Townes

The culmination of a three-and-a-half-decade admiration, Steve Earle's latest is a Townes Van Zandt cover album.

According to legend, a young Steve Earle once declared, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” Over the years, Earle has continued to tout Van Zandt—even naming his son Justin Townes Earle—and now he’s carrying that…

In his brief liner sketch on this album of Townes Van Zandt covers, songwriter Steve Earle writes: "I always read everything Townes told me to read. All of us did; we who followed him around, or simply bided our time in places along his migratory path, for we were indeed a cult, in the strictest sense of the word, with Townes at its ever shifting center."