A needle drops, the slight hiss of an old vinyl LP crackles, then the intimate, completely singular voice and guitar of Stacey Earle invites the listener to her CD, the aptly titled Simple Gearle. An autobiographical collection of tunes, Simple Gearle stands out as a homemade meal in a world
of fast food and snacks. Now that Stacey's Gearle Records has landed a distribution deal with E-Squared, the rest of the country is discovering what those who have seen her live shows in America, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Netherlands have heard for years.

"I was opening some shows for Malcolm Holcombe," Stacey says. "People were coming up to me after the shows, and saying, 'Can I buy a CD?' or 'When do you have a CD coming out?'. When I got home, I told Mark (Stuart, her husband and musical partner), 'We've got to make a CD, at least something like a little cassette that we could just sell at shows'. So we got together $4,000 and made the CD. We recorded the basic tracks in one day, added some things the second day, mixed the next evening, and it was mastered the next morning. Done.

"At the time, we didn't think it was anything to be taken seriously, just something to sell out of the trunk of the car," she says. "At the shows they started selling really well, between 20 and 30 a show. When I would go to shows, I would stop by public radio stations to advertise the shows, and they would start playing it." Stuart puts it thusly: " We had been playing this music onstage for about six years, and we were seeing a reaction We could tell what the audiences were liking." Sales from those shows, then later from her website (www.staceyearle.com), piqued the interest of major labels for distribution. But the suitors generally wanted to put a marketable, saleable sheen on Stacey's music.

What led Stacey to the songs on Simple Gearle was a desire to write more personal material. "I was a staff writer, bashing out stuff for other folks. At home, in the morning, I was writing the songs that ended up on my CD," she says. "These songs were growing with me. I think as I was wearing down mentally and physically, just going through a whole lot growing up - being married very young, having children, getting divorced after 16 years, remarrying - there's a lot of that in there. So I think that's where I took it all, for therapy. That's pretty much the making of that CD. There're happy words and sad words there. Writing that music led Stacey to pursue her own vision for her music, including her live performances, more fully.

Having moved to Nashville in 1990, Stacey had no intention of pursuing a career in music. She was mainly there to house-sit and provide moral support for her brother, singer-songwriter Steve Earle. "I was in Louisiana, going through a divorce and trying to figure out what I was doing," she says. A hint of what the future held came when Steve asked Stacey to sing backup on Promise You Anything from his album The Hard Way. She also sang backup and played guitar on the ensuing tour.

At the end of that tour, Stacey charted her own course. She worked on her songwriting and signed as a staff writer at Ten Ten Publishing. As her songwriting blossomed, her confidence grew, and she became a champion of the Nashville songwriting community by hosting the weekly writer's night at the now-defunct Jack's Guitar Bar.