Train A Comin'

Performer: Steve Earle
Artist: Emmylou Harris; Peter Rowan; Norman Blake
Engineer: Wayne Neuendorf
Producer: William Alsobrook; Steve Earle
Distributor: WEA (Distributor)

Notes: Personnel: Steve Earle (vocals, 6-string, 12-string & high string guitars, mandolin, harmonica); Peter Rowan (vocals, gut string guitar, mandolin, mandola); Emmylou Harris (vocals); Norman Blake (Hawaiian guitar, guitar, dobro, mandolin, fiddle); Roy Huskey (acoustic bass). Recorded at Magic Tracks Recording Studio and Masterfonics, Nashville, Tennessee. Originally released on Winter Harvest Entertainment (3302). Includes liner notes by Steve Earle. TRAIN A COMIN' was nominated for a 1996 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. To say Steve Earle had career problems in 1994 when he recorded Train a Comin' is something more than an understatement. Earle's life went into a dramatic tailspin thanks to a voracious drug habit after he parted ways with MCA in 1991, and he ended up spending a few months in jail on drug and weapons charges in 1993. Earle thankfully got treatment for his addictions while behind bars, and was clean and sober for the first time in many years when he scored a deal with a tiny independent label, Winter Harvest Records, and cut an acoustic album called Train a Comin'. Considering how low Earle had sunk, it was a pleasant shock that Train a Comin' was not only good, it was one of the strongest albums of his career to date. Dominated by songs he's written years before along with a few new tunes and some well-chosen covers, Train a Comin' featured Earle with a small group of gifted acoustic pickers, including Norman Blake, Peter Rowan, and Roy Huskey, Jr., and the tone of these sessions is at once relaxed and committed, sounding like a back porch guitar pull with a seriously talented guy handling the lead vocals and calling out the tunes. Earle's experiences with the judicial system hadn't exactly improved his voice, but he's in far more potent form than he had been on 1991's live set Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator, and his control and command of his instrument is genuinely impressive. Earle's natural cockiness works in his favor on these tunes, especially "Tom Ames' Prayer," "Hometown Blues," and "Angel Is the Devil," and his gift for telling a story is plainly evident on "Ben McCulloch" and a moving cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Tecumseh Valley." Train a Comin' is not an album that asks the audience to forgive Steve Earle for his sins; it's a document of an artist who after a season in hell has reclaimed his gift and is determined to put it to use, and after years of fighting Nashville to do things his own way, Earle resumed his career by following his own muse with eloquent simplicity, and Train a Comin' shows his instincts were entirely correct. [Winter Harvest's original release of Train a Comin' featured a sequence not approved by Earle, who reissued the album on his E Squared label with a different running order; some pressings of the E Square version also delete his cover of the Beatles' "I'm Looking Through You."] ~ Mark Deming When you need a break from THE MOUNTAIN (Earle's 1999 release with the Del McCoury Band), you could flip on his earlier all-acoustic TRAIN A COMIN'. Released in 1995, after the Texas-born songwriter's bout with heroin addiction and jail time, this was Earle's "comeback album." Not only is it an unfiltered pleasure to hear Earle in such pared-down environs, but the band itself is a killer outfit. Peter Rowan, Norman Blake, and the late Roy Huskey don't make "guest appearances" with the band-they are the band. And they're allowed to do what they do best. Blake is even given a solo spot, the guitar instrumental "Northern Winds." Earle draws on material written over the last 20 years, but there's never a sense that he's culling from his notebook material that he was smart enough not to record the first time around. "Tom Ames' Prayer," "Mercenary Song," and "Ben McCullough" are great story songs with at least one leg planted in the 19th Century. "Sometimes She Forgets," "Goodbye," and "Nothin' Without You" are the kind of smart, acrid love songs that will, of course, never show up on the country charts.

Spin (8/95, pp.92-93) - 8 - Very Good - "...Earle offers neither contrite confessionals nor toothless mush. He's too dogged and proud to be anything but himself....[His] redemptive gift lies in his ability to evoke poignance and loss without spilling into sentimentality....Truth be told, he makes no mistakes..." Entertainment Weekly (5/5/95, p.71) - "...Nashville's baddest boy returns, after a five-year-absence, with an acoustic album of early material, new songs, and covers by country-folk mentors like Townes Van Zandt....Earle is nothing short of a narrative master..." - Rating: B Q (2/96, p.65) - Included in Q's 50 Best Albums of 1995. Q (7/95, p.135) - 3 Stars - Good - "...sounds like a man beginning to feel his way around again after a long period out of circulation. He's gone back to where he started, making an acoustic album with the emphasis on the songs....He may be bowed but he's plainly not beaten." Sing Out! (8-10/95, p.148) - "...the writing is crisp and tough, deeply rooted in tradition but never self-consciously folky, and Earle sounds as if he has lived every word..." Mojo (Publisher) (7/95, p.111) - "...TRAIN A COMIN' is all acoustic....the feel of the record is also retrospective...very live, ramshackle and raw. Earle plays his guitar and mandolin parts with customary vigour and sings his heart out in his ragged but right voice..." NME (Magazine) (7/15/95, p.49) - 7 (out of 10) - "...a slew of smart tunes played simply on guitar, mandolin and stuff....He was always doomed by comparisons to Springsteen in the past but these days Earle comes over like a trainee Johnny Cash: pithy, grim-voiced, strangely mythical..."

Steve Earle did for country in the 1980s what Waylon Jennings did for it in the '70s--released it from the shackles of commerciality and overproduction by introducing a bad-ass, rock-friendly outlaw aesthetic. Besides his talents as a singer/songwriter, Earle is a producer/entrepreneur who's worked with many other artists (some on his own label) and helped foster a new wave of progressive country. He's also a dedicated political activist who's done much for a variety of progressive causes.

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