Steve Earle turns 60 on Saturday, ahead of next month’s release of the first blues record of his 35-year career, as CHARLES HUTCHINSON and MARK JACOBSON report.

STEVE Earle’s 16th studio album, Terraplane, is a blues record, recorded in the wake of his latest divorce.

“You saying I made a blues record because I’m getting divorced?” asks the much-married Texan troubadour, who has made a Greenwich Village apartment his home since moving to New York several years ago.

Everyone will surmise that rock, country, bluegrass and folk musician Earle has caught a case of the blues after he and country singer-songwriter Allison Moorer were no more.

“I know that’s what they’ll think. And they won’t be wrong…but it is a little more complicated than that,” he clarifies.

He has been married seven different times to six different women, but in a 35-year career, Earle has penned very few break-up songs. So few that he could not think of one himself. “I don’t want to waste songs on girls that are going. I’d rather save them for girls that are coming,” he reasons.

Through the years, his songwriting his steered a path away from his own heartbreak, until now. Until the new album’s sardonic Go Go Boots Are Back Again, the elegiac shuffle Best Lover I Ever Had and the mournful Better Off Alone. “That’s completely unchartered territory for me, and probably the best song on the record partially for that reason,” says the newly adrift Earle.

“Everyone talks about how many times I’ve been married. They don’t talk about how many times I’ve been divorced, maybe that’s what this record is about,” he reflects. “I mean, I thought I had it pretty much licked. I had a little bit of money in the bank for the first in my life. I’d been married for longer than I ever had been. Allison and I were together for eight and a half years. None of my other marriages had lasted more than three or four. We had this great little kid.

“I thought, okay this is how it is supposed to be. It was the only time I’d ever married when I was sober. Those other marriages were in the 1980s when I was using. After that, I lived with people but I didn’t marry them. I didn’t think I was ready. Then, I thought I was and it didn’t work out.”

Earle knew he would go on to make a blues record when he was recording 2013’s The Low Highway.

“Weird, doing the sessions of that record,” he recalls. “Allison’s on it but we were really coming apart. After that, I spent a long time on the road, a lot of time by myself. I wrote a third of Terraplane on tour in Europe, five weeks travelling around alone with just a guitar, a mandolin and backpack. I needed to be by myself and I needed to see if I could do it. Songs like Better Off Alone came out of that.

“I’m still alone, so I’m thinking maybe that’s just the way its gonna be for me. I’m still an optimist but like I don’t have a lot of optimism about current politics, maybe I have less about relationships. That’s what I’m telling myself right now, anyway. I’m feeling pressed for time. I’m going to be sixty years old [his birthday is on Saturday]. I’ve got a four-year-old son. I have no idea how things are going to turn out for him. I have to make sure he’s kind of set up. My father died when he was 74. I’ll probably outlive him but you know, you just want to make it all count.”

Recorded at the House of Blues Studio D in Nashville, Tennessee, Steve Earle & The Dukes’ Terraplane will be released on February 16, on New West Records as an 11-track CD, deluxe CD/DVD and digitally. The deluxe version will include journalist Mark Jacobson’s interview with Earle, three live acoustic songs filmed on the Studio D porch and a behind-the-scenes short film on the making of the album.

Terraplane takes its title from the 1930s car model designed by the Hudson Motor Car Company of Detroit , Michigan, also the inspiration for bluesman Robert Johnson’s 1936, song Terraplane Blues, recorded in San Antonio, Texas.

Earle was raised outside of San Antonio before migrating to Houston and Texan blues duly made their indelible mark on him. “There was Fort Worth, where the model was Freddy King, and there was the Houston scene, which was dominated by Lightnin’ Hopkins. Two very different styles,” he says.

He saw both King and Hopkins play and was exposed to Johnny Winter, Jimmy and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Billy Gibbons too, each of them influencing his storytelling.

“The blues are anything but superficial,” he says in Terraplane’s liner notes. “For my part, I’ve only ever believed two things about the blues: one, that they are very democratic, the commonest of human experience, perhaps the only thing that we all truly share and two, that one day, when it was time, I would make this record.”

Did you know?

Steve Earle’s memoir, I Can’t Remember If We Said Goodbye, will be published this year by the Hachette Book Group.