I’m familiar with Earle from his later album Copperhead Road, a piece of country-rock that I recall as being quite good but not something that has really stuck with me (I don't think it's on this list either). This is his debut, and it’s also country-rock but more in the country direction than Copperhead Road was (will be...).
As country-rock goes, it’s pretty good, more on the blues side than something like Eagles, approaching country back from the direction that it had been taken by the likes of Rolling Stones and ZZ Top, a harder, rockier version of the likes of Waylon Jennings, laden with twangy guitar and pedal steel and lyrics about “good ol’ boys”, but rooted in the Reagan Eighties - “I was born in the land of plenty, now there ain’t enough” from Good Ol’ Boy (Gettin’ Tough) - double rock apostrophe!
Earle’s not a million miles from Springsteen either. Take the lyric
“There ain't a lot that you can do in this town
You drive down to the lake and then you turn back around
You go to school and you learn to read and write
So you can walk into the county bank and sign away your life”
from Someday, where the narrator dreams of taking his ‘67 Chevy and driving away from a dead end town. That’s not too surprising, though – country is at heart the music of the working class rural white American so of course the topics are going to be the same. Later editions of the albums even include a cover of a Springsteen song (State Trooper). Someday does sound quite Springsteen-like in its melody as well. Others are bit more honky-tonk, such as Hillbilly Highway and Think It’s Over (which hearkens right back to artists like Merle Haggard or Buck Owens). Down The Road brings in some more folk elements like mandolin and a bit of banjo, and is a nice little album closer.
With its mix of traditional and contemporary, this feels a little like a country music album for people that don’t think that they like country music.
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