Remembering Justin Townes Earle: A conversation with Jonathan Bernstein

Charles talks to the author of a new biography of the late artist

The 2020 death of Justin Townes Earle inspired both tributes and reconsiderations of the acclaimed singer-songwriter. Now, Rolling Stone writer and editor Jonathan Bernstein has released an astonishing biography of the late artist, considering his own remarkable work (and troubled life) as well as the communities he occupied and influenced. It was great to talk with Jonathan about What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome and why the Justin Townes Earle story matters so much.

Charles Hughes: You’re someone who has paid attention to Justin Townes Earle’s music for a long time. How did you come to arrive at writing your first book about him?

Jonathan Bernstein: My relationship to this book starts with the first time I saw Justin in April 2009. He was opening for Jason Isbell and the 400 unit in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was a sophomore in college, so at that time I was largely obsessed with, frankly, a lot of the music that my dad introduced to me - a lot of older classic artists, the Bruce Springsteens and Bob Dylans of the world. I went somewhat on a whim and it completely blew my mind. I was 20 but I basically had no idea that people my age (or a few years older than me) were making the type of music that Justin was making. So, from that day on, I was a huge fan. I bought Midnight at the Movies, his second album, either the day before or the day after I went to that show and I continued to see Justin whenever I could in those next few years, which was when his career was taking off. I considered Justin as a career artist, one who I would get to listen to records from for the next 40 years, you know? I liked some of the records that he released more than others but I always listened. I wrote about him a few times in limited contexts – reviewed a few records, talked with him once briefly for a story. I thought he was such a compelling songwriter; even on the records that I didn’t like as much, there was always at least one song that really stuck with me. Fast forward to 2020. I still remember where I was: I got a text from a friend asking me if I saw the news about Justin, and immediately my heart sunk. I didn’t know much about the guy other than following him as a fan. I had no idea what he had been through in the last few years of his life. I wrote a little something about him the next day – just a little essay, trying to gather my thoughts – and then ended up writing a long piece for Rolling Stone. I interviewed 20 or 30 people about Justin’s life, including his widow and a lot of people really close to him, and it was one of those moments as a journalist where I became more obsessed than I ever thought I would have been about a story. But I almost felt like I knew less about him than I did when I started, in a way that really made me just want to learn more. I had always wanted to write a book and had cycled through a million different ideas over the years. After writing that piece, I thought “well, you know, I think from what little I know of Justin’s life and his career, I think he really deserves a proper book to be written about him.” I finally felt qualified to pursue that.

CH: I love the way the book tackles that enigma of knowing less about Justin Townes Earle the more you learn about him. And I love how you frame the book around the idea of “the myth.” I wonder if you could talk a bit about that. What is “the myth”? How did you approach this artist who wrestled with it throughout his life?

JB: That’s such a good question. Writing this book gave me the experience that so many people that I spoke to had with Justin. He entered your life in this incredibly forceful, incredibly intense, incredibly intimate way. Whether it was a romantic partner, or a bandmate, or a best friend, he formed these deep relationships very quickly. And, for that time, you felt like this person is your best friend or future husband or musical life partner or whatnot. And then he kind of vanishes and you leave with tons of questions about who this person was or whether you ever really knew him. The first thing that I did for this book was read all of Justin’s interviews – 500 of them – and I was really struck by the way Justin talked about what he called “the myth,” this idea that – to be a profound or true artist – you needed to subject yourself to some sort of self-harm or self-sacrifice or suffering. I think what I saw in those interviews, and the way that Justin talked about “the myth,” was someone clearly working through his feelings about it. I saw someone who projected a lot of certainty and clarity about having overcome that way of thinking about his own music and sobriety and things like that. As I learned more about his life and spoke to people who had conversations with him about this very topic, it became clear to me that his relationship to that way of thinking was one of the central torments of his life. One of the tensions in his creative and personal life, as someone who grew up the son of [Steve Earle] who had a very strong relationship to this way of thinking and had his own complexity about it, is that he was never ever quite able to resolve how he felt about it. I think intellectually that he felt it was a sort of theoretical exercise. But I think there was also a part of him that would fall prey to the way of thinking that he detested. Especially when his substance use would return, as it frequently did. I found that the way that he thought about “the myth” was a pretty core way of understanding his life.

