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FOR A country icon and lifelong southerner, Steve Earle is remarkably at ease in New York. On a Sunday night, you can find him in a bistro in Greenwich Village with his singer-songwriter wife and one of his actor friends, discussing the Tom Stoppard play that they've just been to see uptown. His drawl cuts through the chatter, but his left-wing rants don't start fights any more. His addictions, once heroin and crack cocaine, are now expensive vintage guitars and the New York Yankees baseball team.

WEB RADIO: Click to hear music from some of the artists at Celtic Connections

Earle moved here two years ago, partly because it was the only way he could think of to avoid leaving the USA altogether, but also because he was nostalgic for the folk scene he experienced second-hand as a teenager, filtered down to Texas and Tennessee. He learned his craft with Nashville's long-haired outsiders in the 1970s, all of whom, whether they liked to admit it or not, were influenced by Bob Dylan. So when a garden flat came up between Bleecker Street and West 4th, he didn't think twice.

In the mornings, he steps out of his front door straight into the cover shot of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. It doesn't snow as much in New York in these days of global warming, and even in the dead of winter it's difficult to walk down the middle of the street like Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo did, but Earle still gets a kick out of being here and tells people where he lives more often than a man with so many fans and such fierce critics should.

When he sees tourists trying to recreate the picture, he lets them know if they're facing the wrong way or the camera needs to be further down the block. His knowledge of the neighbourhood's 1960s heyday is encyclopaedic. He has just finished working with Joan Baez on her next album and recorded his own latest record, Washington Square Serenade, in the studio that Jimi Hendrix built. One of the stand-out tracks is dedicated to Pete Seeger. Earle is even starting to look a bit like Allen Ginsberg.

He still wears a skull ring on his finger and cowboy boots on his feet, though. When he's making a point, which is always, his arms pump up and down like a riveter, driving jokes and opinions home. William Faulkner was "an uptight alcoholic who used big words because he was insecure about being a redneck", Hillary Clinton "is a Republican, just like her husband", and so on.

Over a plate of his favourite duck confit, Earle swears enthusiastically and drops punk-cultural names like hail: "Strummer and I almost came to blows many times Billy Bragg makes fun of me because I read Tolkien." But this isn't an interview, this is dinner, so when the time comes to switch the microphone on, we adjourn to the apartment that he shares with his sixth wife, Allison Moorer. As a Grammy-nominated singer, she is famous enough to have had a stalker, which is why she wishes Earle would stop giving away their address. But she is also extremely gracious, happy to retire to the bedroom while Earle talks and I listen for the best part of two hours.

The flat is, for a rock star pad, surprisingly small. Earle's portable recording studio is set up in one corner and there is a humidifier in another, to prevent his guitars from drying out and cracking. The glass coffee table is littered with ticket stubs. In addition to his career as a musician, Earle is now an actor, radio host, playwright, poet and author. His debut novel, about a backstreet abortionist visited by the ghost of Hank Williams every time he takes heroin, will be published later this year.

His hair is thinning badly, but Earle looks healthier than he has any right to, having spent his youth smoking and snorting and injecting whatever he could lay his hands on and much of his 30s living on the streets, deep in heroin dependency. He hasn't had a drink or a shot of dope since 1994. "I miss the whole live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse thing, but I'm still here, I'm 53 years old and I'm in some of the best shape of my life," he says. "It defies gravity on every f***ing level."

We were supposed to meet a week earlier, but Earle's father died and he had to fly to Tennessee for the funeral. His dad had already suffered three heart attacks, but even so it was a shock when he didn't come home from hospital this time. Earle's response to bereavement is to keep working and to keep on living his life. He is happy that it didn't happen while he was out on tour, but most of all he is grateful that he got the chance to bury his father, not the other way around.

The funeral was a rare opportunity to bring his family together. His mother, two brothers and two sisters were all there. "We're pretty dysfunctional in some ways, but we're still a family and we're still pretty close," he says. "I did manage to raise two boys who are 6'6" and 6'4" and will say I love you' to me in front of people and I'm proud of that. I was raised that way and I thank my father."

Jack Earle was an air traffic controller who worked wherever he was posted by the government, the longest stint being near San Antonio in Southern Texas. Steve was the eldest child. Growing up, his inspiration and most destructive influence was his uncle Nick Fain, only five years older than him. Fain gave him his first guitar, his first joint and his first shot of heroin, all before the age of 14. "He was a real good teacher and a real bad role model," says Earle.

