Justin Townes Earle: Crossing The Boundary of 30

“Won’t Be the Last Time,” one of the best tracks on Justin Townes Earle’s terrific new album, finds the song’s narrator pounding the pavement of a “Sunday mornin’ sidewalk” when he’d rather be snuggling in bed with the woman who just kicked him out. It’s warm under those blankets, he remembers, and it’s cold out on these streets where “I got my hands down in my pockets, ’cause I’m shakin’ like a leaf.”

As the song begins, he expresses bewilderment: “I’m not gonna claim to know what happened… maybe I said some things I shouldn’t.” But the singer never whines about his fate; how could he with the slow, dignified music behind him, a mix of ghostly steel guitar and bowed strings? It’s adult music from the rural South, and it dawns on the narrator that maybe it’s time he became an adult too.

When bluegrass virtuoso Bryn Davies digs her bow into her upright bass, she unleashes a rich, reverberating tone that seems to crack open an epiphany for the narrator: “When I was young, I was dumb and I was free. Now I’m getting older, and I feel this world closing in on me.” Earle delivers that last line in a soft, half-spoken voice bled of all melodrama so the confession’s utter desolation stands unadorned.

“There is less pent-up, angry-young-man attitude on this record,” Earle concedes. “I have realized my own limits at this point. I know how far I can push things before I fuck them up. I used to believe everything was out of my control, but now I realize that’s not true. I had a five-year period where I did alcohol and drugs and then all of a sudden it got me again and that relapse knocked a lot of the youthful cockiness out of me. I’m 30 now, and I don’t think it’s cool to die at 30.”

And yet, even as the song’s narrator recognizes his mistakes, he adds, “It won’t be the last time.” “Yeah,” Earle acknowledges, “It’s important for me to not have too-big expectations. I’ve learned that ‘never’ is a word that doesn’t sit too well with me. So I could never say this will be the last time. There’s a realization there, but the character is also showing a weakness, admitting to everyone else around him that he can’t control himself sometimes.”

The album is called Never Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now, and it marks another breakthrough for the tall, skinny singer/songwriter. On his 2009 album, Midnight at the Movies, Earle found a personal songwriting voice, even if the record’s sound was unfocused. On his 2010 album, Harlem River Blues, he found his signature sound, but only by writing songs that too readily showed their influences in old Southern music. On this new CD, however, the songwriting and the sound come together as one.

“I’ve never heard it put like that, but, yeah, that does make sense,” Earle says. “This record is sort of the culmination of the process. I did my folkie thing with Yuma, my honky-tonk thing with The Good Life, the experimental thing with Midnight and I arrived at a more bluesy, more country, more Staple Singers-like sound for Harlem River Blues. It’s a process of finding out what you want to do, though of course you always leave room for things to change, because you don’t want to fall into a rut.”

“Won’t Be the Last Time” is not the only song on the new album that finds the singer cast out of a warm home to wander the chilly streets, either on foot or in a car. On “Lower East Side,” he’s at the intersection of Manhattan’s 11th Street and Avenue B at midnight, staring at the streetlights shining in the rain-coated asphalt, hearing his ex-lover’s name in the wintry wind. On “Maria,” he is once again “out in the cold,” writing a letter to his ex, asking her to “just walk on past me” if they cross paths on the sidewalk, because “I don’t wanna hurt no more.”

On “Memphis in the Rain,” he’s driving west on I-40 toward Little Rock through “the cold, dark night,… one hand on the wheel,… one on my heart, looking for a girl without a name.” On “Movin’ On,” he’s riding a band van east on I-80 through Ohio, thinking about a phone call from his old home in Nashville where the Cumberland River is rising over its banks. On “Unfortunately, Anna,” the album’s most powerful song, he’s driving down Fatherland Street in East Nashville when he sees an ex-girl friend walking in the rain. He rolls down the window and asks, “Where you wanna go?” She says, “I don’t know, just anywhere but here.”

The song opens very quietly with acoustic guitar, pedal steel and Earle’s hushed, sad tenor. It’s as if he were reluctant to tell this story or to look in this woman’s face because it might be a reflection of his own. Like him, she’s been walking the streets alone at night. Like him, she’s been wondering how her mama has been doing in another town. Like him, she feels all the pressures of life “pushing down on me [till] I’m about to scream.” Like him, she’s hoping that a change of scenery will mean a change of luck.

The listener can feel the pressure building on the car’s two occupants as slowly but surely fiddle, bowed bass, drum brushes, trumpet and saxophone are added to the melancholy music. On the extraordinary bridge, when the driver watches Anna in the rear-view mirror as she says, “I need to know that there’s something more to this life,” Earle refuses to resolve the chord progression, allowing her to ask for more and more without ever getting the answer she wants.

In the end, the only answer he can give her, the only answer he can give himself, is an unpalatable truth: “All this time you’ve been waiting for the world to change, but unfortunately, Anna, it’s you who needs to change.” On those last five words, all the instruments fall away but the high-pitched steel and Earle’s raspy, anguished voice.

