Steve Earle - Train A-Comin' (Train A Comin - Steve Earle)

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Train A Comin - Steve Earle
Date:	15/08/08 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Stripped-back, sparse, powerful recordings of truly brilliant songs.

Disadvantages: None.

Steve Earle's first post-heroin record, Train A-Coming is a revelation, particularly given the raging, distorted squall of much of the preceding album, the fairly grim (in tone, not in quality) The Hard Way. Where that album piled feeding-back, echo-soused distorted guitars one atop the other from floor tiles to ceiling, sounding even more of a Rock Record than Copperfield Road, Earle's breakthrough album from 1988, Train A-Comin' strips everything right back. It is an acoustic driven, old time Country record.

It is the sound of the young Earle sat strummin' in Guy Clarke's kitchen midway through James Szalapski's much-adored 1981 documentary feature Heartworn Highways. A young man with a handful of songs and no great desire for anything much beyond playing them with his friends over a jar of finest gut-rot.

This is perhaps no surprise given the fact that many of the songs featured herein stem from that period. Beautiful performance footage exists of Mercenary Song performed in that aforementioned kitchen, recorded by Szalapski. The gorgeous Louvin Brothers-esque Sometimes She Forgets dates from at least that period, also.

The aching, remorse-wracked Goodbye, covered by Emmylou Harris on her stunning 1994 album Wrecking Ball (Harris shows up herein too, duetting with Earle on Nothin' Without You), is one of the high-points not only of the album, but of Earle's recorded career. "Was I off someplace? Maybe just too high..." he sighs. "I can't remember if we said goodbye."

Earle was obviously feeling his way back into his songs, drained from the rigours of rehab, a fact evidenced in both the appearance of several cover versions (The Beatles' I'm Looking Through You, Townes Van Zandt's Tecumseh Valley and, an unexpected delight, The Rivers Of Babylon) and the fact that so many of these tracks pre-date even Guitar Town, his blinding, country-rock debut. This is understandable, and if Train A-Comin' had been little more than a stopgap effort, surely no-one would have been overly grieved. Train A-Comin', however, is far from that. It is a stunning, expertly played collection of brilliant songs performed by a man who sounds like he just remembered why he got into this whole game in the first place. The "fire burning in [the] soul" of the titular heroine of Angel Is The Devil evidently burns in Earle's also, and Train A-Comin' is the sound of that burning.

A brilliant record by anyone's standards, and yet another high-point in a discography little-troubled by the low.

Summary: One of Earle's very finest records - a raw, wounded joy.