The hardcore troubadour returns to tour Australia and New Zealand with his latest studio masterpiece ‘Washington Square Serenade’ under his belt (album released September 2007) and his beautiful songstress wife Allison Moorer to open the shows.

This time around, Steve has chosen to perform solo in the special intimate setting of fully seated theatre venues.

Steve Earle’s recorded music career has to date delivered twelve studio albums and five live albums. Steve has also written books both story and poetry and a stage play. In amongst all of this he does what we love him for best; travels the lengths and breadth of the world performing his music live.

Asked how he would like listeners to respond to Washington Square Serenade, Earle, characteristically, is ready with a bold answer. "If you feel like you don't know what America is all about right now, and you want to reorient yourself to what America should be about, it's a really good time to come to New York City," he says. "I needed really badly at this point in my life to see a mixed-race, same-sex couple holding hands in my own neighborhood. It makes me feel safer."

"I've been pretty heartbroken about the way things have gone politically in this country the last few years, and I seriously considered moving someplace else," he concludes. "Then I figured out that I didn't have to leave the country. All I had to do was come to New York." Washington Square Serenade – in its commitment, its values, its musical intelligence and, finally, its very American optimism about the possibilities for a better world – demonstrates why. - Anthony DeCurtis

Allison Moorer is releasing her new album ‘Mockingbird’ in Australia through The Planet Company Saturday September 6th.

Moorer - together with producer and acclaimed roots artist Buddy Miller - has conjured a rich pastiche of the phases of women's hearts, lives, needs and yearnings. Whether it's a dervish take on Patti Smith's “Dancing Barefoot,” a stoic, proud embrace of Kate McGarrigle's “Go, Leave,” a winking nod to the naughty that is Nina Simone's “Sugar In My Bowl” or the elegant survival of her sister Shelby Lynne's “She Knows Where She Goes, the lithe songstress demonstrates diversity, eclecticism and the range of the XX chromosome set.

Since their last trip to Australia, Steve and Allison have relocated to New York City and have settled in Greenwich Village.

Steve and Allison now live on the very Greenwich Village street on which the famous cover shot for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1962) was taken. In that photo, Dylan and his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo huddle against the cold as they walk along a snowy New York street. It's an indelible romantic image that captures the idealism of the folk revival that was gathering momentum in New York at the time.

Steve Earle's gripping new album, Washington Square Serenade, is a loving tribute to that era, that movement, that music and the city that gave them all a nurturing home. "That period changed pop music," Earle says. "It made lyrics much more important. Rock & roll could have become a subgenre of pop if it hadn't been for that literary aspect, which completely came out of a four-block area in New York City in one brief instant of time."

Steve Earle brings his ‘Washington Square Serenade’ World tour to Australia in November 2008.