I also went into this book with a few goals for myself. One was to try as hard as I could to write a book about addiction that did not glamorize or romanticize it. We’ve all read music biographies: there’s a wide spectrum in how various authors approach the subject, and “the myth” is almost baked into the DNA of the way that we consume stories about music. So, in the introduction, I try to lay out the stakes for Justin in this way of thinking about art and suffering. But I was also trying to lay the stakes out for myself and to try to hold myself accountable. I knew that there was a serious risk. And I’m sure there was a degree to which, despite my best intentions, the very act of telling a story about someone like Justin Townes Earle subjects itself to some of that.

CH: One of the things that I thought was powerful about your book is that, as you negotiated his story, you somehow avoided either peril of romanticization. In my reading, you didn’t present Justin Townes Earle as that “tortured artist” cliche. But you also didn’t turn him into a simple tragic and terrible cautionary tale. I thought that was really sharp, but I also imagine that was a challenge.

JB: Yeah, definitely. To put it bluntly, something that I thought about almost every day while writing this book was: is this too depressing? Am I presenting enough of Justin’s darkness, presenting too much, or shying away from it? I would have to imagine that, no matter what portrayal you write about Justin, there are gonna be people who think I went too far. There are also going to be people, I’m sure, who think that I didn’t go far enough in litigating every single unsavory and painful thing. So, I really tried to just be fair and understanding of all the many sides of him. And I ultimately came away with the sense that the only way to be fair and honest in telling his story is to write one that is neither some sort of heroic or tragic tale [nor] one that makes his life and his suffering feel like a badass rock and roll story. Because Justin himself was so uninterested in being perceived that way. He was so keenly aware of that way of thinking about artists like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith or Townes Van Zandt and that lineage of bleeding-on-the-page songwriter, though he is to some degree part of that lineage and wrote some songs that feel very obviously influenced by his middle-namesake. He really didn’t want to be seen as just this tragic, depressive, addicted person, and though his story has all those things, some of it was just following the lead of what people who really knew him shared with me, which is that he was so much more than all of those things. I think people particularly don’t have a sense of that side of him as much and I really wanted to show those sides that he was perhaps a little bit less able to share.

CH: Another thing that you do that exposes those other sides is devote a lot of time to talking about the music itself. It’s very easy for that to take a backseat. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the music that he made, and the way he’s exploring these different facets and sounds. How did you engage with the work that he created?

JB: Yeah, like I said, I went into this project as a very big fan of Justin’s music. But I didn’t go into this with Justin being my greatest genius artist of all time, and there was music of his that I felt like I didn’t understand as much as others. I think this is just my own proclivities as a listener, but I was drawn to the stuff that was more obviously vulnerable. Songs like “Mama’s Eyes,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” his ballads. He’s a great ballad writer. The experience of spending three years with his music was one of the most edifying musical experiences of my life. The appreciation that I have for the depth of his entire catalog was transformed by the process of learning more about him. If this book does anything, it’s to hopefully mirror the experience for readers that I got to have with his music. The more I learned about his life, the more I felt like I better understood what he was doing in his music. I would say one of the main throughlines that I came to really appreciate about the craft and the artistry of what he was doing is that he traversed genres or micro-genres within, let’s say, roots music and Americana throughout his career. But another way that he evolved as a songwriter was that, at different points in his career, he found all these different ways to create this interesting distance. I try to talk about them in the book almost as shields for himself, sort of protective layers between the story.

