Steve Earle in The National Concert Hall, Dublin, on August 27^th 2014

He may be among the last of the hard-core troubadours. Steve Earle’s journey from his Virginian roots has taken him down many a hard road, through addiction, broken marriages, revoked licenses and prison spells. It’s all grist for the mill for the songwriter, who jovially talks us through these experiences between numbers during his set at The National Concert Hall.

Earle’s apprenticeship began in earnest in Nashville when he found himself under the tutelage of Guy Clarke, and one songwriter in particular, back in the mid-Seventies – “I had a friend and teacher and his name was Townes” Earle intones over the spoken intro to Townes Van Zandt’s Rex’s Blues late in the set.

Van Zandt’s is an influence that has cast a long shadow over the career of Earle and countless others, and Earle’s personal life seemed to be taking the same fateful trajectory as Van Zandt’s before he pulled himself back from the grip of alcoholism and heroin addiction. In recent times his acting stints in The Wire and Treme, and his version of the signature theme tune to the final season of the former, have brought him to the attention of a new generation, but it’s most definitely the long-timers who populate the hall tonight.

“So that’s new, and this is not” Earle informs us at the career spanning opening trilogy, moving from Girl On The Mountain back to Guitar Town’s My Old Friend The Blues and Someday, his guitar playing becoming that bit more aggressive as he links the latter two songs together. He coaxes the crowd to sing along on I Ain’t Ever Satisfied, and they’re more than up to it; maybe not as much as the Glasgow crowd who sang like that to him for the first time – “fuckin’ scared me, man!”

An impassioned Now She’s Gone “always goes out to whatshername, wherever she is”, as does the following song – “same girl, different harmonica.” On Goodbye his voice is at its most distinctive, moving from whisper to growl and back in a breath; a heartfelt eulogy about Emmylou Harris’ mother precedes the song that Harris recorded around the same time as Earle, just one of many who have given their own slant to his compositions.

During the “chick section” of the set, as Earle calls it, you yearn for a more intimate venue, as if the main room in NCH suddenly seems too cavernous for the intimacy the songs evoke. Every Part Of Me and Sparkle And Shine kick off the chick bait, inserted by design in an attempt to countenance the numbers of hairy and ugly dudes in the audience. A tale of dope, prison and hard luck leads into “the flagship of the whole chick song fleet”, Valentine’s Day, before the set then takes another directional turn.

The harmonica wails, the blues take over, and a picked South Nashville Blues features his most intricate guitar work of the night. “That song has a tendency to make that particular time in my life seem more fuckin’ fun than it was” he tells us, so its immediate follower CCKMP (Cocaine Cannot Kill My Pain) – mining that same Delta vein, albeit a darker one – was penned “lest I forget.”

He eschews the acoustic for mandolin – “my favourite thing I own in the world” – for Dixieland and Galway Girl, stepping beyond the confines of the rug that lays under him for the first time in the set, clearly enjoying the freedom and change in timbre the new instrument affords. It’s a brief sojourn, though, and his pride and joy that all the ex-wives in the world won’t wrestle from him goes back in its case.

As on the opening tracks, Earle’s guitar playing takes on a forceful rhythmic slant, and the crowd again lend their vocal on Copperhead Road to see the set proper out. It’s his fifth week touring around Europe and Scandinavia at this stage, but a stop-off in Tel Aviv to play a cancelled concert with his friend David Broza – another Townes fan – has clearly been the most personal of Earle’s adventures – as he says of the anti-war Jerusalem, “We’re gonna keep singing this song until we die or it comes true.”

It’s a compartmentalised set of sorts from Earle, with some early favourites, some affecting balladry, blues that seems preparatory to his forthcoming album, and indulgent enjoyment on mandolin, all hooked together by the man’s humour and self-deprecatingly narrated backstory. Maybe next time we’ll see him with the band, in a closer, down’n’dirtier venue; for now, though, maybe Steve Earle ain’t ever satisfied, but the same won’t be said of his attentive NCH admirers.