Born Again

Earle takes much of the remainder of his latest album to entrench himself in the music of his own abbreviated innocence. There's a quick, red-hot foray into bluegrass, "Until the Day I Die," featuring Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott replacing the Del McCoury Band, another into Irish folk-rock, "Galway Girl," and a naked and forlorn Van Zandtian rival to "Goodbye" and "My Old Friend the Blues" in "Lonelier than This," but Transcendental Blues owes above all else a heavy debt to the mid- to late Beatles. Sgt. Pepper's and Revolver, copies of which dwelt on a monitor throughout the recording process, positively haunt this CD. (Ironically, the longer Earle stays on the straight and narrow, the more narcotic his music becomes.) Large swaths of Transcendental Blues are, as the title implies, full-on sojourns into the mystic. He has never written a song as tantalizingly elusive as the fable "The Boy Who Never Cried," which hovers on the edge of the listener's understanding.

With this album, Earle has stripped away the intervening years and gone back to the moment when he first laid a needle on a spinning turntable and felt a room fill with hi-fi sound. Before he ran away from home at 13 and promptly got into heroin, before he met "the great teacher and bad role model" Townes Van Zandt, before he had racked up nearly a half-dozen ex-wives, before the "vacation in the ghetto" and his subsequent redemption, and before he watched Jonathan Nobles sing "Silent Night" to his mama and die, there was one immensely talented boy's fascination with the Beatles and their cheery, deceptively simple message of peace and love. For Earle, there's been plenty of blues since that moment of transcendence, and Earle's goal today is to get it back.