Country singer Steve Earle will play Saturday with his wife, Allison Moorer.

NYT / SARA KRULWICH

For decades, Steve Earle was in Nashville but not of it. That’s Nashville’s loss. Earle’s best music does what the best country music is supposed to do — reflect the hopes, dreams and realities of real people. And while he certainly found an audience over the years, the lack of support he got from the country-music machine redounds to their discredit, not his.

Last year, he married musical partner Allison Moorer, and they moved to New York. You can hear the effects of both of these changes on Earle’s latest record, last year’s Washington Square Serenade.

He describes the record as “basically love songs for Allison Moorer and New York City,” and that’s what it sounds like. John King, of The Dust Brothers, produced Washington Street Serenade, and he brings a modern aesthetic to the timeless Earle point of view — unpretentious, non-precious and full of detail and heart. King’s influence doesn’t quite make it hip-hop, but Earle describes it as having been made “by hip-hop rules,” and the use of drum loops and sequences only adds to the plain-spoken observations about life in the city and being in love. Earle and Moorer will play with a DJ for part of their Newport performance, as it’s the most accurate way to re-create some of the new material.

This will be Earle’s third time at Newport, including a stint with Del McCoury’s bluegrass band. “I remember there was some point where we weren’t sure there was going to be a festival. But it always seems to bounce back.”

There were a few factors behind the move to New York, says Earle, who still owns a house in Tennessee and says, “It’s not a particularly great time to sell one, so I’ll probably still have it for a while.” When his father died last year, he got a look at the long view. “It became obvious to me that I missed the ‘live fast and leave a good-looking corpse’ kind of thing, and I might not spontaneously combust in the back of a bus.”

He thought about becoming older, and about the possibility of spending years virtually incapacitated, as his father had. It was more accurate, he says, to say he was based in Nashville rather than actually living there, and the possibility of one day slowing down made him think.

“Tennessee is a beautiful place, but there are a lot of Baptists there! If I had had to stay in town all the time, it would’ve been a hard place for me to live. . . . If something was to happen to me, I’d rather be one of those old commies in a power wheelchair who set foot on Bleecker Street once in a while than be a prisoner somewhere in Nashville.”

The desire to start a new life in a new place with Moorer was also part of it. “Having a city where we had a clean slate, and that we had for ourselves . . . was definitely part of the decision to move there. And having a wife with a job made it possible to afford to move to New York City. I hadn’t had that experience in a long time!”

When it’s suggested he had an adversarial relationship with the country-music Mecca, he sees it as a more fundamental difference than that.

“I’ve never even seen it as an adversarial relationship, because I was surprised I ever got a country record deal. I’m not part of a group of people who went [to Nashville] because they wanted to write songs for Ronnie Milsap; I got there by following Guy Clark, and Guy and Townes started writing because of Bob Dylan, not Whitey Schaeffer or Bob McGill or someone like that. But it was the ’70s, and both coasts were pretty much in the throes of disco, and a lot of singer-songwriters went to Nashville thinking that you could at least get a job writing songs there. It was the last Tin Pan Alley. So there were a lot of us whose backgrounds were more coffeehouses.”

That led to a lot of friction with the record labels in town. “People forget I was 31 when Guitar Town (his 1986 debut solo album) came out. I had been in Nashville since I was 19.… The one thing the business in Nashville didn’t want was, “Yeah, that’s art. But, so?’ they didn’t know how to deal with art.…

“I took a lot of money from big corporations, and I did it with my eyes wide open, and I nodded a lot. There were times when they wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do, and I was pretty good at nodding a lot and doing whatever I wanted to do anyway. But you know what? Not everybody’s as hard-headed as I am, and they shouldn’t have to go through that. I’ve got a lot of friends who have made records they’re ashamed of because they got brow-beaten until they were terrified that they were going to have to — you know, get a job.”

It would seem as though the atomization of the music business, fueled by the collapse of major record labels and the rise of the Internet as a means for distribution and publicity would be right up Earle’s alley — an artist with a long history and a devoted fan base but little of the mega-selling success that big labels demand. As it is, though, he adds, “I still sell records, because my audience is older. A lot of my fans haven’t figured out how to download yet. Or they’re just not willing to go there.”

In today’s environment, he says, “You have to work a little harder, but I’ve never been opposed to that anyway.” And his gigs as an actor (recurring parts in the TV shows The Wire and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) and a satellite-radio host are part of that work. “They’re parts of the way you put together the whole puzzle and try to have a career in my gig these days. It’s not just about you put out a record, you sell a lot of records, it plays on the radio. The bummer is, it’s a lot harder to do that now, a lot harder than it used to be. The good news is, because of that, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. It’s pretty healthy.…

“It amazes me how democratic it is. There aren’t record labels throwing millions of dollars at new artists like there were when I got started, but then again you don’t have to have millions of dollars to make a record.…People need it, so people will find a way to make it, and people will find a way to consume it. So you don’t have to worry about that. We’re having bereavement for the whole thing now, but it ain’t going away.”

Earlier this decade, Earle stirred some people up with overtly leftist political albums such as Jerusalem and Revolution Starts . . . Now, and the single “John Walker’s Blues,” a generally sympathetic, humanistic look at John Walker Lindh, the American who was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002. “Some right-wing talk-show host once suggested that I wrote ‘John Walker’s Blues’ to sell more records. And I said ‘Dude, that is not the way to sell a lot of records at this point in America.’ ”

It seems as though more and more people are coming around to Earle’s way of thinking, though he puts it differently. “They’re probably not coming around to my way of thinking exactly, because I really am a Socialist. I vote Democratic, because I don’t believe there is a viable Socialist party in the United States, and I don’t want my vote to be wasted. And I think that what we’ve been through is a useless travesty, and our grandchildren are gonna be paying for it. And probably their children, too — and if you look at the courts, that’s certainly true.”

Still, he disputes the notion that things were all that different even back in 2003.

“There’s a certain audience that always gave it a pretty good reception. Those two overtly political records I made sold pretty well. And for the last record, the tour became sort of a recovery room for people who had worked so hard in the (2006) election and didn’t get the result they wanted. And I was OK with that.”

But being political for its own sake, Earle says, isn’t the point.

“I do what I do because I was taught to make art that comments on my life and what I see, including the political landscape. It’s not the political landscape in particular, but it’s certainly not off-limits. And when I die, they’ll figure out that I wrote more songs about girls than anything else.”

Steve Earle and Allison Moorer play on the Harbor Stage on Saturday.

rmassimo@projo.com