It's not a complete condemnation of Steve Earle's performance here Saturday night to say that I fell asleep during the second half of his set. Blame the 5:45 wake-up call from our 3-month-old son for a good portion of that. But suffice to say, had the show been more riveting, I would have had more success fighting off the Zzzzzzs.

The show was exactly what I expected from something billed as Earle solo acoustic. The set was heavy with slower story songs, and, thanks to the fact that he is on tour in support of Washington Square Serenade, a lot of tracks from that album. I'll admit I hadn't thought much about the show until the moment I entered the theater, but if I had crafted a dream set list, there would be little overlap between it and what I heard last night.

After an opening set by Earle's latest wife, Allison Moorer, that captivated thanks to her theater-filling vocals, Earle opened with a set of older songs that were a pleasant surprise. The first handful included three favorites from his first album, Guitar Town: "Someday," "Goodbye's All We Got Left" and "My Old Friend the Blues." The slick hooks of those two-decade old recordings has been replaced by a world-weariness that makes them resonate more than they did when Earle was simply inhabiting a character. After all he's been through, it's easy to believe when he rasps about his friend the blues.

After about 40 minutes, a guy came out and stood behind what looked like two turntables and a microphone. He punched a button, filling the room with a drum machine beat and Earle launched into tunes from Washington Street Serenade with "Tennessee Blues:" "Bound for New York City and I won’t be back no more... boys won’t see me around, goodbye guitar town," he sang. Literally, he left Tennessee for for New York, but he also left behind that sound to embrace a new, beat-driven template with a Dust Brother at the boards. The album is an admirable if flawed experiment. Live, the songs gave the show some energy and heft, but it felt like watching someone do karaoke of their own material.

There were highlights, though they mainly came from reinterpretations of older tracks like "CCKMP" and "Transcendental Blues" that found him adding complementary beats to songs that were sympathetic to that presentation. The drum machine left - as Moorer joined him for "Days Aren't Long Enough" - and returned - for the cloyingly obvious "City of Immigrants." The obligatory sing-along, "Steve's Hammer (For Pete)" was nice, and his plodding cover of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole" (used in the fourth and final season of "The Wire") seemed less, well, plodding.

Pleasant surprises continued throughout the set. A spirited "Copperhead Road" and a sweet "The Galway Girl" among them. But in the end, this felt like the performance of someone who had done this for so long that even the injection of a drum machine couldn't adequately spice things up. The crowd loved it, acting as if it had been starved for a big, quality show (and come to think of it...), but this felt like either the kind of thing Earle is going to do until they plant him in the ground, or, hopefully, something he looks back on as a transitory moment.

Labels: music