Nowhere Left To Hide Became The Sound Of Survival
When Steve Earle walked out of jail in 1994 Nashville did not get back the man who had made Guitar Town and his first record after years of addiction arrived with almost no drums and no electric guitar armor
The microphones caught fingers on strings and breaths between phrases and a voice that sounded older than the years that had passed
Eight years earlier Guitar Town had made Earle one of the most combustible new voices in country music yet by the early 1990s the records had stopped coming
Heroin and cocaine consumed the work and arrests accumulated until a drug possession sentence finally put him behind bars in 1994
After his release Earle entered treatment and began rebuilding with something unusually small
A Comeback Built From Wood And Wire And Breath
He went into the studio with producer Richard Bennett and a handful of extraordinary acoustic players including Norman Blake on guitar and Peter Rowan on mandolin and Roy Huskey Jr. on upright bass while Emmylou Harris added harmony
There was little of the muscular country rock that had once surrounded him and the sparse sound left every flaw and every feeling exposed
The album was Train a Comin and some of its songs had been waiting a long time
Earle reached back to material written before fame including Mercenary Song while newer pieces sat beside covers of Iβm Looking Through You by The Beatles and Tecumseh Valley by Townes Van Zandt and the traditional Rivers of Babylon
The selection quietly mapped the musical world that had built him through country and folk and bluegrass and rock and the Texas songwriting tradition
Success Returned Without A Radio Hit
Released in 1995 Train a Comin was not designed as a conventional Nashville comeback record and it did not produce a major country radio hit
It did something more useful by earning a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album and reintroducing Earle as a songwriter rather than a casualty
Within a year he released I Feel Alright followed by El CorazΓ³n in 1997 and began one of the most productive stretches of his career
One Brilliant Bassist Made The Record Even More Poignant
Roy Huskey Jr. anchored those sparse sessions with brilliant upright bass playing and he died in 1997 at only 40
His playing can be heard across records by artists from Emmylou Harris to The Everly Brothers and he was one of those musicians whose fingerprints are everywhere even when his name is not
On Train a Comin there was nowhere for that playing to disappear because the arrangements were too bare
The album still feels less like Steve Earle announcing a comeback than a roomful of musicians quietly giving him enough space to begin again
That space became the first step back toward a lasting creative life and the stripped down record remains powerful because Earle finally stopped hiding behind volume and let the songs carry the truth