“Lately I feel like the loneliest man in America.”

So wrote Steve Earle on the most recent Fourth of July — words that you can read at the top of his notes to his latest CD, Jerusalem. It's easy to see why, for this album featured what has to be the most provocative lyric of the post-9/11 era. While rock stars and pop icons tried to outdo each other with summons to righteous warfare, Earle devoted one track to John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” whose notoriety nearly rivaled that of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Titled “John Walker's Blues,” this song dared to depict its subject as neither Satan nor slimeball, but rather as a confused kid whose sense of isolation and search for meaning led him through religious epiphany to the front lines of war against his own countrymen. Against the tread of a weary, trudging beat, Earle's raspy voice dared to suggest that something other than perfidy might explain Lindh's actions — something more gray than black or white.

Regardless of how you feel about Earle, this was a gutsy move. He paid for it too: from an angry New York Post headline (“Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-Rat”) to vilification from talk-radio hosts across the country, the rootsy singer-songwriter became Public Enemy No. 4 in the minds of many Americans even before Jerusalem's official release in late September.

For musicians whose opinions run against the tide, the risks of being candid are higher than ever. Yet, from Earle's point of view, they could never be high enough to justify any artist feeling cowed into conformity.

“Look, you can put a gun to my head, and you still wouldn't make me discourage people from writing from their conscience,” he tells Onstage. In fact, from his debut release, Guitar Town, in 1986, Earle has built his career on a commitment to say what he believes through his songs. It hasn't always been easy, and songwriters who fall short of his roughhewn eloquence will probably have an even tougher time these days.

“There's still an audience out there for real songs, but the music business doesn't cater to them,” he says. “BMG and Universal just aren't going to sign those kinds of artists now. That's got to be fixed, but until then you're going to have to find alternate ways of getting this kind of music out. I couldn't guarantee that I could get a major label deal if my label, Artemis, folded tomorrow — not in this climate. But even if I had to go get a day job and work for three to six months to buy a rig to make my next record on, I could find the resources to put it out myself. And I will be heard.”

Earle insists there is no moral basis to the idea that artists should censor themselves. He has little sympathy for those who would misrepresent themselves in order to get a record deal and then exploit their position to speak their minds. One must be true to oneself, he argues, from first note to final excoriation by the media; the damage of not doing so is too great for the artist or, ultimately, the republic to bear. “If you're willing to do anything to become famous and get on the radio, hey, go to Nashville,” Earle shrugs. “That's what they want down there: artists who don't talk back.”

But, he adds, it makes practical as well as moral sense to confront, rather than avoid, controversy. “This might not be obvious to the average A&R guy who's trying to sign the next Britney Spears,” he says. “She exists to get on the radio and sell records. I don't; I sell a couple hundred thousand copies of my albums, and it's pretty much the same people who buy each new one I put out. A major label doesn't know how to make a profit from selling those kinds of numbers right now. But for a ‘borderline Marxist,’ I make an embarrassing amount of money doing what I do.”

By refusing to limit his options, Earle is able to write all types of material — as familiar as love songs, as pastoral as a paean to baseball. “I've written four songs opposing the death penalty, but I won't hit you over the head with them at my shows,” he laughs. “I will play one of them, though, and then do ‘Copperhead Road’ and everything else that people expect me to do. You have to gauge the audience each night. I don't script my shows; they're pretty spontaneous. But if I say something one night and people think it's funny, and it seems to pace the show, I'll hang onto it, and by the end of the tour it becomes a monologue. There are monologues that I've done for years, and as long as they keep working, I'll keep doing them.

Earle is encouraged, though, by what he senses is a growing openness from listeners toward controversial material.

“Things are getting ready to change … again,” Earle concludes. “It's a lot like the late '50s now,” he says, “just before Bob Dylan came along. Remember what happened in 1969: Record executives saw 400,000 kids in one place to oppose the war. They recognized that, whatever they thought about politics, this was a market — and suddenly the major labels were in the rock 'n' roll business.”

If so, the torrent stirred by “John Walker's Blues” is about to sweep a new generation of performers into the spotlight and leave Earle feeling a little less alone than before.