Like most singer-songwriters including Bob Dylan, Steve Earle writes more songs than good ones. Happily, the latter -- scattered throughout the multitude of albums issued since Guitar Town (1986) -- are very good indeed. Four decades on, there are enough of them that some have faded from memory, to feel joyously new when reintroduced after an extended absence.

The 15 cuts that comprise Alone Again ... Live reintroduce me to favorites both recalled and forgotten, beginning with a fairly obscure early composition, "The Devil's Right Hand," about gun violence, related thematically to a number of folk and country ballads that, alongside blues and rock, serve as the musical underpinning of Earle's grassroots approach. The current album follows the occasional approach of artists taking a pause in their careers as they look back on the highlights with just themselves and acoustic guitar in hand and on stage.

Usually these are concert recordings in a small venue in front of hardcore fans. It isn't clear -- at least to this reviewer; the explanatory print that might enlighten me on the matter is absurdly tiny -- where exactly that venue was, or if this is taken from a variety of performances. In any event, the songs are solid, and Earle appears to be in a happily engaged frame of mind.

As he bangs his guitar (mandolin on the Irish-flavored "Copperhead Road"), one hears the songs as they were written before they entered a recording studio and got into a would-be hit-making producer's hands. (In fairness, the results would prove mostly smart and satisfactory.) Earle is less a rocker than he used to be; in some interviews in later life he seems to identify more with Dave Van Ronk and other 1960s folk singers, with whom he shares an outspoken left-of-center politics, than with his pop and country contemporaries. Certainly, no song ends up worse than the original in this quieter soundscape.

Actually, at least one ("Transcendental Blues") improves in a stripped-down version, for which it is clear the heavy rock treatment on the 2000 album of the same name was imperfectly advised. When the initially intended song escapes here, it becomes as touching as anything Earle has put to metaphorical wax. On the other side, I could not have imagined "Copperhead" reduced to a single instrument's backing after the Pogues' exemplary folk-rocked accompaniment on the 1988 original. I would have been guilty of insufficient imagination.

Worst are the spoken parts, which as with any live album are interesting precisely once. I might also note that I try to keep my spoken profanity to a minimum, which naturally doesn't mean Earle has to do the same. Still, he may have you wishing that the f-word would return miraculously to its traditional definition.