The Ballad of Justin Townes Earle
He was a brilliant songwriter who built his own legend, but couldn’t outrun the darkness that came with it
He was a brilliant songwriter who built his own legend, but he couldn’t outrun the darkness that came with it.
One day in the spring of 2018, Jenn Marie Earle was washing dishes in her Portland, Oregon, home, when her husband, Justin Townes Earle, walked into the kitchen with his guitar to play her a song he’d just written.
As Justin started singing, Jenn Marie began to cry. On its surface, “Ahi Esta Mi Nina” was the tale of a Puerto Rican father attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter after a long prison stint. But Jenn Marie realized that the song was ultimately about her husband’s pain. His career had leveled off in recent years, and a sense of isolation had set in as he became increasingly worried about being able to provide for his wife and baby daughter. Justin was locking himself inside a dark room off the basement for hours to write, communicating with Jenn Marie through a grate connected to the kitchen upstairs. “If you need me,” Justin would shout, “just stomp your hoof, my little dear.”
“I’d seen him starting to become more distant, in many ways,” Jenn Marie says. “That song, to me, was an admittance, of choosing the fate of being locked away from what means the most to you.” The album Justin was writing in that unlit basement study, the last album released while he was alive, would be called The Saint of Lost Causes. “I think he was admitting that he was defeated, in a lot of ways,” Jenn Marie says.
It had been less than a decade since Earle released his breakthrough, 2010’s Harlem River Blues, which set songs about subway conductors, addiction, and cramped Brooklyn apartments to old-time gospel, folk, and country-blues styles. By that point, he was transcending omnipresent comparisons to his father, country hitmaker turned folkie Steve Earle, and was poised to become the first new solo superstar in the genre of commercial roots music that had come to be known as Americana.
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 worldweary 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, bantering with hecklers and tossing off one-liners like, “I haven’t swayed from Bruce Springsteen’s formula of girls, cars, and sex,” before adding, “Oh, and Mama.”
Earle was funny, caring, and obsessed with esoterica involving antique Rolexes and baseball history. His magnetic persona left a permanent impression on those who knew him. “He lived the life that you would read about some other country legend living,” says early tourmate James Felice of the Felice Brothers. The son of an entertainer who understood showbiz better than most, Earle embraced and solidified his own legend on and off the stage, sharing tragicomic stories about his adolescent heroin overdoses and bar fights that cost him teeth.
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.”
As the years passed, Earle’s insecurities grew. “There was a huge part of Justin that didn’t believe in himself,” says Jenn Marie. “He saw the music business changing. . . . When his [2014 and 2015 albums, Single Mothers and Absent Fathers] came out, he was disappointed they didn’t do so well. I think that’s where a lot of his darkness, his struggles with substance abuse and addiction, started to come to the surface in the last few years: him feeling like he wasn’t good enough.”
After writing The Saint of Lost Causes in 2018, Earle entered rehab, a process he’d been through more than a dozen times, then headed directly for the studio. The unusually vulnerable album seemed like an occasion for a career turnaround, and executives at his label, New West Records, were thrilled. But by the time Earle hit the road in the fall of 2019, he was drinking again, so much that bandmates wondered if they’d be able to finish the tour.
In January 2020, Jenn Marie helped Earle rent an apartment in Nashville, where he could temporarily live alone and focus on a flurry of musical projects. He embarked on a solo tour in March, only to shut it after one show, as the pandemic halted concerts nationwide. Forced to quarantine in Nashville, Earle floundered. “He needed an audience,” says friend and producer Steve Poulton. “He was used to having one: putting that energy out, and getting it back.”
“I can’t blame him all that much,” Justin once said of his father, Steve Earle. “I’m turning out to be more like him than I thought.”
Earle considered producing a Nashville hip-hop act and contemplated several future albums, including a Billie Holiday tribute with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and a record of duets with artists like Yasiin Bey (the rapper formerly known as Mos Def ) and Brian Fallon of Gaslight Anthem. Earle, with his manager and close confidant, Larry Kusters, began planning a livestream series in which he would perform with guests and expound on his favorite topics — baseball, the Delta blues, Civil War battles. The working title for the show was Justin Townes Earle: Misbehaving.
But according to friends and family, Earle continued to struggle with addiction. Though he was only 38, two decades of chemical dependency had taken a toll on his body. On July 21st, he was admitted to a Nashville hospital for pneumonia and underwent a serious lung surgery that, according to Jenn Marie, was a result of the long-term effects of his drug and alcohol use. By the time he left the hospital on August 2nd, his doctor warned him that his body would not be able to keep up if he kept drinking. “We thought that would be a wake-up call,” says Jenn Marie.
Justin felt otherwise. “He always used to say to me, ‘The Earles don’t die, we’re invincible,’ ” says Kusters, who visited Earle after he left the hospital. A few weeks later, on Thursday, August 20th, Kusters spoke with an upbeat, if restless, Earle over the phone. “He was getting a little bit antsy: ‘When can we go out on the road?’ ” says Kusters. Per The New York Times, that same day Justin called his father, who told his son, “Do not make me bury you.”
“I won’t,” Justin replied.
