Singer/songwriter Steve Earle has been around the block a few times, or maybe it's truer to visualize him in a constant state of journeying. Having released 10 studio albums in a recording career that's spanned some 16 years, he's run the gamut stylistically from country rock to rock and roll, bluegrass to Americana. He was recently nominated for a Grammy award in the Contemporary Folk Album category alongside artists as eclectic as Johnny Cash, the Chieftains, Patty Griffin and Nickel Creek. It marks his ninth nomination for an award that has thus far eluded him.

"The Contemporary Folk category has become a sort of catch all. It's always tough, and it's always people I know, so it's like usually I get my ass whipped by Emmylou Harris in front of God and everybody, but she doesn't have an album out this year," Earle chuckles ironically. "I'm sort of the Susan Lucci of rock and roll."

Earle's nominated album Jerusalem was released Sept. 24, 2002, predated by a firestorm of controversy for one of its songs, "John Walker's Blues," about American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh. Written in the first person, the song contemplates what may have incited 20-year old Lindh to take up arms against his own country: "I'm just an American boy - raised on MTV / And I've seen all those kids in the soda pop ads, But none of them looked like me / So I started lookin' round for a light out of the dim / And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word / Of Mohammed, peace be upon him." The chorus to the song contains a recitation of Sura 47, Verse 19 from the Koran, in Arabic, which translates to "There is no God but God."

Conservative journalists and U.S. media outlets jumped all over the song, accusing Earle of being sympathetic to Lindh. The New York Post claimed that he had "glorified" his subject and called him "Jesus-like," while Nashville-based right wing talk show host Steve Gill said the song put Earle "in the same category as Jane Fonda, John Walker and all those people who hate America." Greta Van Susteren, host of the Fox news program "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren," asked Earle to play the song live on her show during a particularly banal line of questioning. He shrugs off the controversy now, saying that his detractors should have realized that like any writer, he was exercising his First Amendment rights by creating a character while not advocating that character's actions. Earle has a 20-year old son, Justin, and felt a certain parental empathy when he heard the young Lindh's story of alienation.

"It was only controversial in certain places that you would have expected it to be controversial. Equating [their rhetoric] with a serious political discussion is like taking pro wrestling as real, and I never took it seriously," explains Earle. "Going out and doing some of the [television] shows I did, and dealing with that, you realize that some of the people that work on those outlets don't even really have a dog in that fight, it's just their job."

Earle's own life has taken some pretty mythical twists and turns. He grew up in a musical family in the small town of Schertz near San Antonio, Texas, the son of an air-traffic controller. His uncle, who introduced him to the music of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, gave him a hand-me-down guitar when he was 12 - a left-handed Suzuki model that he had to switch the strings around on. "It took me a long time to figure out that I needed to rework the nut, [the strings] had filed on it pretty well. I couldn't figure why the strings were all over the place," he laughs. He didn't get into the city much and didn't realize there was anything other than Black Diamond strings, so when he wore those strings out he would head into town and buy a new pair at the drug store. Earle won a talent contest at his school at age 13 but was already being labeled a troublemaker for his unruly behavior by local authorities. He dropped out in the 9th grade to pursue music.

Earle played acoustic guitar because his father wouldn't let him have him have an electric - a decision that would shape his musical inclinations. "Partially, it was a bit tough for him to afford because I was the oldest of five kids," he explains. "And he didn't want that racket in the house. I couldn't make my guitar sound like Jimi Hendrix because I had an acoustic, so I started gravitating towards Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan and Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin - there were a lot of people around playing acoustic guitars who were making really good records at the time."

His grandmother bought him his first Gibson guitar, an LG-0, as a bribe to get him to go back to school. He went back for about a month and dropped out again. "I didn't intend it that way, but that's how it worked out," Earle remembers. He left home at 16 and began hitchhiking across Texas with his uncle, Nick Fain, eventually landing in Nashville in 1974. He scrimped and saved to buy a J-45 from George Gruhn, later trading it for a J-50 and $500 from one of his foremost mentors, Jerry Jeff Walker.

"I sort of locked into Gibson acoustics - I had that J-50 for a very long time, it was my main acoustic for years from about '75 to '86," Earle says. He released his first album, Guitar Town, in 1986, having written a couple of songs for the album with Richard Bennett, who had an Gibson Everly Brothers model. "I used that quite a bit on the album, and about three days into the sessions, Gibson had just started making the J-100s again. And that became a trademark guitar for me for a long time - I borrowed a guitar from Gibson, it was one of the first J-100s that they made, it had a source pickup in it.

"That guitar is in the Country Music Hall of Fame, I donated it in about '90 or so. I used it on Guitar Town and I toured with it up until the time I donated it."

Earle released three more albums before his career derailed and he spiraled into a four-year battle with severe cocaine and heroin addiction. During this time, he says he had 75-80 guitars, most of which were Gibsons that ended up in pawn shops as his drug habit escalated. "The Custom Shop made a bunch of stuff for me - I had a J-100 with a skull and crossbones painted on the face of it, which I've seen up on eBay about three times in the last few years. So I run into them every once in a while," Earle chuckles.

In 1994, he was arrested for possession of heroin in Nashville and instead of doing jail time, he opted for a year-long rehab program and got clean. When he got out, he began work on the critically-acclaimed all-acoustic album "Train a Comin,'" and after its release, landed a new record contract. He has since put out five albums, each one moving in a different musical direction - I Feel Alright(1996) is a rave-up rocker, while 1999's The Mountain is a traditional bluegrass record featuring the Del McCoury Band, with Earle on vocals, guitar and mandolin. The recent Jerusalem is another departure, an album of overtly political commentary on topics as wide-ranging as governmental conspiracy, American hegemony, the failure of our healthcare system and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Its songs occasionally feature electronic loops and compressed vocals, elements that are new to his roots-based sound.

Earle is currently on a five week North American tour, and then he heads to Europe for a number of dates. His performance guitars are nearly all Gibsons and Epiphones - he has two Epiphone John Lennon models, the Revolution Casino and the limited edition "1965" Casino. His two main acoustic guitars are Chet Atkins SSTs that he's had since their introduction. "With my band, we're so loud that they're the only thing that works," he says. "I tend to overdrive acoustics when I record 'em anyway, just overcompress 'em - too many Beatles records I guess. I can make those guitars sound like that at the volume we play without a bunch of feedback." He also plays Montana's Advanced Jumbo and an F-5 mandolin from Gibson's Original Acoustic Instruments division.

While out on the road, he'll continue working on the novel that he's started. "It's fiction, but the character is based on a real person who may or may not have been a doctor, and who may or may not have been traveling with Hank Williams when he died," Earle divulges. He released a collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses, in 1991. He also is a budding playwright - his first work, "Karla," about executed Texas murderer Karla Faye Tucker, debuted in Nashville last year. Earle is a long-time activist against the death penalty.

For all the injustice Earle sees in the world, the title track to Earle's current album offers an optimistic view of the current situation in that most volatile region. "I think there's a reason why we keep turning our attention to Jerusalem. This is one place that's central to these three large belief systems, but people have been killing each other there a couple thousand years now," he muses. "And I think what it boils down to, is sometimes the hard stuff is the place to start. If we can get it right in that part of the world, then everything else is easy. Anwar Sadat came close. Then someone else will come along, and I believe it will happen."