That's Earle, Folks

My man, rocker/actor/activist Steve Earle  has now revealed that he is writing not one but two books in a new publishing deal.  Perhaps he has more time on his hands after getting bumped off in "Treme" last season. He's previously written a collection of short stories and a novel inspired by the doctor who, more or less, killed Hank Williams (he was obsessed with that a few years back when I interviewed him).  The new novel follows a runaway slave who survived the battle of the Alamo.  The NYT covers today but in that earlier interview linked to above he said, of the memoir, which he once claimed he'd never write:

“It’s not an autobiography, it’s a literary memoir, a little more abstract. It’s not like, ‘I was born a poor black child...’ and it doesn’t try and encompass every minute of my life – I think it’s about something besides me. It’s really about heroes and mentors good and bad, so obviously the first part is about  Townes [Van Zandt], before I started making records – the record-making aspect is in other books about me I understand, I’ve never read any of them.

"The second part is about the period of time that everybody thinks they know about but don’t, which is the three-and-a-half or four years just before I sorta slipped off the edge of the earth and the period when I was gone. And the third part of it is basically about recovery – I think it’s going to end long before the present day, we’ll see.”