Vintage Review: Steve Earle & the Dukes’ The Hard Way (1990)

With Springsteen on hiatus, Seger over the hill, and Mellencamp off making movies, Steve Earle seems to have taken up the mantle of the “working man’s” champion with a vengeance. Earle’s songwriting skills have never been sharper than here on The Hard Way, his brilliant follow-up to the impressive Copperhead Road album.

Earle’s lyrics are tougher and leaner and sharper than ever before, his music tight, dark, and rocking. Earle has peopled this album with characters as disturbing, troubled, and real as Springsteen’s Nebraska, documenting their trials and tears on record with a skill and grace the equal of any songwriter. If John Hiatt is the South’s poet laureate of song, then Earle must surely be his darker counterpart, the troubled troubadour, romantic at heart, forever destined to walk down the other side of the tracks and chronicle the life he sees there. (MCA Records, released July 1st, 1990)

Review originally published by The Metro, September 1990