Steve Earle

I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive
4/5
This charming album, produced by the legendary T-Bone Burnett, looks forward into the void as much as it looks back to American roots music. There’s the quintessentially Earle combination of strong lyrics and stronger beat on ‘God Is God’, the spartan duet (with his wife, Alison Moorer) of ‘Heaven or Hell’; and the promise in wrenching love song ‘Every Part of Me’ that ‘my last breath will bear your name’. That impression is further embodied in the title, and less positively, the feeling that, good as this is, it’s nothing we haven’t heard from Earle before.