"Steve's Last Ramble," and the garage-rocking "All of My Life" evincing a masterful understanding of an unwritten rule of the latter genre: The worse it's played, the better it sounds. Keep digging into Transcendental Blues and you'll hit straight-up bluegrass ("Until the Day I Die"), a Springsteen-by-way-of-the-Byrds confessional ("I Don't Want to Lose You Yet") and a sobering acoustic meditation on a death-row prisoner's final hours ("Over Yonder [Jonathan's Song]"). There's even some basic uncut Steve Earle in a handful of restless ("Another Town") and haunted ("Lonelier Than This") numbers cut from rootsy, plain-spoken cloth. Still, Earle keeps his material hewed to a basic theme -- the universality of the blues -- and finds that home truth everywhere his muse takes him. In his own words, it all comes down to this: "Everybody wants to be somebody's somethin'/Ain't nobody wants to be blue." (RS 843)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH