Steve Earle will be two decades clean next month, and his guns-and-jail years lie almost as far behind him as the drugs. Yet the Texas-raised, Nashville-based protest singer gets no luckier in love: he's currently separated from musician wife Alison Moorer and faces a seventh divorce, which even in Nashville terms – where heartbreak is practically an industry – must be close to a record.
With his perpetual troubles in mind, to watch the long-haired, silver-bearded 59-year-old play solo here before 2,000 people with just a twangy acoustic guitar, mandolin and harmonicas for company, spilling his soul, cracking jokes and even striking notes of wild optimism, proves a powerful experience.
On a fair summer evening in Glasgow, this show represents the Kelvingrove Bandstand's first as an out-and-out music venue since its resurrection for the Commonwealth Games, and it'll host few others so loaded with meaning.
Break-up songs Now She's Gone, Goodbye ("same girl, different harmonica") and Every Part of Me, tell of the bittersweet affairs of a man who falls deep and lands hard, much as their author gruffly brackets them less romantically. "That brings me through the chicks' part," Earle quips. "It prevents my audience from growing exponentially uglier and hairier."
The night and the subject matter darkens as South Nashville Blues remembers dragging rain-sodden streets seeking a fix – a bleak dirge which actually makes his life at that time "sound a lot more fucking fun than it was". A shift into Celtic-inflected folk and country with Galway Girl and Tom Ames' Prayer has couples spinning ramshackle hoedowns in the aisles.
Even by typical standards of Americana's only "borderline Marxist" Earle ends with a bold and hopeful political statement. This Sunday, he explains, he'll sing tonight's peace-song closer Jerusalem among other numbers with his Jewish singer-songwriter friend David Broza at Masada in Israel, despite safety warnings to the contrary and the prevailing mood that reconciliation in the Middle East has rarely felt less likely. "I don't believe in lost causes," Earle affirms, stirringly. "Look at me!"
• At Beautiful Days festival, Devon on 15 August, then touring.
