There are good reasons why any musician might consider moving to New York City, but for singer-songwriters Steve Earle and Allison Moorer, one factor trumped all others.

“Neither of us had a history there,” says Earle, checking in from a Chicago tour stop, “and I think that helps a lot.”

He’s laughing, but a little ruefully. The Virginia-born musician has endured a long history of run-ins with the law, mostly having to do with substance-abuse issues that he seems to have beaten for good, and he’s left a trail of ex-wives scattered across the South. Moorer, wife number seven, has had to deal with family tragedies of her own, including the murder-suicide of her parents.

Compared to what they’ve lived through, New York must seem like a safe haven—and it also has a really good theatre scene.

“Most of my entertainment dollars go to seeing theatre in New York,” Earle says. “I go to theatre and baseball games.”

If it seems hard to reconcile the drugged-up country-rock outlaw of 1988’s “Copperhead Road” with today’s erudite off-Broadway fan, consider this: Earle was a drama student in high school when he encountered the Bob Dylan record that sent him down the songwriter’s trail. More recently, he wrote a play, Karla, about Karla Faye Tucker, the convicted killer that George W. Bush sent to the death chamber when he was governor of Texas. It got mixed but generally favourable reviews when it made its New York debut in 2005, and more theatrical productions are coming.

“The next thing I’m working on is actually a one-man show designed for a kid named Eli Smith to perform,” Earle reports. “It’s about Pete Seeger, with Eli as Pete, and it’s based on Pete’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.”

Writing for the stage, he adds, is like “writing in 3-D”. But he hasn’t abandoned the comparatively two-dimensional world of song, with his most recent CD, 2007’s Washington Square Serenade, functioning both as a valentine for Moorer and a love letter to his adopted hometown. His affection for the latter is both obvious and subtle: on “City of Immigrants”, for instance, he teams up with the Brazilian-American band Forro in the Dark to praise a place where everyone’s from somewhere else and everything is possible, while on “Tennessee Blues” he slips in a sly musical tribute to Bruce Langhorne, the electric guitarist of choice for most of NYC’s early ’60s folk artists.

And Earle takes particular pleasure in noting that he now lives on the same street shown on the cover of that aforementioned Dylan album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

“You know, that’s always my go-back-to-every-time favourite Dylan record,” he notes. “I don’t know why, but I’m pretty attached to that one. I think it was the first one I had to backtrack to. My first Dylan records were Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, just because of my age. And then my drama teacher in high school said, ”˜You need to listen to this,’ and gave me a copy of Freewheelin’.”

It’s not all nostalgia for this newly minted New Yorker, though. He’s busy producing other artists (including Joan Baez), writing songs for and appearing in The Wire, taking on the occasional movie role, and finishing his first novel. It’s a hectic life, but Earle isn’t complaining.

“Aw, you know,” he says happily, “it beats the fuck out of the alternative!”

Steve Earle plays the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Saturday (March 15).