Earle had a major hit two years later with the Vietnam-cum-marijuana anthem "Copperhead Road" and the album of the same name, but even then was sinking into the pattern of cocaine and heroin abuse that would cause him to disappear from the music scene in the early '90s. By 1994, when he was arrested and served a brief prison sentence, Earle was by his own admission spending up to $500 a day on crack cocaine.

Earle says he's been clean since joining a 12-step recovery program eight years ago (to maintain "anonymity," he's not supposed to say what specific meetings he attends), and he bounced back musically with the largely acoustic "Train a Comin'" in 1995 and "I Feel Alright" in 1996, two of his best albums. With the fine "Transcendental Blues" in 2000, Earle seemed to have solidified his position as a revered survivor of the hard life, as well as an alt-country pioneer who has inspired much of today's thriving Americana music scene. Then came the album "Jerusalem," and of course the song "John Walker's Blues."

Encouraged by Danny Goldberg, the head of Artemis Records (which distributes Earle's E-Squared label) to write an overtly political album in the wake of Sept. 11, Earle delivered what may be his masterwork to date. A swooping, soaring chronicle of paranoia and despair, "Jerusalem" borrows sounds and themes from all over the musical map, in Earle's inimitable manner.

On the sardonic "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)," you'll hear the guitar riff from "Satisfaction" (and maybe "Jumping Jack Flash" too). The bass line on "Conspiracy Theory" sounds a lot like Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," while the one on "I Remember You" (a lovely duet with Emmylou Harris) strongly suggests "Every Breath You Take." There are electronic effects and traces of hip-hop amid the thundering Old Testament apocalypse of "Ashes to Ashes," the album opener. "The Kind" is a simple, straightforward country ballad, while "Go Amanda" (written with Sheryl Crow) is Skynyrd-style boogie and "What's a Simple Man to Do?" pays tribute to the "narcocorrido" tradition of Mexican norteño pop.

More people have paid attention to the lyrical content of the album than to its music, of course. Even beyond the New York Post and Fox News reporters and right-wing shock jocks who have called Earle a traitor, some people I can respect, like Salon columnist Greil Marcus, have dismissed the wide-ranging, bitter skepticism of "Jerusalem" as cheap left-wing nihilism.

My own position is that there's nothing cheap or fake about nihilism or cynicism at this moment in world history. But I would add that the plaintive, haunting "John Walker's Blues" is not the album's most interesting or most important song. That honor, as Robert Christgau suggests in his perceptive and generally sympathetic discussion of the album in the Village Voice, belongs to the extraordinary title track. It's an unforgettable hymn-like song in which Earle dares to imagine, of all things, lasting peace between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East. As befits him, it's an image both secular and spiritual, political and religious, of this world and some other, now-unimaginable one: "I believe that one fine day/ All the children of Abraham/ Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem."

Earle is currently touring the United States in support of "Jerusalem," hopes to produce "Karla" in Los Angeles or New York next year, and is writing a novel. (His short-story collection, "Doghouse Roses," was published last year.) Between the Saturday matinee and Saturday evening performances of "Karla," he and I crossed 21st Avenue to sit on the back porch of one of those non-Starbucks cafés in near-freezing weather, while Earle smoked most of a pack of American Spirits, chatted with numerous passers-by, dogs and children and talked freely about Nashville, God, death and America.

You do seem at home in Nashville, even though in some ways your politics don't really mesh with this part of the country that much.

You know, if you want an idea of what's going on in the United States of America, this is a much better place to figure it out than New York or L.A. I mean, I wish I lived in New York sometimes, or even L.A. It's tough to find a place to send your kids to school here, if you're me. I mean, if you think the way that I think. My youngest is 15, but Sara [Sharpe, Earle's live-in girlfriend, the lead in "Karla" and the artistic director of the BroadAxe Theatre] has a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old, and we're going through hell with all that. Public schools here suck, for the most part, and private schools are for the most part religious. Really the best thing you can do is Catholic school.

Being a playwright is brand new for you. Have you always been interested in theater?

The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn't kick me out of his class. He turned me on to "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." I had picked up Dylan with "Bringing It All Back Home," and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn't heard.

My grandmother was the wardrobe mistress in a small college theater department, at Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, Texas. So I grew up with her costuming shows, I always dug it. Then I got into theater as literature in a really big way. I didn't finish high school and sort of had to educate myself. I knew about Shakespeare from taking drama and I was lucky enough to have a teacher who encouraged me to read the sonnets. I had this real sense of how good he was on a literary level. I went through a pretty intense Tennessee Williams thing, a really intense Eugene O'Neill thing, just reading plays.

Once I started writing prose, then the next thing was I started writing poetry. I've published very little poetry, but I wrote haiku for a year -- one every day for a year. Which was cool, but I haven't written any poetry since, because I've been doing this.

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical. I mean, theater is a visual medium but it's a different kind of visual medium from film. It's not an everything's-possible visual medium that doesn't require you to use your imagination at all, you know? It's a unique environment, when you walk into a space where somebody's put a show up. It's only going to last for as long as it lasts and you have to be there. Live theater changes every night.

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