I think that I have such a deep appreciation for the classic or “retro”-type of records and songs that he wrote. Songs like “Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving,” and “Hard Livin’,” and stuff on his first full-length album, The Good Life. I can now hear so much depth and so much craft in the way that he creates a kind of sonic distance by dressing up these really painful and really deep stories. Tracing the way that he does that throughout his career really deepened my appreciation for him as a songwriter. Midway through his career, he realized that he wanted to write about addiction on a really deep level, so he wrote about the story of Billie Holiday. Fast-forward even a few more years: he wanted to write about some really dark things that are happening in his own life pertaining to his family and to mental health. On what would be his last album, The Saint of Lost Causes, he wrote distinct character sketches that, on the surface, have absolutely nothing to do with him: people who live in Los Angeles, Puerto Rican men who are imprisoned in New York City, people living in rural Appalachia. That throughline through his songwriting really captivated me and I gained such an appreciation for it.

On a more basic level, I also think about the process of learning about Justin’s music and where it intersected and collided with all these bigger moments in roots and Americana’s pop boom over the past 25 years. My hypothesis going into this book was that I think this person has already become a major and unacknowledged influence in contemporary roots music and will continue to be even more so moving forward. I found out that he and his band were circling over the O Brother, Where Art Thou? moment in 2000, and that he was almost this spiritual center of the Mumford & Sons/“Wagon Wheel”/Lumineers moment some years later. It gave me a real appreciation for what I think will be his place in these larger genre histories. I think that he really is a central artistic influence on so many artists over the past twenty years, and so many artists today, like Charley Crockett and Sierra Farrell, who are carrying that torch forward and were huge fans of his.

CH: One of the things that really struck me as I listened back to all these records again is that, even in these moments of throwback, they don’t sound hermetic. He’s responding to these older sounds, but it doesn’t sound like a museum exhibit. Maybe that’s part of what makes him so interesting and so powerful.

JB: If I learned anything from people about Justin, it’s that he was such an insanely deep and profound student of music in his early years. He studied the most obscure records and had such a deep, encyclopedic appreciation for American music history. I think his records that are very throwback-y work because he’s done the homework and because he’s synthesizing such a dizzying number of influences. It’s a fun game to track what lyrical or sonic references he’s incorporating, oftentimes many in one song. The stew that he’s cooked up is so compelling because it’s coming from a really studied place. I think a lot of people then studied the work that Justin was doing and then tried to imitate that in a certain sense, you know, throughout the 2010s. It always feels really fresh, and, at times, whimsical.

CH: Yeah, totally. One of the things that you talk about that also speaks to how smart he was about the traditions, but also one of the reasons why they don’t feel heavy or weighed down is, that he understood that it was fun, right? The way that so many people go back is to think that it has to be this really serious “old, weird America” thing. And ironically, maybe that’s part of also contending with his life, right? You’re trying to not make it into this false idea that everything has to be so deeply weighed down by the mythology.

JB: Yeah, and I like that you used the word mythology, because I think the way in which Justin realized that it could and should be fun is very tied to this concept of “the myth.” He tied it for himself during the periods of his life where he felt like he had to subscribe to this idea of harming himself in order to write great songs. He also felt that the types of songs he had to write were “great American singer-songwriter” serious songs. He thought he had to be the next Townes Van Zandt or the next Hank Williams. I think as he made strides in his own sobriety, in his own life, and in his own work, I think he realized that you did not have to do that. You could inject very serious adult emotions into a song that is also very fun and entertaining to play in a bar. And this, of course, was a key way that Justin realized he could differentiate himself from his father, who always presented himself in a pretty “authentic,” serious [way]. That’s the way Steve always presented himself in his songwriting and he has so many beautiful songs that are pretty serious. I think pretty early on after realizing that he did not have to be this “great American troubadour” kind of guy, Justin realized that actually he could go fully the other way and be somewhat of a sort of campy Grand Ole Opry act. He could be an entertainer. He could sing serious songs that were also entertaining.

