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Contemporary old soul
Justin Townes Earle looks forward by looking back
By Ryan Heinsius
Published on 03/26/2009
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Hard-won life: singer, songwriter, honky tonker, musicologist Justin Townes Earle, Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins.
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Justin Townes Earle has lived a lot more life than the mere 27 years he’s spent inhabiting this planet might suggest. A decade ago, after letting the road lifestyle get beyond his control, he was sacked by his father, country-rock-rebel legend Steve Earle, after briefly serving as guitarist and keyboardist in his band.
“It was one of those things that at the time it wasn’t a wakeup call because I was a junked-out 17-year-old kid, and 17-year-old kids don’t learn nothin’ anyway. And especially if they have a healthy heroin problem going on,” says Justin Townes Earle. “But several years later, looking back on it, it’s one of those things that’s just like, ‘Oh yeah, that was my fault.’”
A few years later, as the story goes, Earle was hauled into a Nashville hospital by a friend after having been awake for 14 days on a binge of one sort or another. He had suffered respiratory failure, had become a full-blown junkie and was about to die.
Now five years sober, the blunt, brash Earle just released his second full-length album, the outstanding Midnight at the Movies released earlier this month, and is forging his own path with his music—by both establishing his own name independent of his famous father, and squelching the demons that put him dangerously on the brink.
“It’s hard not to go through that in this lifestyle because you’re in bars every night—everybody wants to give you drugs, the girls want to f**k you.
There’s all those things that are being thrown at you,” says Earle. “I lived really hard for about 10 years and I just decided that when I got cleaned up, that it was time. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m 27 years old and it’s time to stop acting like a kid, and that was a big change that had to come from me because I wanted to be taken seriously as a songwriter. I didn’t want to just be another honky tonk guy. And so that took me growing up and writing adult songs.”
Midnight at the Movies is a decidedly significant leap forward for Earle. His 2008 full-length debut, The Good Life, was comprised of many songs he had written as a teenager along side several more recent compositions. Midnight at the Movies, save one choice Replacements cover (“Can’t Hardly Wait”), was composed in the span of a far more condensed, seven-month period. Both albums display Earle’s two-sided style: part Hank Williams classic country greaser, and part intimate, confessional singer-songwriter. His singing voice itself bears little resemblance to his father’s, but in his quieter moments Earle’s family legacy becomes much more apparent with personal admissions of failures, shortcomings and the magnetic human impulse toward all flavors of vice. But, the overwhelming and distinctive old timey, folk and blues influences Earle wears like a uniform came from what at first might seem like an unlikely source.
“I actually discovered it through Kurt Cobain,” he says. “It was really weird, Kurt Cobain played ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ on Unplugged and that sent me back to Lead Belly, and then I just kept—I went really far back … What separated him from all those other bands that came out is that he knew about Lead Belly, and he understood Lead Belly, and he used Lead Belly—that influence in his music. And that’s a really important thing. If I was making music now, and I was basing—like, my starting point was Nirvana, then we’d have some f**kin’ problems. There wouldn’t be much depth to that.”
His allegiance to the mythic ex-con Louisiana folk and blues musician runs deep, as does his appreciation for authenticity and history. As a kid, Earle began his intense study of various forms of folk music, giving him a fertile foundation of influences. It’s also given him a keen eye for imposters.
“Whenever you hear these old formats being played these days, it is half the time some kid who really genuinely thinks he understands what Dock Boggs was all about,” says Earle, “yet he’s got long hair and he’s doing this hippie thing and trying to get all this hippie s**t involved in old timey music. And he’s singing about plow horses and ’52 Ford pickup trucks and all this. Number one, Dock Boggs would pin you down, shave your head and then shoot you in the face if he found you—and especially if he caught you playing banjo. And then, you’ve never plowed a field, you don’t know s**t about a ’52 Ford pickup truck, so don’t write about it. That’s the big problem, you get some kid fresh out of a f**kin’ frat house and he’s singing about farming.”
Earle’s life experience is the passport to his authenticity. His songs chronicling a life spent screwing up, getting wasted, squandering second chances, and repeatedly pleading for repentance don’t come from some hollow, empty imagination. They’re literally his autobiography.
“It wasn’t worth the time. I did near die in the streets of f**kin’ south Nashville and spent three years on the streets there homeless … I don’t really regret anything that I’ve ever done, and I do love the fact that I can write about those things, because I’m a very personal writer, and I’m not going to write about something that I don’t know about.”
All of Earle’s meticulous musicological work and hard-won life experience has landed him square in the thriving, youthful modern folk-Americana movement along with close friend Jason Isbell, with whom he is currently touring. Isbell, former frontman of country rockers Drive-By Truckers, put out his second solo album (also excellent) in February with his band, the 400 Unit. Earle himself is currently touring as a duo with mandolin player Cory Younts.
See Justin Townes Earle with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit Mon, March 30 at the Green Room, 15 N. Agassiz. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show is at 8 p.m. Tickets are $13 in advance and $15 at the door. For more info, see www.justintownesearle.com or www.jasonisbell.com, or call 226-8669.
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