Sections

Steve Earle

E-Squared/Warner Bros

Four Stars

In his most recent press photos, Steve Earle looks like a hillbilly Hell's Angel -- a big, long-haired, bearded badass sporting a black leather jacket and cowboy boots. But his story's more interesting than that. Earle's a singing, songwriting, guitar-playing made-for-TV movie.

The Texas-born Earle blazed into Nashville the mid-'80s, startling the country establishment with his 1986 debut "Guitar Town." He brought with him a maverick musical style (rock'n'roll fury combined with traditional country influences), an engaging persona and a self-destructive streak several miles wide. Nearly a decade later, Earle had to his credit five albums, five marriages, five divorces, a debilitating drug habit and a prison sentence.

Last year, out of jail, remarried, sober and apparently back on the straight and narrow, Earle released the acoustic "Train A' Comin'" (the title cleverly lifted from Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues"), a triumphant, bluegrass-drenched return to the studio.

With this record, though, Earle returns to the industry proper, and what a comeback it is: "I Feel Alright" is a nearly perfect rock record featuring a virtuoso performance from Earle, who proves that he can still do just about anything in his music. From the "Gloria" riffing of the autobiographical title track ("Some of you would live through me/then lock me up and throw away the key"), to the hillbilly blues of "Poor Boy," to the pristine pop of "More Than I Can Do," to the achingly lovely ballad "Valentine's Day," to the fiery rocker "The Unrepentant," Earle switches styles easily and to great effect.

He also sounds like he's exorcising some demons. On the wrenching blues song "CCKMP" (or "cocaine cannot kill my pain"), Earle describes a junkie for whom heroin is "the only gift that darkness brings." In "The Unrepentant," he sings in a hell-raising howl about a man "standin' at hell's door/with a bad attitude and a .44" facing down the devil.

The album's best song, though, may be the scrappy "Hard-Core Troubadour," in which Earle gives advice to a woman faced with a troubled ex-lover who sounds remarkably like himself. The song also gives a glimpse of Earle at his best as a songwriter: "Wherefore art thou, Romeo, you son of a bitch?" He also slips a line from Bruce Springsteen, an obvious influence: "Hey Rosalita, won't you come out tonight."

More polished and certainly more mainstream than any of his previous albums, the record won't thrill Alan Jackson-style country fans, but then Earle never did tailor his style to Nashville's current flavor of the month. It also won't bowl over longtime Earle fans devoted to his more traditional country work. But "I Feel Alright" will gain Earle plenty of new fans ("More Than I Can Do" is already doing well on Adult Album Alternative radio), and that should suit the hard-core troubadour himself just fine.

As he announces on the title track, "I've been to hell and now I'm back again." Glad he made it.

-- Jennifer Buckley