When we say Justin Townes Earle knows about the creative underbelly of Nashville (and Chicago, and the Ozarks, and...) we're not kidding around. Justin spent a majority of his teenage years nursing bluegrass, ragtime, alt-country and very bad habits including the abuse of alcohol, cocaine, and a cornucopia of other "weirdness". Finally, after getting the boot from his father Steve Earle's tour band, Justin Townes Earle went sober, came down, and released the jaw-dropping Yuma followed closely by The Good Life. His latest release, Midnight at the Movies, has been raking in rave reviews from Sound Opinions, Paste, Performing Songwriter, Pitchfork, and more. He's played SXSW and the Grand Ole Opry in the past year. Yesterday, I got to chat with Justin about hitting the ground running (or trotting, if he gets his way).
When did you begin songwriting? What triggered it?
I started writing when I was very young, started writing short stories and there was a first grade teacher who for some reason really concentrated more on reading and writing with me. I guess she saw something in me nobody else did cuz she gave me books she didn’t give other kids. So really I started writing through her—and also for something to do. I mean, you gotta understand, my mom was a single mother raising me and before I turned into a wild kid I was a scared kid locked in the house every day. Then when I hit high school I realized, y’know, girls liked songwriters more than prose writers and I switched over. One of the first songs ever wrote I finished and put into the album: “Halfway to Jackson.” First song I ever wrote and finished. I think that songwriting was one of those things I arrived, at not something I started out to do. And people say I started when I was 15 but honestly, they need to realize, I had a very strange childhood. By the time I was 15 I was just trying to figure out a way out of the fucking house.
You’ve got a somewhat
sordid history. How has it informed your songwriting—if, in fact, it has at
all? Is there any writing from between 15 and the first album?
There’s a lot of writing that got scraped—I mean, give me a break, I wasn’t only young but I was a junkie. Then again, there’s a lot of stuff that made it. I was hard living off the good life when I was 16 years old. “Turn Out My Lights” I wrote when I was sixteen. In the end, a lot of the songs stuck with The Good Life… I had 10 years to complete that record, half of them being old and half of them being written in the few months leading up to the record. When I decided I wanted to do this, I wasn’t like “Mom, mom, I wanna do this!” It was like, “Fuck you, mom, I’m doing this.” I mean, obviously no one wants to say ‘fuck you’ to their mothers—but by that time I had to move. “All you other motherfuckers can sit around picking your noses but I’m gonna be a fucking songwriter!” (laughs) So I went to the hills to learn more about hillbilly, I went to Chicago to learn blues music, I went straight to the sources… and then I made a record.
Tell me more about
that—about going to the sources. Something tells me most bands don’t bother.
What made you decide how to do it?
Starting when I was about 12 years old, I was spending more time around my father—not a lot, mind you, but the most I’d spent up to that point. And he’s a very idealistic man. About everything. I mean, it was never suggested to me what good music was, it was told to me. What it was, how it’s made, what you gotta do to do it. Where most people screw up is that they think that its all degradation that makes songwriters, that it’s just a complete and total loss of everything that makes you a songwriter. And when you look at people like Townes, you can get that misconception. That he was born that way and that that’s something you have to do, sleep with women, sleep on couches, be a junkie, just destroy everything around you. So where most people screwed up is that they did all that in one place—I may’ve been a degenerate, but I knew my welcome would wear out if I stayed in one place for too long. And I knew there was things I wanted to try that I couldn’t try in my hometown. Constant movement helps with the writing, I think, just in that everything happens and it happens to you. I saw a lot, I starved, I ate, I had a carton of cigarettes, I had no cigarettes— but none of that counts if you don’t have a brain in your head, if you don’t read, don’t know what’s going on in the world. I know so many people I wanna shake and scream “USA Today is not really news!” Townes said you have to throw away everything that you love to do this, and I think he was wrong. I think the people you love have to be understanding of you. But throwing them off? In this business, it’s an extra special accelerated thing. Most relationships go sour in six months, in a year; things go in three days when you’re never around.
I feel like
songwriters—including Townes and your father—come prepackaged a lot with a kind
of mythology… And a lot of its fact! But a lot of its fact due to this
accelerated nature you mentioned. Is that accurate? How does reality compare?