CH: You kind of touched on this already, but I really love how you frame this book historically, as a story about 21^st-century roots music from O Brother through Americana and everything else. As part of that, you talk about this community of musicians. I think one of the striking things about his story – and how you tell it – is that there is this crew of musicians, mostly based in Nashville, who come in and out of the story. You get a real sense of the musical world that Justin Townes Earle occupied, especially as he developed as an artist. That had to have been exciting to include, but also, I imagine, a challenge in writing about such a singular figure. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Earle’s world as a musician and why you felt it was so important to include his collaborators.

JB: It became very clear to me as early as writing that Rolling Stone story about Justin after his death that the true untold story for many in his life is the story of everyone who had such a huge role in his career artistically. I think Justin certainly saw himself as a “great man,” a great individual American person. (In fact, I think one of the things that he would perhaps not appreciate about the book is how much attention I give to everyone else other than him.) It was a challenge, frankly, introducing a dizzying number of names. By and large, they’re non-famous musicians, [and] some of them are no longer even professional musicians. But they are nevertheless incredibly talented and incredibly instrumental to Justin’s formation. The very first people I interviewed for this book were The Swindlers, the members of the band that he was in for 7 years. Justin rarely mentioned The Swindlers by name during his career. If he ever did, it was like a one-sentence cast-off, like, “this was my shitty teenage band.” But Justin wrote a lot of the material from his first several records while in the Swindlers. And these guys were entirely fundamental to Justin; they introduced him to a lot of music, especially older songs that Justin would end up covering later in his career. They really helped him form who he was as a songwriter, as an entertainer, and as a singer. As a non-Nashvillian writing this book, I view this as a huge opportunity to try to write a book about recent Nashville music history that did not merely hit the same touchstones of most stories and narratives about the city: Jack White and Dan Auerbach and Kasey Musgraves or some version of that. I thought that, in telling the story of Justin Townes Earle, there was an enormous opportunity to show the people who truly formed who Justin was and who he was in conversation with at the time. But it was also an opportunity to [talk about] just a tiny sliver, frankly, of the amazing music that gets made in that city by people who either remain local artists in Nashville and never get known nationally, or who are non-professional or amateur to some degree, or who don’t get ever signed to a label. I really wanted to situate Justin in the world and scenes and the city that he came out of at the time that he came out of it.

There’s some private writings where Justin talks about how lucky he got, basically, and that he was in the right place at the right time. I think that was Justin at his most honest. He came of age at the perfect time, at such an exciting, creative, artistically flourishing time in the city of Nashville: the early 2000s, just as it was flourishing as a city but was not [yet] getting national attention, with people from L.A. and New York moving there and making it all expensive and inhospitable to artists and everything. He was existing in a city that was, as one person put it, blooming creatively. The city was already, I think, making plans to have it be what it would end up becoming today as a bachelorette destination and all that. But in making all those plans, the art that was being created there - under the radar and just in a local way - by bands like Old Crow Medicine Show, by people like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and by The Swindlers and Justin Townes Earle, would go on to be so influential on a national level. I feel like I stumbled upon what any writer of any piece of history could only dream of, which is a genuine under-reported scene and community of artists making music largely for themselves and their friends in 4 to 6 bars in Nashville between 1999 and 2005.

CH: It really is remarkable how you draw that out. As someone who’s written books myself, I know that whenever you’re invested in a long process like this, something always ends up surprising you that you didn’t think about coming in. What surprised you as you wrote this book?

