They seem an unlikely pairing -- Joan Baez, the crystalline-voiced queen of folk, and alt-country hero Steve Earle, the once-notorious "last of the hard-core troubadours."
But at 67, Baez is winning rave reviews for her terrific, eloquent new collaboration with Earle, "Day After Tomorrow."
An oft-married, recovering drug addict, Earle, 53, has a reputation as an opinionated, confrontational, cantankerous sort. But like Baez, he's also an activist who has crusaded for justice and peace.
"They say he's gruff, etcetera, but he was a pussycat with me," said Baez, who comes to Minneapolis for a concert Thursday. "I didn't have a whole lot of resistance to just about anything he brought up. He picked [the musicians], he's worked with them, he knows how they get along with each other. They just had an intuitive knack. I knew with him there wouldn't be any fuss, there wouldn't be any diva business."
Baez doesn't recall when she discovered Earle's music. "Long enough ago that I can't remember," she said. He was her opening act on tour a decade ago, and she started performing his song "Christmas in Washington," which she recorded in 2003. A year later, she gave him an award in England.
The idea of his producing her album was hatched over lunch by Earle and Baez's manager. She said she instantly agreed because of Earle's musicality and because "both of us are planted in the earth."
Earle provided three of his own songs for the album, and Baez, with the aid of her manager, chose tunes by Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Eliza Gilkyson and Patty Griffin.
"It wasn't a bunch of protest songs," said Baez. "The feeling was to have it be a bookend to the very beginning of my career. And it kind of is. It has the feeling of the ballad days, but it's completely contemporary."
