Is Steve Earle America's greatest living songwriter?

It was early one morning, in the lobby of a Stockholm hotel, Steve Earle recalls, that he told Elvis Costello how he was planning to spend the next 24 hours. "Costello listened to me," Earle says, "and told me I was fucking crazy. He has known me a long time; I believe he was genuinely concerned for my safety." Also present at this meeting was Bobby Muller - the President of Veterans of America, and co-founder of the Nobel prize-winning charity International Campaign To Ban Landmines, in whose support both musicians had been performing the previous evening.

"I regard Bobby," Earle says, "as the most brilliant activist of modern times."

"And what did he say?"

"He told me I was fucking crazy too." (Readers of a sensitive disposition should note that this will not be the last occurence of an expletive in Earle's conversation.)

Earle had told them that he was planning to write a song from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, an American detainee at Guantanamo Bay. A 20-year-old Muslim, Lindh had been filmed duct-taped to a stretcher: half-naked, malnourished and trembling. This degrading footage was repeatedly screened by Fox News and CNN. The finished song refers to the United States as "the land of the infidel" and has a hauntingly beautiful chorus in Arabic, which translates: "There is no god but Allah."

"John Walker's Blues" was released in 2002, at the height of America's vertiginous optimism over the War On Terror.

"They told you it was crazy," I suggest. "But you wrote it anyway."

"I couldn't not write it. I'd almost died from drugs, 10 years earlier. Literally. I believe I was spared for a reason."

We're sitting in Café Fido, an unpretentious diner in Nashville. The musician wanted to talk here because it's close to the AA Twelve-Step meeting he just left. Earle, 52, has been sober for 13 years, but over two decades of using heroin and other drugs have left their mark: the young man who was once well-placed in Playgirl's Top Ten Most Desirable Musicians, appears, with age, to be heading for a look more reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg.

After he left Costello and Muller in Stockholm, Earle tells me, he travelled to Malmo.

"I checked into a hotel, turned on my laptop and put in 'islam.com'," he says. "I was looking for a chorus. I found it as a sound file: 'A shadu la ilaha illa Allah'. Then I sat up all night and wrote a song designed to piss some very important people off. But the main reason I did it was to humanise a young man that everybody seemed determined to vilify. As I was writing it, I can remember thinking: 'well, they'll both be safely up in the air by now. Costello's flying back to Dublin. Muller's on a plane to the States.' All I could think of was them going: 'He has really fucking done it this time.'"

His song for Lindh (currently incarcerated in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of May 2019) was not greeted with universal approval.

"When it came out, I got this call from my mother. She was freaking out, because she was watching CNN and they said: 'Let's hope that Steve Earle has good bodyguards.'"

The New York Post ran a front page that read: "Twisted ballad honors Tali-Rat."

One CNN commentator remarked that: "If Steve Earle had written that song about a Muslim country, he'd have had his tongue cut out," the implication being that Sharia law might have something to teach us after all.

"John Walker's Blues" appeared on his 2002 masterpiece, Jerusalem. Like his virulently anti-war CD, The Revolution Starts Now, released two years later, it was quintessential Earle: humane, articulate, effortlessly poetic and driven by an instinct for full-blooded subversion. (The singer has, by his own account, been arrested "only 50 or 60 times".) The Revolution Starts Now was the last album in a body of work that qualifies him, to my mind, as America's greatest living songwriter. And, to misquote something Earle once said in another context, I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cheap English shoes and say that.

It's been a very long wait for his next album.

Part of the trouble, Earle explains, was the time he's devoted to his first novel, which will be published next year. He says he's just finished recording his new CD, Washington Square Serenade, in New York, where he now lives. Earle, who once said that he wanted at least one wife for every letter of the alphabet, is back in Nashville to produce an album by his seventh spouse, singer Allison Moorer.

"I have seven finished tracks from my own album outside, in the car," he says.

"The New Yorker said it's going to sound like rap. Actually, nobody has heard much of it. I'd describe it as very folky."

Steve Earle, a man whose views make Billy Bragg sound like Michael Howard, is one of the very few popular musicians who can hold his own, when debating, in any company. He hosts a talk show on Air America, and his forthright contributions enlivened the BBC's coverage of last year's anniversary of 9/11. Most of his greatest songs, like "Fort Worth Blues" - his mournful eulogy to his mentor and fellow hedonist, the late Townes Van Zandt - are not overtly political. That said, Earle's 1990 classic " Billy Austin" manages, in six minutes, to be as effective a condemnation of the death penalty as a lifetime's worth of BBC2 documentaries.

