“You can occasionally monetize heartache,” says Steve Earle.
The iconoclastic 53-year-old musician — a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, sometimes a little bit bluegrass, too — is addressing the question of what a writer learns from marriage and divorce. His answer: not much, it turns out, especially if you’re not a guy who specializes in relationships-gone-wrong songs.
Earle isn’t, but he’s still is a good one to ask because 22 years after his debut album, “Guitar Town,” put him on the map — and more than 13 years after he stopped trying to scratch himself off of it with crack, cocaine, heroin and booze — he remains an unusually gifted and prolific scribe; of songs, primarily, but also of a produced play and a published short-story collection. He’s carved out time finally to finish his novel next year.
Also, he’s been married seven times.
To be fair, his current union, to 36-year-old country singer Allison Moorer, isn’t much like his priors. When Earle walked down the aisle with Moorer (the younger sister of Shelby Lynne, another fine country chanteuse) in 2005, it was his first marriage since the ’80s, and the first he entered into sober.
“I never bought the idea that my bad behavior was on-the-job training or anything,” he says, dismissing the idea that the artist must suffer to make art.
Many of Earle’s best (and best-known) songs are explicitly political, railing against the death penalty and militaristic foreign policy. But last year’s “Washington Square Serenade” found him focusing on more personal matters: his love of Moorer, and of New York City, where he moved with her three years ago. Perhaps the album’s most gorgeous moment is “Days Aren’t Long Enough,” a ballad the couple co-wrote and sang as a duet.
Moorer will be with Earle when he returns to the Birchmere on Sunday and Monday night. He’ll play the show’s first half alone, “mostly acoustic,” before Moorer joins him, along with a DJ playing two turntables and a digital mixer. A DJ probably isn’t something longtime fans expect to see from a guy who was fronting a bluegrass band the last time he headlined at the Birchmere, but Earle insists it isn’t a radical move.
“It didn’t make sense to play [the “Washington Square” songs] with the Dukes,” he says, referring to his longtime rock band. “It just isn’t their thing.” The DJ was “Washington Square Serenade” producer John King’s idea, one that will allow Earle to include songs that otherwise would be impossible for only two musicians to play in the arrangements he wants, such as “Satellite Radio” and “Way Down in the Hole.”
The latter is the 1987 Tom Waits song that found fame 15 years later as the theme for the acclaimed HBO drama series “The Wire,” on which Earle played Waylon, an addict trying to clean up his life by attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. He’s got another film role now, and he intends to record an album of covers of songs by his mentor, the late Townes Van Zandt, before the end of the year.
(If you go: Steve Earle and Allison Moorer; The Birchmere; 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; $59.50; 703-549-7900; www.birchmere.com)
