NCH, Dublin
****
The last time Steve Earle played Dublin was about a year ago. Then, he was in the company of the Dukes, and the gig was one of those roustabout roots rackets that has everybody tapping a toe and creaking a knee joint.
This time around, Earle is in solo mode – just him, his guitar, his grit-and-gin gargle of a voice, his long beard, and a batch of songs that take the audience on a journey from Earle back then to Earle right now.
Judging by the set list, Earle right now is as mixed-up as he was back then, and you sense that at least several songs directly reference his most recent emotional woes, notably his imminent divorce (number seven) from country singer Alison Moorer.
Indeed, the first song, a new and as yet unrecorded composition, Girl on the Mountain, is as close to the nub of a divorce tune as you can get. Just in case you don't get the message, he follows immediately with My Old Friend the Blues. So no, this evening's gig is not going to be an all-night party, but more a two-hour lesson in how to take the punches, roll with them, get up, shake the dust from your feet and walk away.
Earle does this in rugged style, and with no small sense of humour. He dedicates the pithy yet pretty Now She's Gone to "whatsername, wherever the hell she is", terms Valentine's Day "the flagship of the chick-song fleet", and says that the tear-brimming Every Part of Me is the kind of song he writes when "I find myself alone in King's Lynn".
So we have deeply, often intensely personal songs delivered in a laconic drawl that’s never too far away from despair, but Earle is nothing if not an optimist, and never a believer in lost causes.
He finishes with the political, delivering Jerusalem, his poignant, heartfelt vision for peace in the Middle East. And then he's gone – two hours, a guy, a guitar and songs. Sometimes, and in the right hands, that's all it takes.
