I Steve Earle

15 Track CD - Give Peace a Chance! 15 Anti-War and Protest Classics Dedicated to John Lennon, featuring Robert Plant, Richard Thompson, Roy Harper, Steve Earle and more.

Mountain Stage is a two-hour, live music performance radio show staged with a theater audience, produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and distributed by NPR.

15 Track CD - Give Peace a Chance! 15 Anti-War and Protest Classics Dedicated to John Lennon, featuring Robert Plant, Richard Thompson, Roy Harper, Steve Earle and more.

While many of us have struggled to salvage a sense of purpose from a year's worth of isolation, veteran New York rocker Willie Nile has tapped into his own lockdown experience as a source of inspiration for the set of haunting new songs that comprise his emotion-charged new release, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Although the veteran singer-songwriter borrowed its title from the beloved 1951 science-fiction movie classic, the album was actually inspired by the sight of Nile's beloved hometown temporarily turned into a desolate ghost town. "It came from seeing the deserted streets of downtown Manhattan, with all the shops and stores boarded up and all these beautiful buildings looking down on everything," Nile recalls, "But one Friday night last June, crossing Varick Street, I realized that there wasn't a car in sight, and that I could have laid down in the middle of the street without anyone noticing.

Tribute albums frequently betray their subject, but not this homage to Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears, the country giant’s 1964 salute to Native Americans. A concept album about a discomfiting cause – the US’s treatment of its indigenous people – Tears was a radical statement resisted, to Cash’s fury, by the Nashville establishment. For its 50th anniversary, producer Joe Henry gathers a stellar house band that takes turns to lead. Gillian Welch delivers an entrancing As Long As the Grass Shall Grow; Emmylou does likewise with Apache Tears. Steve Earle drawls: “I ain’t no fan of Custer” and instrumentals evoke North America’s haunted plains. Very fine.