And Earle felt the pressure. Because Earle writes about small-town restlessness and Reaganomic suffering, his songs invite comparison with those of Spnngsteen, Mellencamp and Bob Seger. I'm going to reach that audience, but I'm not going to change the music. His writing reflects a natural fondness for rock. The comparison with mainstream rockers, Earle argues, reflects how much rock has borrowed from the country tradition.
Country is where lyrics that are that strong and that topical came from originally.
It's the portability of the music that gave it its character, the fact that you could travel. Earle's father was an air-traffic controller who was transferred frequently around the San Antonio area. The oldest of five kids, Steve got an acoustic guitar at the age of eleven because his famay couldn't afford an electric. I got beat up for having long hair. Three or four rednecks would jump out of a pickup truck and beat the hell out of me, cut my hair with a pocketknife and steal my boots.