Sugarland adores Steve Earle

One of the instant standout tracks on Sugarland’s new “Love on the Inside” album is “Steve Earle,” an uproarious and shameless love letter to and about the celebrated Texas troubadour. Against a bouncy honky-tonk two-step beat, the duo's lead singer, Jennifer Nettles, deadpans:

Well I heard Steve Earle had lots of wives
About as many as cats have lives
Met 'em on his records and we’re good friends
He writes a song for everyone
They fall in love and before it’s done
He writes an even better one when it ends.

Steve Earle, Steve Earle
Please write a song for me
I promise I won’t take a dime
When it comes my time to leave
The others wanted your whole heart
But I just want your sleeve.

When I sat down Tuesday with Nettles and her Sugarland partner, Kristian Bush, at their hotel in Santa Monica, they talked about how the song encapsulates their own experiences as music fans.

"There’s a huge piece of the puzzle of this album that has to do with being a fan," Bush said, at which point Nettles jumped in: "Let's talk about Steve Earle. It’s the story of being a fan, and it’s also a songwriter writing about a songwriter whose life could be a song -- frankly, it is a song."

I couldn’t resist asking whether they’d heard anything back about their, er, tribute from Earle himself...

or, more intriguingly, from Earle’s wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer.

“Noooo,” Nettles said, half laughing, half disappointed. “We gave it to his manager, obviously out of respect to say, ‘This is what we’ve done, what do you think?’ Steve said, ‘People have written books about me, I have articles written about me and I don’t read those. I don’t want to hear a song written about me.’

“But,” she added with an obvious sense of pride, “his manager did give him the gist of what it was about and said he got a chuckle out of it. We felt we had been validated just by making him laugh. In my mind, he howled.”

As for Bush’s take? “At the very least,” he said, “Allison has something to cover.”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Sugarland taken with a  Lomo Oktomat 35mm camera by Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times