“In ‘Unfortunately, Anna,’ I was trying to show the confusion that exists among my generation,” Earle reveals. “We are a generation without connection. It’s the least-voting generation in a long time. We saw young people get really rich really fast, which created this money-hungry stampede where we stepped on anyone in our way. All the schemes that were funny when we were in our 20s aren’t so cute anymore.

“I was an already-screwed-up kid who got a job that allowed me to run away from everything for a long, long time. Eventually, though, I built up enough crap that it started catching up with me. Most people who run figure that out eventually: If you run, you’re going to get caught. Yeah, Anna’s on the street, but what’s that guy doing driving around on the same streets? A lot of times when we try to save people, we’re the ones who need saving.”

Earle is not shy about talking about his own problems. He frankly admits that he had a long battle with alcohol, heroin and cocaine. He thought he had licked it, but then he had a relapse at the worst possible time: just as he was launching his potential breakthrough album, Harlem River Blues, in the fall of 2010. He was even arrested September 16 that year in Indianapolis after a drunken fistfight with a club owner. After a stint in rehab, he relaunched the album, and the title song eventually won the Americana Music Award for Song of the Year.

“I found myself in a battle that I thought I was well done with,” Earle acknowledges. “These new songs came out of that, even if they don’t refer explicitly to struggling with drugs and alcohol. To me there’s no point in talking directly about these problems; it’s better to write about the feelings of the experience rather than the experience itself. It’s better to write relationship songs, because most people can identify with that, while only a few can identify with heroin songs. It’s the same feeling, even if different people arrive at it from different situations.”

In other words, the feeling of being shoved out of a comfortable home life onto a cold, unforgiving street is the same whether the pushing was done by a girlfriend, a bottle or a packet of powder. Even when he gets close to talking about addiction on “Look the Other Way,” when he sings, “I’m hurtin’ in the worst way; I got no money in my pocket, no place to stay,” he addresses the song to an ex-lover who might or might not take him in.

“These stories are composite characters in composite narratives,” he insists. “It could be something that happened to me, but it could also be something that happened to someone I know—or something I read in a newspaper or a novel, a movie or a TV show. I try to keep my eyes open and my ears to the floor so I don’t miss a beat. But I have to process these songs very carefully to make sure I’m treading my own water, that I’m not letting my influences too far into it.

“With ‘Unfortunately, Anna,’ I wrote the first few lines about six months before I finished it. You have to make sure that you’re revealing new things with each stanza, that you’re not letting yourself off the hook. Because of my history with drugs and alcohol, I’ve had several girlfriends who’ve had the same problems. There can be a certain bit of anger, but you have to realize you helped them into that hole.”

If there’s any sense of redemption on the album, it comes on “Am I That Lonely Tonight” in the tentative declaration, “Sometimes I think that I could find a way where I won’t feel so on my own.” More convincing than the cautious lyric is the music that rises up so full and comforting. Skylar Wilson, Earle’s longtime friend and co-producer, plays a churchy organ, reinforced by Amanda Shires’ violin and Bryn Davies’ thumping bass. Finally Jon-Paul Frappier’s trumpet and Geoff Pfeifer’s saxophone join the patient, expansive chords, which seem to wrap comforting arms around the forlorn singer.

The horns are a new addition to Earle’s sound, making the R&B flavors of Harlem River Blues even more pronounced. It’s not a full horn section, just one sax and one trumpet, like the Memphis Horns, who played with everyone from Otis Redding and Al Green to U2. And Earle doesn’t call for a Clarence Clemons kind of wailing sax; he calls for soft swells and harmonic pads to set a noir-ish mood for his brooding lyrics.

“I’ve arrived at a kind of soul-based singer/songwriter music rather than country-based singer/songwriter music,” Earle points out, “but it still has that singer/songwriter approach, because that’s where I come from. I knew after making Good Life that I didn’t want to be a country musician. It was such a confining role; it wasn’t the crowd I was looking for; it wasn’t the age group I was looking for, and as a singer I wanted to get away from that high, nasal place and go to a lower, fuller place.

“It came down to what music did I listen to when I was on my own at home? It was the Staple Singers, Otis Redding and Al Green; listening to Steve Cropper play just behind the beat is the best for me. The horns add that little touch that echoes all those records I loved.”

The horns echo more than those great Memphis soul records of the ’60s and ’70s; they reflect a long tradition of Southern black music ultimately rooted in the church. If the tonalities of that music imply a soul wrestling with demons and finding some solace in emotional release, that’s an appropriate frame for Earle’s new songs.

“I’m not a religious man at all,” he says, “but I am a strong believer that all kinds of popular music come out of the church. I like to base my music on primitive genres, and that’s the one I’m most comfortable with.

“Maybe it’s because I grew in a mixed neighborhood in South Nashville with a lot of poor white musicians, the ex-wives of those musicians and a lot of black people. When you walked by the 12th Avenue A.M.E. Tabernacle on Sunday, it was rocking. I don’t know how he did it, but Skylar talked his way into a black church out in Murfreesboro. He became their organ player and came away with a lot from it.”

