If you do anything long enough, no matter how much you love it, the temptation to switch it up has to be an irresistible pull. If you’ve been doing it for nearly 30 years, one would have to imagine that the voice in the back of your head would become a bit more insistent. Such must be the case with Steve Earle. After dabbling in the genre here and there, he finally pulled the trigger and decided to play the blues for his 16th album, Terraplane (New West Records).

Country, folk and Americana are the genres most associated with Earle, but he also has rock in his toolkit. Thus making a blues record is only a slight left turn as the roots of rock & roll, namely country and blues, are so closely intertwined. But beyond the itch to try something new, it’s also appropriate that Terraplane is a blues record as it comes on the heels of his separation from wife and fellow musician Allison Moore. It may be a cliche, but there’s nothing like a broken heart to give you the blues.

But Earle, backed by his longtime band the Dukes, resists the temptation to go down well-worn paths. Terraplane is a mixture of heartbreak songs and dance tunes with a tip of the hat to conventions such as the de rigueur song about deals with the devil. There’s a noticeable lack of the standard 12-bar blues sound. It’s lurking under the surface, particularly in “King of the Blues,” but Earle and his band are careful to bring a diversity of styles and sounds to the table. There are even a few tracks that arguably skew a touch more country. But such differentiation is nitpicking as Earle’s interest in the roots of music probably lead him to the days before blues forms got so codified. After all, the title of the album was inspired in part by the Robert Johnson song “Terraplane Blues.”

Lyrically the album is surprisingly well-balanced in that it doesn’t solely focus on his breakup. And there are even a few songs that seem to recall happier times. But when Earle does decide to lean into it, he does so with quiet, devastating economy. If all he released was an album full of songs like “Better Off Alone,” Terraplane would be a break-up classic in the vein of Marvin Gaye’s Hear My Dear. Yet in the same way that it’s musically varied, the mood changes frequently enough to get the listener out of the bottle and onto the dancefloor. It’s a fairly even split, though it doesn’t feel like two separate records smashed together. Terraplane is a record that stems from the heart, but stirs the body, mind, and soul.