"Capital punishment," in Earle's words, "means never having to say you're sorry."

While Vietnam had American musicians scrambling for their instruments, Earle's contemporaries, with certain notable exceptions, have addressed the Iraq war obliquely, if at all.

"Which is surprising, isn't it, because there are some situations that you'd have thought would politicise anybody. Where is Bruce Springsteen on Iraq?"

"He's very ..." Earle pauses. "I know him very well. I don't think he's been absent. Everybody has to make their own decision about this."

Then you have the strange situation of the Dixie Chicks, whose singer, Natalie Maines, made an off-the-cuff remark criticising Bush, in London on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003. Once the flak started flying, the group as a whole endeavoured to distance themselves from what Maines had said. In this context, The Dixie Chicks, now the most celebrated musical opponents of the Iraqi conflict, were like learner drivers who accidentally took a slip road on to the M25, while Earle was powering up the fast lane with his heavy right foot on the floor. "Now public opinion is more in their favour, The Dixie Chicks appear to have realised they have a commodity to market."

"What the fuck else are they going to do?" Earle asks. "They are obviously making lemonade, to an extent. What Natalie said, she said as a citizen. It took balls."

While we're on the subject, Earle says, "when Europeans start criticising Americans over Iraq, I have to say that I think Tony Blair was about the most dangerous thing you can possibly imagine. Without Bill Clinton, Blair was not possible. Without Blair, George W Bush was not possible.(omega) As soon as you perceive Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown, or Bill Clinton or his fucking wife to be to the left of anything, you are in trouble. Why was Iraq possible? Why did you Brits let them do it? Why didn't you take to the streets..."

"We did."

"OK, you did, but why did you allow it to keep on going? Why isn't there a fucking revolution in England? Because," Earle continues, " you wanted a latte. Suddenly there were good restaurants in England. Suddenly you could get a decent cup of coffee.

"People thought Brown and Blair were responsible for the prosperity, that benefited a certain social group. In England you were like - 'OK, we'll bitch about the war a little at Starbucks, but let's not fucking rock the boat.' That mentality is a contagious disease which you caught from us, and it's called materialism. I do not believe, by the way, that Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place."

"Somebody told me you said you resemble George W Bush in some ways..."

"Absolutely. I was with some people, and they were all asking about Bush. 'Why is he the way he is? Why does he keep repeating his mistakes?' I told them: Bush, like me, is a recovering addict. And George W Bush..." Earle stops himself. "I can't say what I was going to say, because it would be busting his anonymity."

There is the hint of a pause.

"But fuck him. I can't stand the motherfucker. George W Bush went to AA meetings when he was governor of Texas. I know people who... he was seen in meetings all the time he was governor, in Austin."

"That doesn't make him a bad person."

"No. But the reason this is important is that now, as President of the United States, going to Twelve-Step meetings is impossible. There are rules about that and the CIA writes those rules. The guy who established Alcoholics Anonymous took the principles from something called the Oxford Group, which was totally Anglican, then made a system that worked for anybody - even if they were agnostic."

"So AA meetings tempered Bush's instincts?"

"From the moment he took office, the Christian rhetoric started to ratchet up. In his life, he replaced the Twelve-Step Programme with fundamentalist Christianity. I really believe that."

Earle is rarely short of an opinion - he launched, at one point, into an unexpected homily to Arsenal FC ("I don't care what you think of them. I'm an Arsenal fan. I fucking am. Fucking Manchester. Fucking Oasis.) Neither is he someone who enjoys taking orders: he recalls a tour with Bob Dylan, in the early stages of which, he says, the legendary songwriter paid him no attention.

"Then one of his people came up and told me Dylan was worried about my 'profanity' on stage. I said: 'You know what? Tell him to fuck off.' The day after that," he recalls, "he started talking to me."

Friends say that Earle, despite his sometimes confrontational manner, is not an arrogant man. "When we look back on the poisoned reign of Junior," Elvis Costello told me, "from the vantage point of peace and resolution - should that unlikely day ever arrive - we will see Steve Earle as one of the less self-regarding members of the cultural resistance."

Earle refers more than once to the fact that he really should be dead.

