Carl Jung, the master of the meaningful coincidence, would have a field day with this: one of the most memorable tunes on the new album by Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle was written 54 years ago, in New York City’s Hotel Earle.

That former fleabag, now the Washington Square Hotel, is just a few hundred feet away from where that other Earle currently hangs his hat, but the former Nashville resident wasn’t fully aware of the connection until recently.

The song in question, “You Were on My Mind”, is best known as a 1965 hit for California folk-rockers We Five, but it was penned by a Canadian, Sylvia Fricker, and originally recorded in partnership with her future husband, Ian Tyson. And the rumours are true: Fricker wrote it in a Hotel Earle bathtub, but only because it was the one place cockroaches wouldn’t go.

“That’s straight from the horse’s mouth,” says Earle, noting that the woman now known as Sylvia Tyson recently got in touch with him to praise the new recording of her song.

The Americana icon appears to have older songwriters on his mind when the Georgia Straight catches up with him: he’s at a New York City airport, waiting for a flight to Nashville, where he’s taking part in an all-star tribute to the late Guy Clark. And he’s also musing on another Hotel Earle connection.

“The Earle is where almost every bit of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s relationship took place,” he explains. “It’s the hotel on Washington Square in [Baez’s 1975 hit] ‘Diamonds & Rust’, and I asked Joan about that. She said, ‘Yeah, he was a 20-year-old guy, and you didn’t go into 20-year-old guys’ apartments, ’cause they were nasty.’ ”

Earle laughs, having known more than his share of nasty flats, even if he’s now living in one of the world’s most desirable neighbourhoods. And he’s probably laughing, too, about the web of coincidences surrounding “You Were on My Mind”, Greenwich Village, and what he had hoped for when he went into the studio with Colvin.

Early reviews of Colvin & Earle have compared it to the countrypolitan efforts of Tammy Wynette and George Jones, or Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, but Earle says it’s a far different animal, both sonically and sociologically.

“It’s more about Ian & Sylvia—or Crosby, Stills & Nash, for that matter. That’s maybe even a better comparison, because we both have careers of our own,” he says. “There’s only one song on the whole record where you hear our voices separately; it’s all about us singing together.”

The pairing is natural, he adds. “We don’t ever work parts out, and we don’t ever have to. And we change parts all the time, but no one ever thinks about it. It’s never contrived; it just sort of happens. Not once in the process of making the record or rehearsing for this tour did anyone say, ‘You sing this part and I’ll sing that one.’ ”

That’s the dynamic that he and Colvin have been bringing into their intimate shows—it’s just the two of them, a few guitars, and a couple of mandolins on-stage—and that they’ll deploy on a projected second effort. But first, Earle says, he’s got his own album to do.

“I’ve been writing a lot,” he notes, crediting Colvin as an inspiration. “I wrote my part of six songs for this, and since then I’ve written two or three for this record that I’m getting ready to make in December, and one song for a theatre piece....

“Anytime you do something different it fights any chance of writer’s block—and that’s one of the reasons I moved to New York.”

Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle play the Vogue Theatre on Saturday (August 20).