Steve Earle is the country singer of choice among literate people with leftish politics, cutting-edgish tastes and a bit of attitude. That is, among people like Steve Earle, who reveres such classic Nashville songwriters as Hank Cochran and Harland Howard while listening to Beck and the Geto Boys, and who’s equally happy to talk about Ray Price or Raymond Carver.

Earle’s first two albums, Guitar Town and Exit 0, were among the best and most influential country records of the eighties; his lyrics had the literary virtues of plot and character, and his music combined the ache of country with the energy of rock. Like such contemporaries as Lyle Lovett and the O’Kanes, though, Earle was too smart and edgy for country radio, and his third album, the loud aggressive take-no-prisoners Copperhead Road, with its title song about a dope-growing Vietnam vet, ended whatever career he might have had as a corporate country star. Meanwhile, his own drug problems were getting worse. He released two more albums, the under appreciated The Hard Way and the live Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator before heroin took him down; in 1995, he was busted for possession of heroin, served three months in jail (on a one-year sentence) and got clean.

Earle’s comeback began with the spare acoustic set Train A-Comin’. He returned to his trademark mix of rock and country on I Feel Alright, and his most recent album, El Corazón, may be his best since the eighties. It ranges from pure acoustic bluegrass to grungeoid rock with feedback guitar and even a stuttering sampler. It opens with an elegiac invoca-valediction to the late Townes Van Zandt—and adds up to a self-portrait of a complicated, conflicted and passionate man.

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