"The idea of live fast, die young and leave a good corpse is all very well. What if you turn out to be a tough motherfucker, and die a slow and horrible death? That's what almost happened to me." How many rock stars, I find myself thinking, have done their best work over the age of 40? Who would have wanted to watch Jimi Hendrix in middle age, grinding out the kind of ambient soundtrack music to which his instincts were already leading him? Who would have liked Jim Morrison to be parading his double hip replacement on stage at the Barbican next week, fronting an ensemble called The New Doors?

Steve Earle is different. Earle's great work is now - even though he's currently best known to a mass audience for a relatively early track, " The Devil's Right Hand," because it's used in Brokeback Mountain. Brought up mainly in San Antonio, Texas, he was slow, given his precocious talent, to get a recording contract. He made two classic albums - Copperhead Road and Guitar Town - before his addictions temporarily extinguished his professional life.

"I lost five years, from 35 to 40," he says. "My drug habit got to the point that I couldn't leave the source. I was homeless in Nashville. I was usually four blocks from here, in a really bad motel, sleeping on the floor in other people's rooms. I've slept under bridges."

In this period, which ended at the beginning of 1995, he dedicated himself full time to smoking crack and injecting heroin. Most of his supplies were procured in Lewis Street: a project housing area commemorated in his song "South Nashville Blues", which has lines such as "The devil lives in Lewis Street I swear / I've seen him rocking, in his rocking chair" and "I took my pistol and a hundred dollar bill / I had everything I needed to get me killed."

The song is characteristic of his guitar technique: mesmerising, yet totally unflashy. Earle exudes the qualities of any virtuoso - effortless grace, and the sense that he may possibly be in touch with another reality. Within weeks of becoming sober, in 1995, he had played on recordings for Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams.

Earle is relatively cautious when talking about the instability of his earlier life. Which makes it all the more remarkable that, in 2002, he allowed the writer Lauren St John, to publish Hardcore Troubadour, a biography drawing on interviews with his friends and family.

"I've never read it," he says. "I did it because Lauren is a friend." The result is one of the most remarkable music histories ever written. At one point, St John describes how the musician was visited by Jehovah's Witnesses, who found him hunched over his crack pipe. Earle invited them in.

"I heard," he told them, "that you think only a limited number of people are going to get into heaven."

"That's right," one nodded. "Only 144,000."

"Oh," murmured Steve. He sucked at the pipe. "So how come y'all are out recruiting?"

The Witnesses were off, he said, "like a prom dress."

Earle never read the book, but his relatives did, notably his younger sister, singer Stacey Earle. "Some of them said things they regret," he says. "I told them: you say it, they print it. That's how it works."

Without Hardcore Troubadour, which is well-written and thoroughly researched, we may never have known how he practised his golf swing through the sliding windows of his bedroom at the Marriott Marquee in Atlanta, gradually narrowing the gap to make misjudged drives - and there were many - more emphatic.

"And how many of us can say that we drove a car through a wall into our own living room?"

"That wasn't me," says Earle. "That was two friends of mine. It was a new Camero. They drove in through the French doors. I was watching Saturday Night Live when they arrived."

He pauses. "I don't enjoy talking about some of this shit. At the same time I'm aware that it is relevant to my life. I am also very grateful for still being here. At some point, I was lucky enough to grow up."

Stephen Fain Earle was born in Fort Monroe, Virginia, but was raised in Schertz, outside San Antonio. His father, Jack, was an air-traffic controller. Barbara, his mother, was subject to clinical depression: precipitated, Earle says, by the fact that he and his younger siblings, Mark, Kelly and Stacey, arrived within less than five years of each other.

"My mother was horribly depressed. She'd been a model parent when I was young - but when I was 12 or 13, she began just laying on the couch, and sleeping. She'd go off to hospital for shock treatment, then come back and sleep some more. She recovered after I moved to Nashville when I was 19."

"Did you feel responsible for her condition?"

"To some extent. I was the oldest. I knew my mother was fixated on my not doing well in school."

As a boy, he was strongly influenced by Barbara's half-brother, Nick Fain, a drug addict who lived with them and, being five years older, was essentially an older brother.

Earle was using hypodermics at an age when some of his schoolfriends had not yet ignited their first cigarette. "The first time I took cocaine, I shot it."

"How old were you?"

"Thirteen. I was doing what Nick did."

"What became of him?"

"He lives on the street, or with the Salvation Army. Last I heard he was in Austin." Earle pauses. "To look at him, he could be 80."

