what I do. I am worried. I’m worried about civil liberties, and I’m worried about racism in this climate. I’m worried about this climate bringing out the worst in all of us instead of the best.
TP.c: Well, what prompted you to make this recording? I understand your label’s owner, Danny Goldberg, asked you to think about making a political record before 9/11?
Earle: Danny Goldberg said, ‘You know what, I don’t want to tell you how to make records, but, you should make an overtly political record.’ This is before the 11th. And at the time, I didn’t really take it all that seriously. I didn’t even know whether I wanted to do that. And then the 11th happened, and more for me and Danny and the common ground that we have politically, is the reaction to 9/11 –- which was everyone being terrified to say anything in any way critical of this administration or of the government or the military, because, we were, quote, at war.
I just started seeing something that I’d seen before -– that I grew up with, and that was the suggestion that it was unpatriotic to question where our leaders are taking us. The bottom line is that that’s never ever unpatriotic. In fact, it’s the opposite of unpatriotic.
TP.c: Well, what’s changed the most about the country for you, since 9/11?
Earle: What’s changed the most is people’s willingness to surrender their civil liberties. It’s been sort of shocking. It shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does, because it has happened before. But we are so afraid of whatever, and I think that we’ve become – we don’t question what our government feeds us.
And unfortunately, this administration is feeding us, because of an agenda of their own that existed before 9/11, I think they are feeding us a lot of racism and a lot of divisive ideas about Islam -– because they want to go into Iraq. They were going into Iraq before, and if they keep this attitude of ‘We’re America and we can do whatever we want to and ‘Fuck Europe’ and ‘Fuck Everybody,’’ they will go into Iraq yet. I hope that something changes about this administration and they listen to the rest of the world and it matters to them what the rest of the world thinks of us. I don’t see anything in their track record, so far, that makes me particularly optimistic about that.
TP.c: Then why aren’t more Americans critical of this administration?
Earle: There’s a lot of PR that we believe about ourselves, as a people. Some of us know it’s not true and in recent years we’ve [the country] subscribed to it. This wasn’t a country born of a people’s revolution. It was a country born of a revolution of rich farmers that didn’t want to pay their taxes -– and we’re still kind of that.
But we sort of inadvertently created this thing that’s bigger than we are. And that’s our Constitution. It’s taken a battering. It’s been abused. But the main parts of it still hold up in this amazing sort of way. And it survived the ‘60s. It survived Watergate, to a certain extent, and I think it’s under attack again.
TP.c: Do you think there’s reason to be optimistic, or is that naive?
Earle: I think there’s reason to be optimistic, but I think a lot of bad things are going to happen before things turn around. I have to be optimistic. This is the only planet I’ve got -– and I want to be able to tell my kids that it’s gonna be alright. And it’s gonna be alright if they make it.
If anything good can come out of 9/11, it’s that eventually, we may learn from it. Right now we’re not interpreting it that way. But I still have hope that eventually we’ll realize that we are citizens of a larger place, of the world.
(To hear Steve Earle talk about the lyrics and issues behind four songs from "Jerusalem," click here for www.BehindTheBeat.net's sound portraits).
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Published: Sep 10 2002
