This episode’s show notes are an adapted transcript.
On the late afternoon of Sunday August 23, 2020 - already a horrible time for nearly everyone in the depths of the Covid pandemic - Nashville police broke down an apartment door and found the dead body of singer songwriter Justin Townes Earle. His friends had been deeply worried about him for days when he couldn’t be reached. His wife, thousands of miles away visiting family, had a vivid dream that Justin had died over the weekend. She was right. Coroners determined he’d left this world three days before - on Aug 20 - due to an overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl.
Shortly after, Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Bernstein wrote this in the magazine:
“Onstage, Earle was an electrifying presence: six-foot-four, dressed in vintage suits, playing in a fiery style of fingerpicking he’d picked up listening to the bluesman Mance Lipscomb. He assumed the public persona of a world-weary troubadour, one worthy of his cursed namesake, the self-destructive country-folk genius Townes Van Zandt, a friend of his father. He could be Old Testament-intense one moment, sardonically witty the next.
“But that persona also masked problems that only worsened as Earle’s career plateaued. He wrestled with mental-health struggles and self-doubt, and like his father, he struggled with addiction. ‘The fact that I survived my twenties is a miracle,’ he once said, ‘and I believe that wholeheartedly.’”
The story of Justin Earle - his charisma, his burdens, and his timeless songwriting - proved so compelling that Bernstein went on to write a book about him - the new biography What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, published in January by Da Capo. And in String #351, devoted to the memory of Justin Townes Earle, Bernstein joins me to talk about it.
In the first half, I speak with a young songwriter from Utah who became Earle’s friend, protegé and touring companion. His work is worthy of attention in its own right. Sammy Brue, who emerged as a teenage prodigy in 2017 with the album I Am Nice, grew so close to Justin that his widow - Jenn Marie - gave him access to the late songwriter’s notebooks, and let Sammy take raw material to write and record his own very personal tribute, an album called The Journals.
The full story of Earle’s descent into addiction is brutal at times. Much of his self-destructive and duplicitous behavior was hidden from Brue when he was young and on tour with the artist. Asked about confronting that side of his “hero” in the years since Earle died, Brue says this:
“It was so emotional getting through this book, because I was never mistreated in any way. He always propped me up. And I think, me being so young, he was trying to be the strongest version that he could be. And I was mindblown at how many relationships he had burnt with some of my favorite artists, you know? He loved people so deeply, but this well of sadness and just something within, it always got to him, you know?”
In the book, Bernstein portrays Earle’s contradictions and complexities without judgement or excuses. He describes the mixed blessings and burdens of being the son of famous songwriter and famous addict Steve Earle with grace and deep reporting.
“There were portions of this book that were excruciating to write emotionally, because the phrase that would always come back to me was just, you know, (a) pitch black kind of darkness. I hope readers are frustrated by the guy. I hope readers fall in love with the guy. I hope readers are exasperated by the guy. I hope readers are totally enamored and charmed, you know, by the guy. Because after speaking to several hundred people who knew him and loved him, that was the experience of knowing and loving Justin - all of those things.”
WMOT’s original obituary of Justin Townes Earle is here.
Find a full archive of The String here.