When researching the life of someone who's been married more than once, I tell Earle, it sometimes helps to divide their history according to their spouses, just as conventionally minded English historians do with monarchs.

"This doesn't work so well with you - it gets positively confusing, because you've had seven..."

"And one of them I married twice," says Earle. He has been widely credited with the definition of marriage as a process whereby "every five years you find a woman that hates you, and buy her a house"; he says he heard that from Glen Campbell, also on his seventh matrimonial excursion.

"Who were you talking about when you said: 'I was balancing on a wall, nitrous oxide in one hand, tequila and LSD in the other. She looked up; it was love at first sight?'"

"Cynthia [his second wife: 1977-1980]. She was as self- destructive as I was."

"That relationship has been described as violent."

"Nobody ever put anybody in hospital. I did chase her round a parking lot in my truck, but all I hit was cars."

Earle married his first wife, Sandy, when he was 19, and stayed with her a couple of years. On the eve of their wedding, her father had offered him $5,000 to leave town. Carol-Ann Hunter, his third wife, who married him in 1981, lasted four years. He married Lou-Anne Gill twice, either side of a liaison with a woman named Teresa. He does seem to have been, in Carol-Ann's words, "a hard dog to keep under the porch."

"The thing you have to remember," Earle says, "is that my marriage to Allison [in November 2005] is the first I've ever entered into sober." He has four children from previous marriages, including Carol-Ann's son, musician Justin Earle.

"Before your lost five years, considering the amount of narcotics you were indulging in, you seem to have held things together reasonably well."

"Ambition helped. I was smart enough to realise that I shouldn't hang around with Townes all the time and copy every move he made. [A chronic alcoholic, depressive and gambler, Van Zandt pulled the trigger three times during a solo experiment with Russian roulette. He eventually succumbed to a heart attack in 1997, aged 52.] "I did things without thinking what the consequences were. The biggest lie that all addicts believe is that: 'I am not hurting anybody but myself.' I was kind of a bad motherfucker, you know?" In 1994 he received a visit from a concerned-looking Townes Van Zandt. " I must be in trouble," Earle said, "if they're sending you."

His 2001 collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses, is an essentially autobiographical treatment of the unbridled depravity of this period. Harold Mills, his main dealer in South Nashville, appears under his own name.

"At one point you were discharged from hospital after a car crash, wearing a paper gown, with your forehead stitched up, and went straight back down to Lewis Street."

"I'd totalled my ex-wife's car. I was on crutches. I had to buy more drugs."

"How did you stop?"

"I encountered the immovable object. I went to jail [on a charge related to possession of heroin] where I was physically restrained from taking drugs. It takes a while to figure out how to get heroin, in jail."

His mother wrote him a letter which said: "Steve: I think you know what you have to do."

He went into the Twelve-Step Programme and emerged, sober, at the end of 1994.

"At which point, presumably, you were a different person."

"Yes. I'd remarried Lou by that time. She was my most efficient co-dependent. When I came out, she started using again. I had to leave."

The time and energy he had dissipated went into his work as a musician, writer and activist. The musical record of his epiphany is El Corazon, an album he wrote mainly in Galway following the death of Townes Van Zandt in early 1997. It was there, staring out at Galway Bay, that he composed " Fort Worth Blues" and "Christmas in Washington", his epic tribute to Woody Guthrie, which has been recorded by many artists including Joan Baez.

"It's Christmas time in Washington," the song begins, "and Democrats rehearse / Getting into gear for four more years / Of things not getting worse."

There had been perhaps only one consistent enthusiasm in Earle's life that could not be viewed as a sin: since the 1980s he had pursued his opposition to the death penalty by writing letters to inmates on Death Row. For 10 years Earle had been corresponding with Jonathan Nobles - a methamphetamine user convicted of the murder of two young women. In prison, Nobles had become a lay preacher. He was one of 246 executions sanctioned by George W Bush in his less than six years as Texas governor.

Earle visited Nobles on each of the 10 days leading up to his execution by lethal injection, in 1998.

"Steve," Nobles said to Earle as he was being wheeled into the execution room, strapped to a trolley, "I can't believe I had to go through all this to see you dressed in a suit." Nobles died as he was reciting "Silent Night".

Three days later, Earle was in Galway, writing "The Witness", a short story which, he says, describes his exact recollection of the details of Nobles' death.

