steve earle review (and Alison Moorer) for tonight's show

Steve Earle's gripping new album, Washington Square Serenade, is a loving tribute to that era, that movement, that music and the city that gave them all a nurturing home. "That period changed pop music," Earle says. "It made lyrics much more important. Rock & roll could have become a subgenre of pop if it hadn't been for that literary aspect, which completely came out of a four-block area in New York City in one brief instant of time."
Like Freewheelin' itself, Serenade is an album that combines songs of love and protest, a stirring chronicle of both the connections between people that make life worth living and the things that must be changed in order to make such connections more possible for everyone. "I knew it was going to be pretty personal," Earle says about the album, which he recorded at Electric Lady Studios, the famed Greenwich Village recording complex that Jimi Hendrix built in the late Sixties. "The best part of my personal life was going so well I knew that chick songs were going to be no problem. As for political songs, I don't think I've ever made an apolitical record. The last two before this [The Revolution Starts … Now (2004), Jerusalem (2002)] were overtly political, and unapologetically so. This one is unapologetically personal."Washington Square Serenade – in its commitment, its values, its musical intelligence and, finally, its very American optimism about the possibilities for a better world – demonstrates why.Allison Moorer
When Allison Moorer decided to make a record of other people's songs, you know she wasn't just going to grab a handful of whatever and set her slow burning alto to them like a low flame to dry twigs. No, the woman whose very first single was nominated for an Academy Award, whose albums have been marked by an artistic restlessness and passion and whose willingness to expose her deepest truths has yielded some of pop music's subtlest, but most enduring treasures wanted to do something special - and in looking around the vastness of American music, she realized how much of the glory of women songwriters was overlooked and oversimplified.
“I think true feminity is not encouraged,” she says in that smoky drawl. “In the music business, you have two little boxes. Either you're a whirly twirly girl or you're a too-angry raging woman - and that's just not even close. Men face their own share of problems, but they don’t face that.”
For more information, visit www.steveearle.com