Steve wanted to sound like Hendrix, but his parents wouldn't let him have an electric guitar, so he learned songs by the Beatles, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones instead, starting with Mother's Little Helper. The choice proved prophetic in more ways than one. Following the birth of her fifth child, Barbara Earle struggled with post-natal depression for three years, although the "help" she got was electro-shock therapy, not pills.

Playing the guitar and getting high soon became Earle's only passions. "I was totally uncontrollable," he says. "We butted heads about everything. But I watched my father change. He started out horrified that I was photographed at an anti-war rally when I was 15, but by the end of the war when I was registering for the draft he said, You really should consider leaving for Canada'. My father was a good barometer. He wasn't a redneck but he believed totally in his country until Vietnam."

Earle ran away from home so often that when he dropped out of school, his parents rented him a flat in San Antonio. The rest of his education took place in coffee houses and bars, playing to audiences who expected to hear both country and protest songs. He says: "When I was growing up, what you lived in fear of was getting caught with some pot, and that judge going, Well, it's three years in prison or you can join the army'. It's how most of the people that I knew ended up in Vietnam."

The country mainstream, then as now, was conservative to its boots, but the outlaw spirit was alive at the margins. Earle's second great mentor was Townes Van Zandt, another songwriter whose genius was inextricably bound up with his gift for self-destruction, more famous within Texas for his reckless nature and hard drinking than the beautifully tough songs he wrote. Years later, Earle provoked Dylan fans with a typically mouthy defence of his hero: "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."

By the time he reached Nashville, in 1975, Earle's first marriage was already on the way out. On the eve of their wedding, Sandy Henderson's father had offered him $5000 to leave town, convinced that the boy was no good. It turns out Mr Henderson was right. Earle's addictive, impulsive nature has led him down the aisle seven times, twice with the same woman, Lou-Ann Gill. He has two sons from different marriages, plus a step-daughter and a daughter from a one-night stand, who he has never met, but supported until she was grown up.

He once boasted that he planned to marry one woman for every letter of the alphabet, but swears that he has found his soul-mate in Moorer: "Remember, this is the first relationship I've ever entered into sober." Washington Square Serenade, the album he wrote in the corner of their apartment, is full of unabashed declarations of love, including a tender duet called Days Aren't Long Enough.

It took Earle more than a decade of writing songs under contract to get Nashville's producers to take him seriously as an artist, despite the patronage of Van Zandt, Guy and Susannah Clark and Rodney Crowell. "Nashville cultivated people like us," he remembers. "They let us have the night shift because they knew they'd have good stuff on their desks in the morning. But no-one was going to let you have a record career."

On country radio, Earle is still defined by his debut album, Guitar Town, a slick modern country record that he finally made in 1986. It sold 300,000 copies, providing him with the leverage he needed to stretch out creatively. His next two albums veered away from country towards harder roots rock, backed by his new band, the Dukes. They also made him dangerously rich by the standards he had become accustomed to.

"It didn't take long for the wheels to come off," he says, "but the whole Syd Barrett, Peter Green, Brian Jones thing - I think it's horseshit. I think I would have been a heroin addict if I had been a carpenter. The drugs just wouldn't have been so good and so exotic."

In his 20s, Earle used to drink because that was all he could afford. By the time he released The Hard Way in 1990, he was "carrying heroin across borders on tour hanging out with whores and other junkies". He could match the Pogues round for round and often did. On a good night, he would pour his dark adrenaline into furious, exhilarating performances, but it couldn't last.

"The Glasgow gig on that tour is one of the best live recordings I have," he says. "For me, the Barrowlands is one of the world's great venues, but it's a scary place. When they start singing football songs it sounds like they're about to rush the stage."

When he returned home, he set out on a "vacation in the ghetto" that lasted almost five years, during which time he didn't write a single song and shot a guitar collection worth $1 million into his arm, to say nothing of every royalty cheque he received.

Earle is certain he would have killed himself if he hadn't been sent to jail first. In 1994 he was sentenced to a year in prison on drugs and firearms charges. His "clean date" is the first night he spent in the cell. After a week of suffering hideous physical withdrawal symptoms, he was transferred to a treatment centre "because an inmate had just died and they didn't want any more bodies".

