Kurt Andersen: Steve Earle, welcome to Studio360

Steve Earle: How are you?

KA: Good. Is there one song, on this album “The Revolution Starts Now,” that is getting the most reaction- positive, negative?

SE: Well, my first experience with the reaction from it was playing a few of the songs live and you know I started playing “Rich Man's War”, and it was pretty phenomenal, every single place I played it, we were dealing with audiences that had never heard the song before as soon as I got to the chorus, you know, it was like the whole place would just explode. And that's, that's, in my job that makes you feel pretty good. That's kind of what its all about.

KA: Can we hear it?

SE: Absolutely. (Sings song)

KA: Now with these political songs, do you expect to, make people angry, make people inspired, both?

SE: Well, my belief is that, this number one idea that artists are unqualified to comment on society that they are living in is a relatively new idea. As far as I knew and the way I was raised was to do this. It's my job. Whether I'm writing about girls or whether I'm writing about politics. I'm single man, I'd much rather be writing chick songs, I just find it increasing hard to do in this political atmosphere. I just write about what's going on around me.

KA: You have said, I think very acutely, that you quote “make an obscene amount of money for a borderline Marxist.”

SE: Right

KA: Does that give you any pause when you write a song about fighting a rich man's war? One can argue you are a rich man.

SE: Well I am but, but I'm also… I mean, you know there is a lot more people who have a lot more money than I do. How much money can you spend? I don't, I don't really understand the accumulation of wealth as a sport. And I think capitalism is perfectly ok as an economic system, I just think it make a lousily religion. I just believe that we can be better than we are and we were headed in a different direction when I grew up in this country and like I said, I hold us responsible for it, democracy is hard work, you have to participate in it.

KA: In addition to putting out a record every fifteen or eighteen months, you seem to do everything, you performed in a play, you performed in “The Exonerated” you've written a play, you've written a book of stories, you paint, you are writing a novel.

SE: That's uh, that's a new thing and probably the least serious. That was, that was like, I basically had this little bout with kidney stones and I was on pain medication and it sort of set my brain into a place that I couldn't write so I was going nuts and I just went for some reason, went to this art store and bought some canvases and some acrylics and started slinging paint straight out of the tube.

KA: And how, what did you think of the art that resulted, or the paintings, if we don't call them art?

SE: Well I'm, I'm proud of it, its like well, it may be you know, the funny thing about art, it may be more art than it is painting you know and its, it certainly qualifies as art because it was something that I really needed to do. The first thing I painted was an our Lady of Guadalupe that actually has a scull for a face and skeletal hands and just kind of weird stuff like that.

KA: Now it sounds like your paintings, and I know from the stories that I've read that, they're not so explicitly ideological or political as the song certainly on this new record. Does that mean, do I conclude correctly that not of all your creative impulses are about politics?

SE: They're not. I mean when I die they're gonna take inventory and find out that I wrote more songs about girls than I did anything else. But I certainly, it just never occurred to me not to write, you know. People call it political music, but I mean you know, Pete Seeger said that all songs are political because lullabies are political to babies and I think that's true. And believe me love songs can get pretty political when it gets right down to it if you look up the word in the dictionary.

KA: Would you play another song for us?

SE: Yeah this is the title track from the record and it's about what. It's about the fact that the revolution goes on anyway whether we are involved in it or not and it starts when we wake up and realize that.

(Sings The Revolution Starts Now)