Copperhead Road (Deluxe Edition) (2008)

"The city hasn't changed as much as real estate agents would have you believe," Steve Earle explains about his adopted hometown of New York City. "Specifically, my neighborhood hasn't changed that much. I point people in the right direction so that they can take their picture like the cover of Freewheelin' all the time."

That's easy enough for Earle these days, because he and his wife, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, now live on the very Greenwich Village street on which the famous cover shot for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1962) was taken. In that photo, Dylan and his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo huddle against the cold as they walk along a snowy New York street. It's an indelible romantic image that captures the idealism of the folk revival that was gathering momentum in New York at the time.

Steve Earle's gripping new album, Washington Square Serenade, is a loving tribute to that era, that movement, that music and the city that gave them all a nurturing home. "That period changed pop music," Earle says. "It made lyrics much more important. Rock & roll could have become a subgenre of pop if it hadn't been for that literary aspect, which completely came out of a four-block area in New York City in one brief instant of time."

Like Freewheelin' itself, Serenade is an album that combines songs of love and protest, a stirring chronicle of both the connections between people that make life worth living and the things that must be changed in order to make such connections more possible for everyone. "I knew it was going to be pretty personal," Earle says about the album, which he recorded at Electric Lady Studios, the famed Greenwich Village recording complex that Jimi Hendrix built in the late Sixties. "The best part of my personal life was going so well I knew that chick songs were going to be no problem. As for political songs, I don't think I've ever made an apolitical record. The last two before this [The Revolution Starts...Now (2004), Jerusalem (2002)] were overtly political, and unapologetically so. This one is unapologetically personal."