The controversy he has occasionally engendered-even cultivated-has never obscured one central fact about Steve Earle's command of his craft: The man has a gift for seeing the world through his characters' eyes. Be it the one-night-stand guitar slinger with "a three-pack habit and a motel tan" in "Guitar Town," the Vietnam vet turned modern bootlegger in "Copperhead Road," the dreamer in a dead-end town watching the cars zoom down the Interstate towards somewhere better in "Someday", Earle has a genius for painting portraits that make listeners think twice about the way they view the world.  In "Home To Houston," Earle's surrogate is a harried independent contractor, trying to make a danger-fraught buck in postwar Iraq.  Set to a driving, truck-driving beat, our Halliburton homeboy is booking down the desert highway, dodging IEDs and RPGs and reflecting that hey, maybe money isn't everything after all….