In the late 2000s, Justin Townes Earle emerged as one of the most magnetic singer-songwriters in roots music, thanks to the emotional immediacy and potent charisma he brought to time-tested folk, country and blues forms.
But in 2020, he died of a fentanyl overdose in Nashville, the same place his life and musical journey began.
Journalist Jonathan Bernstein first dug into those events in a thoroughly reported 2021 piece for Rolling Stone, and that year of research led to more and, ultimately, his engrossing new biography of Earle, “What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome.”
“When I started writing this story and really talking to people,” Bernstein explained during a visit to Nashville Public Radio, “very quickly my understanding of him got tossed on its side. It left me with a real sense of, ‘I’ve barely begun to understand this subject. This actually feels like a beginning and not an ending.”
Jewly Hight: Plenty of celebrated music books have been written without the authors seeking permission. Why was it important to you that this be an authorized biography? And what did that involve?
Jonathan Bernstein: What I learned very quickly is that no one really agrees on what “authorized” means, including people who write biographies. But for me, it basically means one thing: that the estate of Justin’s, which is his widow, Jenn Marie Earle, cooperated with this biography and agreed to be interviewed extensively.
When I started doing interviews about Justin for this book, people were, I think, appropriately wary or uncertain about speaking with me. Many people went directly to Jenn Marie Earl to say, “Is this guy approaching me, like, a random weirdo, or is he legit?” She opened doors for me and connected me to people that I wouldn’t probably have been able to speak to otherwise.
But the reason it was so important for me to go the route of [getting] the estate’s official permission is from the first time we talked, it became very clear to me that she was very committed [to] the way that I was to trying to tell this person’s story, warts and all, the beauty and the tragedy of it. It was just obvious that she felt it wasn’t worth telling a story about this person, given the way he died of a fentanyl overdose, if we were not to be very honest about the effects of his addiction and his mental health issues on others and on himself. I would never have wanted to write a book that either glorified that stuff or ignored it.
JH: As you note at the end of the book, Justin’s famous fellow artist father, Steve Earle, declined to participate. How did you receive that news? What impact did it have on the book?
JB: I went into this project in my gut not thinking that Steve would speak to me, nor did I promise his participation in trying to get a deal to actually write a book. I, of course, was so eager to speak with Steve about his son. I spent two years hearing stories about Steve and Justin and I was dying to get his side of this whole relationship.
[But] Steve is an incredibly seductive and forceful narrator and storyteller, and I think it would have been hard to resist the pull of his weight of his version of the truth had he, let’s say, extensively spoken to me for days on end. I really didn’t want this book to be Steve’s version of what happened, because Steve has told that story. This is Justin’s story, not his dad’s.
The tortured troubadour myth
JH: One of the central themes of the book, which applies both to Justin and to his father, is that towering myth of the tortured troubadour. I love how you define it as a conception of art and music as a higher calling that requires suffering. What understanding did you gain of the role that that myth played over time in Justin’s music-making, in his life and his career?
JB: He grew up as a teenager, really believing, given his middle namesake Townes Van Zandt, and his father’s public story, and the music he was exposed to as a kid—you know, Nirvana or The Replacements—that he had to destroy himself in order to make great art. He thought that he needed to write these important American songs in the vein of Townes and Woody Guthrie. Justin nearly did destroy himself as a teenager, and he was hospitalized in the ICU at age 22, because he couldn’t breathe anymore, he was doing so many drugs.
It was when Justin got sober in his 20s that he started to talk about and identify this thing of the myth. I think it was a way for him to sort of separate himself from his past, to separate his addiction from his sobriety, and to really publicly call out what he thought was harmful.
I think a lot of artists struggle with this and strive towards [the idea that they] can be happy and still make meaningful art. And when Justin was in his clear-minded self, when he was most sober, he believed so strongly and fervently in that. The really difficult and complex, and, in some ways, heartbreaking element of this is that as Justin grew older, as he continued to struggle with substance use and his addiction, I think he developed a strong and somewhat tortured ambivalence towards this concept. I think a part of him never stopped fully believing in it, and that part of them was very much correlated to when his addiction would come back when he would relapse. Justin said things to his wife in his later years when he was not doing well like, “I think they like me the most when I’m messed up.”
Also, this stuff was thrown at him in almost every conversation he ever had. When he did get married in his 30s and he was in a relatively, pretty solid and stable period in his life, just about every interviewer starts asking him, “How are you gonna write songs now that you’re married and you’re gonna have a kid and you seem outwardly happy?”
JH: That might be a flippant question, but I imagine it would have real impact facing it over and over again.
JB: I think that was probably incredibly, existentially devastating to Justin to hear that question. He would make quips and make light of it, and what he often would say is, “I’ve been happy for a year and a half, but my parents had way more time to screw me up than I’ve be happy, so I have a lot of material to draw from.”
Caring so much that it hurts
JH: We saw a somewhat parallel scenario play out last fall with the passing of another beloved Nashville singer-songwriter, Todd Snider, after a long and visible decline that complicated his legacy. You interviewed so many sources, who each had their own experiences of Justin and his artistry, his musicianship, his life, his career. How did you make sense of the human toll exacted on those who were really invested in Justin and his wellbeing?
JB: At the very beginning of me writing this project, one of Justin’s dear friends and career-long photographers, Joshua Black Wilkins, sat me down and said, “You’re gonna learn that every single person you speak to saw a completely side of this person and has a different relationship to him and will have a completely different Justin to tell you about.” I frankly didn’t what he meant. And now I do, three years later.
