Steve Earle - Southern Theatre, 5/6

Chances are, if someone tries hard to be relevant, the transparency of that effort will end up making the person irrelevant. Such is the challenge for a topical songwriter like Steve Earle, who follows in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.

But there’s also a reason Earle named his son Justin Townes Earle after Townes Van Zandt. Like Van Zandt, Earle’s greatest skill is his ability to tell a story. At the Southern Theatre on Tuesday night, it was those tales--not the politicking and attempts at rabble-rousing--that truly revealed why he’s still relevant.

Earle kicked off the mostly solo show with “Steve’s Last Ramble,” harmonica around his neck and boot stomping the stage, playing the role of a lonely folkie trying to find his way back to his woman. It was refreshingly rough around the edges and real, as were other country numbers like closer “Copperhead Road” and “Little Rock ‘N Roller.”

Earle dedicated “Now She’s Gone” to “what’s-her-name, wherever the hell she is,” along with “Goodbye.” “Same girl, different harmonica,” he said. It takes a rough-and-tumble guy like Steve Earle to pull off love songs like these without sounding overly sentimental. And it requires just as much skill to perform a long-form poem about an outlaw sentenced to die without becoming trite, but that’s just what he did with “Billy Austin.”

And then the deejay came out. Now, the deejay songs weren’t all bad, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that turntable scratching alongside Steve Earle was a glaring anachronism. It was a mixing of the contemporary and the tattered, seemingly an attempt to modernize old songs like “Guitar Town” and showcase newer tunes like “Jericho Road.” The tribal flavor of “CCKMP (Cocaine Cannot Kill My Pain),” along with reverberating echo to drive home the point, worked nicely, but other songs with hip-hoppy beats felt sorely out of place. Perhaps it’s Earle’s attempt to incorporate some of New York City’s personality into the material after migrating there from Nashville. Earle may feel at home there now, but the city hasn’t yet nestled comfortably into his repertoire.

Allison Moorer, Earle’s wife and show opener, came out for a few duets, and while the two didn’t clash, they didn’t really jel, either. A more subtle female vocal than Moorer would suit the songs better. She has some pipes and sang her opening set with gusto, but her overly affected phrasing didn’t quite suit the female songwriters she covered. Moorer has a habit of turning words like “orphan” into “or-PHAWN,” “forsaken” into “forsak-AWN” and “love” into “luu-UV.”

Earle finally got political toward the end of the evening, instructing the audience to “pick a side” and singing songs from last year’s Washington Square Serenade, such as “City of Immigrants” and “Steve’s Hammer (For Pete),” the latter of which turned into an audience sing-along. Both came across as juvenile protest songs filled with platitudes compared with the finely spun yarns from the rest of the night. “Jerusalem” was probably the best of his most overtly political material, packaged with the hope that “one fine day all the children of Abraham will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem.”

But it’s in the stories where Earle’s convictions are really allowed to take root. “The Devil’s Right Hand,” which a tracks a young man’s love affair with a pistol, is a much more nuanced castigation of war and violence.

Political posturing is hit or miss, but a good story will always be relevant.