Great Singers Don’t Always Need Great Voices, Steve Earle Will Tell You
One of Nashville’s most influential country-rockers, Steve Earle, has made a pronounced comeback on the Nashville scene this year - and not just with his striking “Train a Comin”’ acoustic album on Winter Harvest Records.
There is also the impact of his songwriting, as Travis Tritt, Emmylou Harris and Stacy Dean Campbell sing Earle songs on new albums. Harris did the stunning ballad “Goodbye,” and Tritt and Campbell both recorded the traditional country “Sometimes She Forgets.” Tritt’s rendition is currently a hit single on the country charts.
“I always have loved that song,” Earle says of “Sometimes She Forgets.” “It was written during a period of time when I thought I was writing really commercial country music, and then they told me all these songs were too country.
“I know exactly when I wrote that song: 14 years ago. Because my boy’s 13, and during the time I was waiting for him to get to the world and knew for sure that he was coming … you know, I had a deadline, and I panicked. I was trying to write songs I could get cut, and it didn’t work. I didn’t ever intend to record ‘Sometimes She Forgets.’ I didn’t sing it that well when I wrote it. I sing it much better now.”
He does sing it, as well as “Goodbye,” on “Train a Comin’.”
“There’s a lot of people who don’t think much of me as a singer, and in some ways I think they’re right, but they were righter years ago than they are now,” he says.
“There’s a whole lot of criteria that you hold yourself up to. One of the most ignorant statements anybody can make is that Bob Dylan can’t sing. Bob Dylan has possibly one of the most irritating voices - if you take it at face value - on the planet, but he is a great singer.”
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Ready for Christmas albums?
Christmas albums already are wending their way to distributors to be ready for the season.
A couple from RCA include Clint Black’s first yuletide offering, “Looking for Christmas,” and Nashville singer-songwriter Peter McCann’s “What Christmas Really Means.” The latter is led off by a distinctive McCann-written song titled “The Man Who Ran the Inn.”
“The traditional story has it that the man who ran the inn also owned the stable and gave Joseph and Mary permission to use it,” McCann explains. “We can’t know for sure. All it says in Luke is that the Child was laid in a manger because there was no room at the inn. The point is that whoever did it did a very nice thing. I thought it would be nice if this person got a little good press after all these years.
“It was an act of charity. You might say it was the first one of the Christian era. Whoever it was didn’t know who they were dealing with at the time, but I don’t think it matters. Who can say who is more uplifted by a true act of charity, the giver or the receiver?”