“The city hasn’t changed as much as real estate agents would have you believe,” Steve Earle explains about his adopted hometown of New York City. “Specifically, my neighborhood hasn’t changed that much. I point people in the right direction so that they can take their picture like the cover of Freewheelin’ all the time." That’s easy enough for Earle these days, because he and his wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, now live on the very Greenwich Village street on which the famous cover shot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962) was taken. In that photo, Dylan and his thengirlfriend Suze Rotolo huddle against the cold as they walk along a snowy New York street. It’s an indelible romantic image that captures the idealism of the folk revival that was gathering momentum in New York at the time.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 opens with “Tennessee Blues,” which updates the title track of Earle’s 1986 debut album, Guitar Town – and establishes the sense of another fresh start. The new version is acoustic, more introspective and more rhythmically charged – all traits highly appropriate for the tale of an artist “bound for New York City” and leaving Tennessee behind. “It’s continuing a narrative – the state of me,” Earle explains. The “chick songs,” as Earle describes them in apt period slang, include the lovely “Sparkle and Shine,” which echoes both early Dylan and the Beatles, and “Days Aren’t Long Enough,” which Earle co-wrote and sings with Moorer. “I’ve written duets forLucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Iris DeMent and my sister Stacey, so there was no way I was going to get away with not writing a duet for me and Allison,” Earle says, laughing. “I had to – I’m married! But we’ve been singing together as long as we’ve been together, and I wanted something that was a love song about us.”

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	01 Tennessee Blues 02 Down Here Below 03 Satellite Radio 04 City Of Immigrants 05 Sparkle And Shine 06 Come Home to Me 07 Jericho Road 08 Oxycontin Blues 09 Red Is The Color 10 Steve's Hammer (For Pete) 11 Day's Aren't Long Enough 12 Way Down In The Hole