"His prayer was interrupted by a sound from his own lips; a low-pitched bark, a startling, incongruous sound, like a small child with whooping cough as the air was forced from his lungs and his head pitched forward, it was as if an invisible anvil had been dropped on his chest from a great height, there was a soft hissing sound like air leaking from a punctured tyre." The immediate impact of the injected drugs was such that Nobles' glasses flew off his face.

"Perhaps there's something to be said for a firing squad."

"It isn't the brutality of the method that makes me opposed to the death penalty," Earle says. "What I object to is that my government is supposed to represent me. I don't want their blood on my hands. In that sense, I'm not trying to stop anyone from going to Death Row. I'm trying to stop me from going to hell."

"It's curious that your sister Stacey said she thought you were scared, on one level. Nothing about you looks scared to me."

"I'm scared of a number of things, but Stacey doesn't have any idea what they are. I have stood as close as this," the musician indicates a distance of a few yards, "while the state of Texas killed a man. I held his mother's hand while he was being executed. Death is not something I am afraid of. I am more acquainted with it than most. I have no problem with the word God. I pray. But I pray because it's good for me. It doesn't matter whether I pray or not; there's still going to be a God."

"I remember watching you act in the TV series The Wire," I tell him.

"I wasn't really acting. I was playing a recovering addict."

"One of your lines was something like: 'While I'm stood here sounding strong, my disease is out in the parking lot, doing push-ups, taking steroids, waiting for me to stumble.' Do you ever fear that you might?"

"Of course I do. I've seen people with 20 years' sobriety go down."

We leave the cafe, and the singer drives me around Nashville. Earle drives down - and that's no idle preposition - to South Nashville. He turns into Lewis Street.

"I can't say I feel comfortable here," he says. "I haven't been in Lewis Street for more than 10 years."

He points out what remains of the Travellers' Motel, where he used to squat, and the house once occupied by the late Harold Mills, his dealer. He pulls up to show me one of the many places he himself nearly died.

"I'd come here to buy coke, and the police pulled me over. I had a Glock 45 in the waistband of my pants. They gave me one of those police wedgies. My gun fell on to the road, and went off twice. I remember thinking: 'Now I am dead.' They didn't shoot me, though. I don't know why. They let me off with one of the worst beatings I've ever had."

Nashville - and especially this southern district - has come to stand for his old life; the one he's not that eager to revisit, much less relive. The north, and New York, represent his new existence, revolving around theatres, bookshops, a stable relationship and absolutely no narcotics. He drives up Old Hickory Boulevard, near where Townes Van Zandt died, and turns on the sound system. It's the opening track from Washington Square Serenade.

I can tell instantly from the defiant volume that Earle knows what he's done here is special.

The song is driven by his characteristically beautiful guitar playing. " Sunset in my mirror," Earle sings. "Pedal on the floor. Bound for New York City and I won't be back no more, you won't see me around. Goodbye Guitar Town, fare thee well, I'm bound to run; this ain't never been my home. "

It's a curiously hypnotic sound, which combines his delicate acoustic guitar-picking with the sort of thunderous percussion that causes OAPs to glare at vehicles. These songs have been produced by John King, best known for his work with The Beastie Boys and Beck.

"It's less political than your recent work."

"I wanted this to be personal," Earle says, "and to reflect the people that first made me want to play music. That guitar sound is basically a homage to [Bob Dylan's legendary guitar player] Bruce Langhorne."

One song, called "Walking Down The Jericho Road" has the occult beauty of some of the pieces on Harry Smith's classic Anthology Of American Folk Music. Another, "City Of Immigrants", features the Brazilian band Forro In The Dark. It's never an easy moment when someone plays you their new work, owing to the fear of having to simulate enthusiasm for something that has privately disappointed you. That isn't a problem today: this is a magnificent album. The seventh track is a gentle love song called "My Baby Sparkles and Shines".

"It gets a little darker from there on in," he says.

It's seven in the evening and the light's beginning to fade by the time he drops me at my hotel. Watching him drive away, I suspect that his thoughts are still with the lyrics of the new CD that he's almost certainly put on repeat play: "Sunset in my mirror… pedal on the floor. " As confident as he can be that the most turbulent stage of his journey is behind him, Steve Earle pulls out on to 8th Avenue, and heads north.

Steve Earle plays tonight at The William Howard Centre, Brampton, Cumbria; on 27 July at the Cambridge Folk Festival; and 28 July at Midland Music Festival, Mullingar, Ireland. His new album is released in Septembe r

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