Why Justin Townes Earle is singing those family-man blues
Becoming a family man has given Justin Townes Earle a new perspective.
Fatherhood has always loomed large in the career of Americana singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle – and in the past few months the paternal tie has shifted down a generation. A lot has been made of Earle’s relationship with his own dad – alternative-country legend Steve Earle. His wayward youth was spent growing up on the seedier side of Nashville’s tracks, seemingly following in his father’s drug-addict footsteps. His 2014 and 2015 albums were entitled Single Mothers and Absent Fathers respectively.
And then, at the start of July, the 35-year-old and his wife Jenn Marie announced the birth of their first daughter – Etta St James. Just as the elder Earle named his son after his greatest influence, Townes Van Zandt, so the younger Earle picked a name that carries great musical resonance for him – Etta James, the blues and R&B singer of such classics as At Last and I’d Rather Go Blind, who battled her own personal demons throughout her life.
“She’s an artist I’ve always looked to because of the power of her voice,” he says. “But the importance of her name – and keeping that name alive – is that she was treated so badly and still pushed through all that adversity.”
Adversity is a constant theme in Earle’s eighth studio album, Kids on the Streets, which arrived just a month before little Etta.
It’s not a belligerent, me-against-theworld sense of adversity throughout the album – rather, it’s a measured, objective view of a past no longer seen from inside the hustle and hard living of Nashville’s Music City, but from family life now based in Portland, Oregon.
When, in the rolling New Orleans blues of 15-25 he sings, “I know I’m probably lucky that I survived, well, I could be doing 25 to life,” or revisits the well-worn murderous folk standard with Same Old Stagolee, it’s because he’s sailed close to the wind and lived to tell the tale. Or, as he prefers to deadpan it, “Yes, there have certainly been plenty of occasions over the years that could have worked out really badly.”
He describes himself now as a more “static” writer than the rough singer-songwriter with the fine country pedigree of the 2007 debut Yuma, and someone who “looks at life and subject matters in a more outward way rather than internalising everything”.
He’s also adjusting to the father thing – he missed the birth by four days because of his touring commitments. But he’s stayed home since.
Justin Townes, with band The Sadies, plays at the Southern Fork Americana Festival in Auckland on October 11 and 12.
He grew up on the seedier side of Nashville’s tracks, seemingly following in his father’s drug- addict footsteps.