JB: That’s a great question. First, I’ll answer in a meta way: what surprised me about this process was that I could not have anticipated the intensity of the relationship that I formed with this dead person. I was really taken aback by the degree to which I constantly thought about him. How strange and, at times, all-consuming that became. But what’s something that surprised me about the story or about this subject? As a fan, I think Justin cultivated a persona and a relationship with the press and with his fans of being this deeply, almost shockingly honest and revealing person. If you’ve seen a Justin Townes Earle concert or read a Justin Townes Earle interview, they’re always a comment or two where you’d be like, “whoa! I didn’t think he was gonna talk about his daddy issues in this way, or I didn’t think he was gonna talk about his past heroin use.” I think that those disarming reveals from him, among other things, helped form those intense bonds that his fans had with him. I was one of those fans and I viewed him as one of these people who was just all out in the open. I think what really surprised me as I was getting a much better understanding with him is actually how private Justin was and how deeply in control he was of exactly what he was revealing. There was always a reason, I came to learn. There was always a very controlled and in some ways showbiz reason for the way that Justin would reveal what he did. And I came to understand that almost everything he said in public, even when it felt incredibly revealing, was – again, like in his music – oftentimes a way of shielding or protecting an even more painful or stark or hard-to-take truth about his life. So, for example, he’d make offhand comments in interviews about having been locked up and in jail for 6 months as a teenager. And, you know, when I set out, I asked “did Justin spend 7 months in jail as a 16-year-old like he said he did?” You find out that he actually cycled through a number of institutions that were like wilderness camp for troubled teens or a school for emotionally disturbed students and things like that. And what I learned in that was he’s trying to find a safe way to talk about these really painful childhood, educational or pseudo-educational experiences that he had.

CH: Alright, unfair question: what’s the one song for you? What’s the Justin Townes Earle song that is the first one you go to, maybe the first one you went to after he died, or the first one that you think defines him, or whatever?

JB: This one’s much easier for me. The first song for me is the first song that hooked me in 2009, and it’s “Mama’s Eyes.” I think that song was one of the moments where he showed so much. It is both “the myth” of him and his ties to his father. It’s a beautiful song, a song that I’ve heard hundreds of times but – if I hear it in the right moment – it will still choke me up at the end. And Justin was someone whose entire life was deeply impacted by profound issues with both of his parents to the day that he died. He loved both of his parents a ton. Both of his parents loved him a ton. But to understand him is to understand the intense relationship that he had with both of his parents, and that song is just the perfect starting point. It is both the whole story and just such a tiny fraction of the story. It is both so emotionally true to him, and also such a guarded way of setting up his dad a little bit as the bad guy and his mom a little bit as the savior, you know. It’s just a beautiful song. It’s so well crafted. It’s the first song that I play to anyone who asks why they should care about Justin Townes Earle’s music. Always.

CH: That was definitely the one that first really hit me, too. Lastly, when we talk to authors for No Fences Review, we always ask what they’ve been reading recently that they think is really good. It doesn’t need to be music-related, but it can be.

JB: I recently read the new book by Alice Gerrard called Custom Made Woman. I learned so much from it. I found it so edifying, and it was such an important piece of American history. It was very like her. It was very humble, conversational, just kind of a collection of her stories and photos. But to learn about her life and to learn about all the major intersections she had with so many central figures in American political and musical history of the 20th century was just…it was funny, it was powerful, it was profound, it was silly and sweet, and I really enjoyed reading that book.

CH: Yes. Totally.

JB: One tiny thing that I meant to mentioned before, because I think it’s maybe the best illustration of my relationship to his music and getting a deeper understanding of it. Justin has this one song on his record Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now, which is kind of his more R&B record, and has a lot of kind of fun, up-tempo, Stax-inspired songs. He has this one song called “Look The Other Way” that I always liked at the time. I think it was one of the focus tracks of the album – it was on radio a bit. There was a moment where I was interviewing Justin’s aunt Judy, his mom’s sister, and she said “oh, when I heard that, I thought, oh, that’s about Carol. That’s about Justin’s mom.” The moment she said that, I realized that I’d never fully heard the song before. And I now view it as one of Justin’s most profound and artful songs in that it functions in many levels. It works as a catchy song that’s about some sort of generic “mama” that could be, you know, some old-timey lady he can’t stand or whatever. Or it could be a song about a son pleading for his mom to see him or to help him. I’ve never been able to hear that song in the same way again.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle is available now from Da Capo Books.

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