The 12-step programme saved him. Earle still goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, still calls his sponsor, still guards against a relapse. "I've just been tried in a big way," he says. "My father died and I ate too much, that's what happened. Caffeine's the only drug I have left and I use it too much. I'm still an addict." On hit television series The Wire he plays a counsellor named Waylon. "It's not really acting because I'm playing myself."

Earle rarely used the "recovery-speak" of a former addict, but his second career has been characterised by a belief in redemption lifted straight from the 12 steps. He has passionately opposed the death penalty, in songs, articles, non-fiction articles and a play. For several years he corresponded with Jonathan Nobles, a murderer who found God in jail and became a Catholic lay preacher. Earle witnessed his execution by lethal injection. "Trust me, it's an act of violence," he says. "There's no way that it heals anybody and if you see it that's obvious."

His political views had always been "slightly to the left of Chairman Mao", but on Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts Now his attacks on government greed, hypocrisy and stupidity came to define and even overshadow his music. One track in particular, John Walker's Blues, sealed his alienation from the establishment. It was written from the perspective of the American caught fighting for the Taliban and used a verse of the Koran - there is no God but Allah - as its refrain.

"CNN were hysterical. I got a call from my mom at three o'clock in the morning because there was a guy on there saying, He'd better have a good bodyguard'. But there was not one single death threat that I'm aware of."

Although Earle calls himself a socialist, he has always voted Democrat, in the absence of a serious alternative to the left. He thinks John Edwards "makes the most sense" of all the presidential candidates but he's not about to offer his support. "I'm so radical that if I want a Democrat to be elected probably the best thing I can do is stay away from them," he says.

Washington Square Serenade is his least political album for years, but Earle still makes room for a protest song called Steve's Hammer that could have been written in the civil rights era. "One of these days I'm gonna lay this hammer down," he sings, "when the air don't choke ya and the ocean's clean, and kids don't die for gasoline." More likely, he will take his hammer with him, to live with his friends in Ireland or Spain.

"New York is a place to make a last stand with my back to the Atlantic ocean," he says. "When my dad was sick I thought, What if I get sick and I'm in Tennessee, and need a car and somebody to drive me around?' I'd rather be one of these old commies in a powered wheelchair that you see here, running over people's feet."

Steve Earle and Allison Moorer play Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for Celtic Connections on Thursday www.celticconnections.com (tickets are sold out)

Celtic Connections: pick of the week

Opening Concert: Common Ground The 15th Celtic Connections festival opens with a smorgasbord of acts, a handful of special guests and one or two surprises. Missing from the Celtic Connections line-up this year but making an appearance here is English singer Kate Rusby, always a big draw, while Mike Scott from The Waterboys and fast-rising gaelic singer Julie Fowlis are among the Scottish contingent. It's going to be a busy night.

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Main Auditorium, January 16 (7.30pm) Steve Earle One of the few American musicians left who genuinely merits the title legend', Steve Earle makes a welcome return to the UK, this time with wife Allison Moorer. He brings a new suite of songs - ever the musical magpie he recently collaborated with King Gizmo, aka John King of hip-hop producers the Dust Brothers - and a suitcase full of old ones. His rumbustious cover of ska classic Johnny Too Bad is one of many reasons to love the man.

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Main Auditorium, January 17 (7.30pm) Lewis And Harris Night Two of the Western Isles' most celebrated musical nurseries unite for a feast of Hebridean music led by sublime gaelic singer Christine Primrose. Three other former Mod medalists feature (Margaret Stewart, Donnie Murdo MacLeod and Jenna Cumming), female quartet Teine, teenage accordian player Iain Angus MacLeod and singer-songwriter Iain Morrison. You'd be forgiven for sipping an Islay malt as you listen ...

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Strathclyde Suite, January 18 (8pm) The Burnsong Song House Norman Black of Teenage Fanclub and Roddy Woomble of Idlewild lead this performance of the work created under the aegis of the Burnsong project, an attempt to create new songs in the spirit of the Bard. Also on the bill are Jo Mango, Nuala Kennedy and Louise Quinn.

Oran Mor, January 18 (7.30pm) The Festival Club The Quality Hotel on Gordon Street is the after-hours venue of choice for punters and performers alike. There's a ceilidh practically every night and Fridays have been deemed blues night. Kicking things off this week are bluesman Josh White Jr who's joined by singer Spencer Bohren. They're followed by Geoff Muldaur (January 25) and William Lee Ellis and Guy Davis (February 1).

Logie Baird Suite, Quality Hotel, Gordon Street, January 16-February 3

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