Jonathan 'JC' Clarke

Jonathan 'JC' Clarke

ON AIR: Sundays 7PM - 9PM. Jonathan Clarke joined Q104.3, New York's Classic Rock, as an on-air personality in 1997 and continues to be a mainstay...Full Bio

 

Interview: Steve Earle Says He's an 'F Train Cowboy' Since Moving to NYC

Actor, writer and outlaw country music legend Steve Earle says his car obsession ended as soon as he moved to New York City.

Earle tells Q104.3 New York's "Out of the Box" with Jonathan Clarke that his move was an informed one. The singer has lived all around North America; he was born in Virginia, he grew up in Texas and began his songwriting career in Nashville. He spent years living out of a tour bus, with stints in Mexico...and even a couple months in prison.

But there's nothing better than living in Manhattan and having everything you could ever need just a matter of subway stops away.

"I don't have any cars anymore," he says. "It's one of the things I like about living in New York. My motor head period is officially over...I'm kind of an F train cowboy; I ride the subway."

And being closer to his favorite sports team, the New York Yankees, doesn't hurt much either.

Earle will always be associated with outlaw country, a defection by country music artists against the meddling of record labels, which Earle helped in the mid-'70s when he began writing songs and producing.

"It was about artistic freedom," he says of the outlaw genres catalyst. "It was about the records; it was about the music.

"These guys weren't doing what they were told by record labels. They discovered that rock artists had more artistic freedom than they did...[Waylon Jennings] and [Willie Nelson] sold a lot of records doing exactly what they wanted to. And for one moment -- and it happened to be while I was in Nashville -- the inmates were firmly in control of the asylum. And it didn't last very long, but I was there and I saw it and it was glorious."

Check out the interview above and Earle's live performance of his new song, "Lookin' for a Woman," off his new album, So You Wanna Be An Outlaw, available now.

Here's the official video for Steve Earle's "So You Wannabe An Outlaw":


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