A lot of people would preface the conversation by saying, “I’ve heard a lot of stories about this person, but the Justin I saw was this beautiful, kind, gentle, caring, delicate, sweet person.” I also feel privileged that those who did have to see the worst and the most harmful and, at times, violent parts of Justin trusted me enough to share some of the really difficult things.
Justin, like Todd Snider, left a really human and emotional and psychological wake in the mighty path that he forged. He hurt people. It was very intense and meaningful to try to bear witness and listen to what that hurt looked like, how it sounded, how it felt. What I tried to take in as this person’s biographer is that almost everybody who had been truly hurt by Justin, that was wrapped up in a really deep care and love that they had for him. I think those two things are very much related in people’s relationships to Justin. It hurts so much because they care for him so much and they wanted to see him thrive and succeed and find anything resembling happiness.
JH: You certainly did not center yourself in the writing of this book, because you’re a professional and this isn’t your memoir. But as someone who had followed and appreciated his work deeply, how did immersing yourself in his story impact you?
JB: The one-sided and essentially imaginary relationship that I developed with this person who isn’t around to speak for themselves was incredibly intense. It was unexpected, in some ways. You spend a day thinking about someone who is, to put it really crassly, like a dead stranger to you. I did not know Justin personally. I interviewed him once. [But] I spent every day of three years of my life thinking and talking to other people about this person. And you start to feel a profound sort of closeness to the person.
For me, writing this book was profound, because I was speaking to these many hundreds of people, many of whom hadn’t had the chance to speak about Justin. I joked that I felt like I was sort of like an unlicensed grief counselor for these people. There were a lot of tearful conversations. I ultimately became a receptacle for the communal love that was felt for this person. I think that receiving that for two years affected me and shaped my emotional relationship to Justin.
That also was challenging and confusing at times, because as I learned more about Justin, I would continue to learn things that were upsetting. And I think that’s what a lot of people who actually knew Justin experienced in their relationships with him.
JH: One way that you make use of the insight you gained is by teasing out a defining paradox of his music and performance style: how much of him he really put into his songs, although he was often working with old-timey forms that conceal the personal nature of the material. How do you think that enriched his work?
JB: I started from the position of being quite a long-time fan of Justin’s music. But to be honest, my relationship to his music was [that] I loved his ballads. I loved the songs that were more obviously emotional, like “Mama’s Eyes,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Who Am I to Say.” I had fun with Justin’s songs that were fun, old-time country songs, like “Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving,” “Hard Living,” but I didn’t appreciate the depth of what he was doing on a level of craft and emotional masking. [Now] I have so much appreciation for how he found these ways to create safe distance for himself to sing about himself. I frankly think that he was a genius at doing that.
JH: As someone who did interview Justin multiple times over the course of multiple album cycles, the way you got at the inconsistencies in how he told his story and what an unreliable narrator he was rang true to me. You show him to be someone who was always engaged in the work of fashioning and refashioning his story, with flair. How did you reckon with the slippage you found in his own telling of his story?
JB: I have a background in fact checking. That’s my day job at Rolling Stone.
I think ultimately where I found so much meaning in Justin’s story was often in the space between the way Justin told his emotional truth and what the less interesting, more boring facts and reality was. As one of Justin’s friends and influences Scotty Melton—a great songwriter in East Tennessee—put it, “In the half-truths that Justin told, there’s often a deeper truth.” Justin would tell a story that often sounded like total nonsense, and the fun thing was learning that there was almost always a grain of truth to it, emotional if not literal.
Justin, for example, talked about having been incarcerated for six months as a teenager, which was not true. I’m almost positive that Justin was talking about spending several months against his will at a troubled teen wilderness camp in Middle Tennessee. And to learn that the way Justin talked about that time was one of incarceration said so much about his emotional state as a 14-year-old, alone and fearful and not able to control how he spends his time. And the way Justin publicly blamed his father and sort of lionized his mother when the reality was much more complicated says so much about the way that he needed to believe and communicate his life to the public, because the reality is even more heartbreaking.
The influence that lives on
JH: What did you ultimately conclude about his lasting significance to roots music?
JB: From day one, the excitement for me as a music journalist and as someone who’s covered and loved music coming out of this city of Nashville and roots music of the 21st century, was this opportunity to try to tell the larger story, and learning about a shadow, almost proto-American scene that Justin was involved in in the late ‘90s in Nashville with bands like Old Crow Medicine show before they were taking off.
JH: And you reminded me about Justin’s early string band, The Swindlers.
JB: All these people are kind of interacting and collaborating and making music together, much of it happening in a place called the Chicken Shack on Warfield Drive in Green Hills, which is the backyard teenage hangout of Dustin Welch, the son of Kevin Welch.
It was also really interesting to reframe Justin within the context of what we now call the “stomp clap era.” In the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Justin was at his commercial and cultural peak, he was very much adjacent to a group like Mumford and Sons who viewed Justin as the real deal, OG version of what they were doing.
And yet as the late 2000s became the 2010’s, Justin did, in some ways intentionally, in some ways unconsciously, recede from the larger cultural understanding of roots music and Americana as it kind of became more mainstream, as people like Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers were having enormous careers. I think we’re now still very much in a moment where Sierra Ferrell and Tyler Childers and Charley Crockett are almost stadium- or arena-level artists. Sierra and Charley both cover [Justin’s song] “Harlem River Blues,” so that’s a pretty direct lineage to me.
Justin never did become the stadium-selling kind of star that I think some people, for a period of time, thought he might become. But I do think that his body of work ended up becoming hugely and quietly influential on those who sort of did end up sort of taking that mantle that he never quite took.
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