![]() Beyond production work, which has included Richard Thompson, Solomon Burke, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Robert Plant, Devil Makes 3 and Patty Griffin, he is the musical supervisor of Nashville, Oscar winner Callie Khouri’s ABC series - now moved to CMT - about the country music business. If Miller’s not as wildly known, he is in many ways the most busy. Twenty years later, all three parties had ascended. Earle, always one to have bands long on musical muscle, knew he needed a guitarist who could handle the ballast of the songs he’d cut with the Dukes, but also had the experience for the bluegrass and folk songs he’d written for Train A-Comin’. When Colvin knew Miller, they were bright-eyed kids struggling to make a mark as artists - and for a moment, she was even the singer in a band Miller and good friend Jim Lauderdale were putting together. Earle had teamed with Miller shortly after getting out of jail in 1995. As Colvin says, “Buddy said, ‘Steve moved towards Shawn a little bit, and Shawn moved towards Steve a little bit.’ But I think we both moved towards Buddy, too.”Ĭolvin had known the dusty, old-leather-chair voiced Miller from her bluegrass and folk days in Greenwich Village in the ‘70s. Looking for common ground, they landed on roots icon Buddy Miller. How they made a record is both an odd convergence and the reality of journeymen musicians four decades into their craft. We started just doing the dates, then we started talking about making a record, then we started figuring out how to make a record.” So you get up onstage, you play a song, they play a song, you tell a story and a rapport develops. Colvin and I, we can busk, individually or together. One guitar, one mandolin, no tour manager, just to prove I still could. I once did a one-backpack tour of Western Europe, mostly by train. “And we’re both really hard-headed about being able to go out there with a guitar and do that (entertain people), to maintain that skill set. “You’ve got someone doing the same thing you’re doing who ‘gets’ it,” he continues. But of course, there was a lot more to it than that. ![]() “She talks about the camaraderie, but really, it’s half the work - we split expenses,” he explains matter of factly. To me, just the idea of the dates was great.”Įarle calls their initial run together a “white-washing-the-fence tour.” ![]() I knew the material - and I love being a rhythm guitarist and a harmony singer. She pauses, taking stock of the notion that led to the string of dates. He’s more raw than I am, and I really like how he has this rock thing, even acoustic. I’m a big fan, and it wasn’t necessarily to make a pairing, but we could see what the music did. “I suggested we go do some gigs, just to play. “We had a trial run,” Colvin says late one afternoon from her Austin home. This was not a duo hatched out of a test-tube marketing alliance or record label focus group, but rather one artist reaching out to another with the simple idea of hitting the road just for the sake of the songs. Then I couldn’t afford to have a band, so I stayed with that coffeehouse me-and-the-guitar approach.”Īnd it was by stripping things back to that bare-bones approach that the two seasoned touring and recording artists began their journey as Colvin & Earle. “I fronted a couple bands in high school, but really that wasn’t what I did. “I really didn’t play with a band ‘til I was 30,” Earle offers, as the workman drills in the distance. In spite of Colvin’s pop success with three Grammys - 1991’s Best Contemporary Folk for Steady On and 1998’s Record and Song of the Year for “Sunny Came Home” - and Earle’s various paths since Guitar Town made him a cultural voice to be reckoned with in 1985 and Copperhead Road made him a rock fringe force in 1988, they both came from a school of one voice, one guitar. Now he’s got Colvin & Earle, an album of duets with acclaimed songwriter Shawn Colvin that considers the ravages of the rambling life.īoth artists are at the core journeymen folkies. But given his emergence as an Americana pioneer, his underpinnings as a true troubadour and his fairly consistent output over the last two decades, the former troublemaker is more likely to be arrested at a protest these days than for any kind of narcotic thuggery.Ī year after his divorce from singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, Earle returned to the other side of his Houston folkie roots with the acoustic-driven Texas and Chicago blues homage Terraplane, featuring the Mastersons. Perhaps the landlady was just more concerned by the storied tales of Earle’s past. “I lived here for a while and nobody even thought about it, then she did. “The land lady just realized what these guitars are worth, and she said she’d pay for it,” Steve Earle explains, getting back on the phone after directing an installer where to put the touchpad for his new alarm system.
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