Then, no one heard from him. When the Nashville Police Department performed a welfare check Sunday evening, they found Earle dead in his apartment. A toxicology report determined he died of an accidental overdose due to a combination of alcohol and cocaine that was laced with fentanyl, the deadly opiate responsible for the deaths of Prince and Tom Petty, among many others.
Earle’s death caused an outpouring among fans like Stephen King and Billy Bragg. Steve Earle paid tribute with J.T., an album of his son’s songs. “The record is called J.T. because Justin was never called anything else until he was nearly grown.” Earle, who declined to speak for this article, said in a statement, “For better or worse, right or wrong, I loved Justin Townes Earle more than anything else on this Earth.”
“Justin shaped so much of the broader, younger perspective of what Americana music was,” says Earle’s former manager Nick Bobetsky. As Earle’s primary musical partner, Adam Bednarik, says, “He changed the lives of a lot of other people around him for the better.”
Fellow singer-songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield, who frequently toured with Earle, described his gift more simply: “He was able to explain trouble better than most.”
In the late Seventies, Steve Earle met Carol Ann Hunter at a Nashville bar where she worked. They married in 1981, and Hunter gave birth to Justin a year later. By the time Justin was four, in 1986, his parents had separated; that year, Steve Earle became an unlikely country star with his debut, Guitar Town. One song, “Little Rock ’n’ Roller,” was a touring musician’s promise to his son: “One of these days when you’re a little older,” Steve sang, “you can ride the big bus and everything will be alright.”
Justin spent his early childhood with his mother in a then-rough neighborhood in South Nashville, where he was exposed to drugs and dropped out of school in eighth grade. “I had the shaved head and the rat tail and wore the Jams and Air Jordans,” Justin said in 2009.
When Justin dropped out of school, he began to see more of his father, touring with him as a guitar tech and later doing odd jobs for his dad’s label. By the mid-Nineties, Steve was sober after being forced to kick a heroin addiction while briefly serving time in prison on drug charges in 1994.
In the late Nineties, Justin joined his first real band, the Swindlers, a collection of kids whose fathers were successful Nashville songwriters and musicians — “Music Row brats,” as one of them, Dustin Welch, puts it. The Swindlers’ headquarters was a backyard studio on Welch’s family property known as the Chicken Shack, a dusty shed full of recording gear, where Earle and Welch lived on and off as teenagers. The boys spent their nights partying and obsessing over their fathers’ blues records, putting their fingers on the spinning vinyl to slow them down and study the instrumental parts.
By the time he was a teenager, Justin was writing profoundly adult meditations on loneliness and despair like “Rogers Park.” It soon became clear the Swindlers would serve as a vessel for his blossoming songwriting. “He was this force of nature,” says another Swindler, Skylar Wilson, who produced several of Earle’s early records. “Everybody was trying to keep up.”
Even when the band members worked to break free of their fathers’ influence, it loomed over them. On the Swindlers’ first tour, in Oklahoma City, they panicked when they realized it was Father’s Day. Each bandmate began frantically calling his dad. “Dumbass,” Welch remembers Steve Earle telling Justin, “that’s next month.”
As a budding songwriter, Justin was eager for his father’s approval, which didn’t come easily early in Justin’s career. “Steve knew how incredible of a writer [his son] was — he let me know that — but he couldn’t always let Justin know that,” says Welch. Once, after the Swindlers ended a show with a newly written original named “Maria,” Steve asked Justin about the Elvis Costello song he had closed with. More than a decade later, Justin was still proud of the unintentional compliment.
Steve increasingly became one of his son’s biggest public cheerleaders as Justin grew into his own as an artist, but privately Justin still hungered for his father’s approval. “I don’t know if he ever listened to Harlem River Blues,” Justin told a journalist in 2012. “I’ve gone over [to Steve’s house] a few times and still found the same, wrapped copy of it sitting on the countertop. My dad means well, but he gets all over the place sometimes. He’s just like me, scattered as shit.”
One of the first of many times Justin would mythologize his complicated relationship with his father in song was on “Decimation of a Southern Gentleman,” a frighteningly personal unreleased Swindlers-era tune that Earle soon abandoned: “You ever get the feeling you were gonna die in the streets that you were raised in? Doing the same things your daddy done?”
Eventually, the Swindlers grew apart, and Justin began focusing on his own music. In 2006, Earle and a friend, the singer-songwriter and photographer Joshua Black Wilkins, decided to embark on a joint solo tour. Wilkins suggested that Earle use his middle name, Townes, on the road. Earle agreed, and took the idea a step further, getting “Townes” tattooed below his throat.
For all his prodigious gifts, Justin was never free of the shadow of his father. Their complicated relationship ended up becoming one of his most enduring themes as a songwriter, from 2009’s “Mama’s Eyes” (“I am my father’s son”) to 2012’s “Am I That Lonely Tonight?” (“Hear my father on the radio”) to his 2015 album, Absent Fathers. Justin wasn’t concerned with his parents hearing his songs that addressed them bluntly: “I always had to deal with it in a public format,” he said. “Why shouldn’t they?”
In the early days of Justin’s career, father and son enjoyed exchanging playful jabs in public. [