By the time of the 2011 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in April, Earle had overcome the tour’s shaky September start and delivered an impressive set. Dressed in a white linen suit, a round-brim hat to match and a peppermint-striped shirt, the long, lanky singer was joined only by Davies and fiddler Josh Hedley. Wearing dark shades over his thin goatee in the bright afternoon, Earle swayed to the trio’s lazy, country-blues swing and sang in an unhurried, unstrained tenor marked by a full, rounded tone.

That didn’t mean that Earle had lost his edge. In introducing his best known song, “Mama’s Eyes,” as good a song about parent-child relationships as has been written, he told the crowd: “My mom can detach your retina. I know, because she did it to my dad.” He then sang the song from Midnight at the Movies with a new Harlem River Blues feel: a languorous, swampy country-blues. “I’m my father’s son,” he sang. “I never know when to shut up.”

His dad, of course, is Steve Earle, who saddled his eldest child with two of the most intimidating names in American songwriting: Townes, as in Van Zandt, and Earle. Somehow Justin managed to rise to that seemingly impossible challenge, though not without numerous struggles and resentments. His mother is Carol-Ann Hunter, the third of Steve’s six wives, and “Mama’s Eyes,” as the title implies, is about her more than Steve. In the final verse, Justin sings, “I’ve got my mama’s eyes, her long thin frame and her smile. I still see wrong from right, ’cause I’ve got my mama’s eyes.”

“That song says something to my mother in three verses and a bridge that I’d never been able to put into words for her,” Justin admits. “I’ll always look up to my mom, because she was a very strong person. When I was a kid, she was a roadie; she was pushing amps and setting up lights for local shows or a David Bowie tour.

“She gave me a kind of honesty that doesn’t come from my dad’s side of the family. They were always storytellers; my dad’s dad was one of the greatest storytellers I ever heard. As a songwriter, you need both: both the truth about what’s actually going on and the art to make it entertaining. The idea is to make people cry or laugh—either one is okay with me.”

Two of the new songs on Never Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now also refer to his parents. The first words you hear on the CD are these from “Am I That Lonely Tonight”: “I hear my father on the radio singing, ‘Take me home again.’” The song’s narrator may be in Asheville, in the North Carolina mountains—where Justin did, in fact, record the new album in a short, four-day burst with no overdubs—but he can’t get away from his father’s shadow, his father’s voice, a voice he nonetheless longs to hear over the telephone.

More pointed yet is the album’s final number, “Movin’ On,” where the person on the other end of the phone is his mother. “[I] tell her I been gettin’ sick again and we both pretend we don’t know why….
She asks me how my father’s been and we both pretend we don’t know why.” Some children of famous celebrities play down the association, trying to create some open space for their own lives. Others whitewash the past and present their famous parents as impossibly heroic people. Justin does neither.

“I’ve found it’s better to address the issue of my parents myself,” he argues, “because otherwise people are just going to make shit up. Some sons of famous fathers can’t even speak their dads’ names, but as an adult I’ve become very good friends with my dad, and that’s as good as it gets. But I thought my mom also deserved her point of view to be displayed in my songs. I’ve always leaned toward my mother, because she’s the one who actually raised me. On this record, I pointed out that she’s had her problems too. That’s all part of it.

“I don’t know if they actually like me doing it or not, but they haven’t said anything about it. I think a lot of songwriters shy away from that subject, because it’s such a tender spot and it reflects so much on who they are. Not only are they missing out on some great material, but they’re missing a chance to show listeners that it’s okay to talk about these things.”

Neither Justin nor his girlfriend (they split time between his place in New York and hers in Nashville) are planning to have children, but Justin has at long last come to a place where he can at least talk about it. He’s been sober more than a year and the prospects look good for the future. As a mid-level touring/recording musician, he’s the head of a small business that meets its payroll. Four days into 2012 he turned 30.

“I was given a lot of bad information when I was growing up,” he says. “I believed the party life was part of the creative life, but that’s just a myth. The one has nothing to do with the other. But I didn’t pay attention to the lessons; I kept banging my head against the wall. All getting fucked up did was delay my career—though maybe that was good, because I couldn’t have made the records I’m making now when I was 18.

“I find a lot of my friends are still doing what they did in their early twenties, like drinking bottles of Robitussin to get high. I’m like, ‘What are you thinking?’ The later you get in your twenties, the less appropriate some things get. Drinking a lot of beer when you’re 24 is no big deal, but your wife isn’t going to be so happy if you’re still pounding drinks with the boys at 29. Maybe everyone just needs to get it out of their system.”

There’s an ambiguity to the chorus of “Movin’ On.” When Justin sings, “I’m trying to move on,” is he running away from his problems or trying to overcome them and get on with his life? In the final verse, he seems to ask himself the same question. Should he keep trying to solve the riddle of his parents’ doomed marriage that left him with a twin inheritance of addiction and workaholism? Or should he “go back to New York City and just learn to live with it”?

The jaunty hillbilly harmonica and swelling R&B horns behind him, so full of confidence and clarity, seem to be pushing in the latter direction. If so, that’s good news not just for Justin, but also for every listener who wants him to hang around long enough to deliver more albums like this one.