STEVE Earle has gone back to his old habits. No, not the booze and the drugs and the days in jail, but after many years of solo acoustic tours, alt country’s premium rabble-rouser is reactivating his electric live band, The Dukes.

Or more precisely, The Dukes and Duchesses, as his wife Allison Moorer and violinist Eleanor Whitmore will be in the line-up.

“There’s this record I’ve made with T Bone Burnett and the players he worked with, and I wanted to be able to play these songs that way,” says the American country powerhouse, referring to new album I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive.

“I felt at a point where we could bring together the acoustic stuff and the electric stuff and so you’ll hear things that I’ve not played for a long time as I hadn’t a fiddle player or a guitarist as good as Chris Masterson in a while.”

This rare full-band tour maintains Earle’s tendency to keep freshening up his live act. “If I don’t keep myself interested, I don’t see how I will keep audiences interested,” he says. “They don’t pay to see me being bored.”

This year has seen the release of Earle’s long-anticipated debut novel, also entitled I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May, it imagines the troubled life of Doc Ebersole as he is haunted by the ghost of his former patient and friend, the country great Hank Williams.

On top of that, Earle is reprising his role as Harley in the second season of HBO’s series Treme, set in New Orleans, having earlier been a regular in The Wire.

“These other art forms resurface in my main art form, which is songwriting,” says Steve. “It gives you more tools to work with. As an actor, if you go out and say great words, you will write better. I just learn more about why journalists have to find poetry in the everyday.

“I don’t know why people walk around with an earpiece in. You miss the songs on the street, the overheard conversations.”

As the title taken from Hank Williams’s last single indicates, I’ll Never Get Out Of Here Alive is a record that addresses the passing of the years. “They are all, as far as I can tell, songs about mortality in one way or the other; death as a mystery rather than a punctuation mark; or at least, a comma rather than a period,” says Steve, who is 56, hardly a veteran but certainly weather-beaten.

Not that age will ever wither him. He is as outspoken as ever on political and social issues. “An atmosphere was created where it was really discouraged, and I don’t know if it’s brave or stupid, but I grew up in the Sixties and it would never occur to me to compromise myself,” he says. “That may have cost me sales but it makes me feel okay about myself.”

It has been said that Earle has stood out even above Bruce Springsteen as the troubadour of these troubled American times, but Steve disagrees. “Bruce has paid with a lot of his audience for saying the things he did, and he really is better than I am. Put the two bodies of work together,” he says. “I think there’s a reason why he’s Bruce Springsteen. He knows that and I know that.

“But the other piece in the puzzle, and probably the reason I’ve been compared to him so much, is that he’s the greatest performer rock has ever produced and the greatest communicator. Put that with being the greatest writer and you can’t deny that whatever I do, I have to cut off a piece and pay it to Bruce Springsteen anyway.” Earle’s itchy feet and restless mind have led him to move to New York City. “I had to go there because I’d run out of things to write about,” he says. “It immediately felt like I was home. I’ve never been homesick before but now I do feel that way whenever I see it in the television and I’m not there.”

Will he move again after six years in the Big Apple? “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “New York is going to take a while to digest, so maybe London will have to be in the next lifetime.”

• Steve Earle & The Dukes (and Duchesses) featuring Allison Moorer, Grand Opera House, York, tomorrow, 7.30pm, and Leeds Irish Centre, November 10. Box office: York, 0844 871 3024; Leeds, 0844 844 0444.

Did you know?

I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive is Steve Earle’s 14th studio album. Released in April on New West Records, it is his first original material since the 2007 Grammy Award-winning Washington Square Serenade and gained his highest UK chart position to date, number 28.