PROFILE Who says musicians don't write political songs anymore? Not Earle

Living near a military base has sparked some of his material.
By DAVID BAUDER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- Steve Earle is an unapologetic leftist who'd like nothing more than to see President Bush defeated in November.
So what would people who disagree with his politics get from Earle's new CD "The Revolution Starts... Now" other than elevated blood pressure?
Actually, they might get fired up, too. For his disc's overriding theme is less about speaking up against Bush -- though he'd like that -- than speaking up in general.
"I don't hold 'them' responsible for the fact that the country is not going the way that I think it ought to go," he said. "I hold us -- the people who think like I do -- responsible. We went to sleep. Democracy, it's hard work. It requires vigilance."
The title cut is an anthem about that very idea. Earle's revolution is simply overthrowing apathy and, as he sings, it begins "in your own back yard, in your own hometown."
To drive the point home, he repeats the song at the album's end.
Reaching out
On a blunter song you won't hear on the radio, "F the CC," Earle sings that he's "been called a traitor and a patriot." Fine, he says, call me anything you want, but don't forget that democracy flourishes with a cacophony of opinions.
"I'm trying to reach out to people that don't agree with me," he said. "I'm also trying to make people that do agree with me, that have been silent and intimidated into being quiet, speak up."
Through his songs and activism, Earle has campaigned against the death penalty for years. He's ratcheted up other topical content over his past three albums and earned the enmity of many Bush supporters with "John Walker's Blues," a song about the American who joined the Taliban in Afghanistan.
When he wrote "The Revolution Starts... Now" and "Rich Man's War," Earle knew he had to get them out before Election Day. So he banged the rest of the disc out quickly, writing and recording on a song-a-day pace.
Like "John Walker's Blues," which tried to get inside the head of John Walker Lindh, Earle wrote less about politics than characters whose lives are affected by the decisions of others.
There's a truck driver in Houston driving a rig in Iraq, a young man who joined the Army to see the world and was sent to fight in Iraq, a soldier in Afghanistan whose car was being repossessed back home, a youth in Gaza strapped with a bomb to blow himself up in the name of Allah.
Earle lives near Kentucky's military base, Fort Campbell, and some of his material came from watching what was happening there.
"We see stories about people losing their homes and losing their cars because they're desperate," he said. "They have the same problems in that community that you have in any community where people are basically poor. That shouldn't be happening. They're serving their country and should be better taken care of."
Fascination
With a leering growl behind a reggae beat, Earle sings in "Condi, Condi" about his desire to seduce National security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Huh?
"I think she's kind of hot," he said. "Her very existence fascinates me."
He and Rice are exactly the same age, he explains, and he often wonders how the highly educated Rice wound up with views diametrically opposed not only to himself, but to the majority of black Americans.
Earle was asked to join Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, Jackson Browne and other artists who are touring this fall under the "Vote for Change" banner, to benefit efforts to defeat Bush. He turned it down for financial reasons, not because he disagreed with their sentiment.
Some of the swing states where Springsteen is touring have some of Earle's biggest concentrations of fans, he said.
"I need to go play those markets and pay my child support and alimony," said Earle, who's been divorced six times.