People have a lot of large misconceptions of what goes on out here. It definitely is an accelerated way of life—things that are great are greater, things that are bad are worse. But it’s just not all that glamorous. In fact, and I think this is why people get going and give up in a day, its extremely tedious. Everything happens the exact same way every day. I wake up in a hotel; I have a granola bar, yogurt, cup of coffee; I get in the van, we drive four hours; we load up gear, get on stage, go “check check,” go to dinner, get on stage again, play for the people, sell merch, drive four hours, go to sleep, do it again. That’s why so few people can do this. There’s a massive misconception that, oh, there’s all these girls and drugs and shit. And it is there, but all that shit gets old. I’ve been doing this for 13 years, spent every night in and out of clubs. I would think really badly of myself if I was still chasing pussy and doing blow. I would feel like I was stuck. I mean, my girlfriend’s asleep in the bed next door and I’m fortunate to be able to say that.
Is that common? To
have a significant other in tow?
It’s one those things to where when you have a band you don’t have that luxury but… I’m the boss. (laughs) Everyone around me understands. I don’t drink, I don’t do hard drugs— my life has, physically, had to slow down. When I go out, I go out for a few hours, I say hi, and as soon as the volume knob goes up with the guys (obviously from the consumption of alcohol) I back to the hotel and read.
I’m at the point where I don’t have to do anything to make my life extraordinary. Hell, my life was extraordinary from the moment my grandma had to be called to pay the bills to release me from the hospital and go home with my mother. I was born into a shit storm. My whole life I’ve lived on the terms of other people, terms that I’ve had literally nothing to do with. Now it’s as close to my terms that it’s gonna get. I get to call my own shots… and they usually involve going back to the hotel room and reading.
Why keep doing it? If
so much of it is tedious, if you’re constantly called out…?
I could never see myself stopping doing this. I’m definitely in the process of starting to slow it down a little bit—I’m not old, but I’m not 18. Pulling ten shows in a row doesn’t work anymore, that ain’t happening anymore. More than 2 weeks straight out on the road ain’t happening anymore. It’s just one of those things where I’ll never quit, but I’m just not an animal. And that’s what I’ve lived like for a really long time. Even last year—we did over 250 shows last year on the road and I was constantly living like shit, eating like shit. By the end of it I felt like I’d been running junk all year! And I’ll keep it up but… I just gotta find my happy medium. Used to only be about this, used to only be about the music, about getting the records out there and doing the shows. Now there’s times I just want be at home sometimes. I live in New York City and I want to enjoy New York City— I want to be able to eat good food, not fast food all the time. I want to be able to enjoy life. I value my life and I value my living situation right now. I would do anything to keep it, and the road’s not—this life is not very good to those kinds of things. Being a smart man, I have to not drive myself into the ground and if it can’t slow down then… well, I hope I can walk away if I get unhappy.
“You hope”? Do you
think you could, right now?
I still haven’t—and I mean I talk shit, I have a lot of frustration with it—but I’ve never once seriously thought about quitting music all together. I have seriously considered quitting touring but, y’know, I can’t. Um, at all. Gotta eat. It’s just gotta slow down, and every week it’s slowing down a little bit more. The more stuff—interview requests, PR—that comes in, the more it slows down. The more people want to talk to you, the more you can demand. You can get that money up to where you don’t have to do six shows in a row in order to eat. It’s art, and it’s business. No matter how “indie” people think they are, the business has got you. “You did this on your own, you made this”—that’s true, but I am very much aware of the fact that I’m part of a business. There ain’t no such thing as “indie.”
Alright, I got time for I think one
more. And I’m gonna roll with a complete subject change—
Rock on!
--that is near and dear to my heart. Your music often gets a hailed as “contemporary roots”— or, my personal favorite weird genre name, “newgrass.” What does that phrase mean, to you? Does such a thing exist?
Uh, wow… good question.
I know, right?
Yeah, I don’t know. You probably have just as much luck defining “Americana.” When people ask me to describe my music, I used to say it was southern American music but that’s a moot point. All American music is really southern music, all of it, blues, rock, country—it all comes from Kentucky down. I was fortunate enough to grow up in an area where I had all these influences…. I could see John Hartford, I saw Porter Wagoner on the Grand Ole Opry. I was in a unique position to gather the real deal and I think that’s the problem. You have that term that’s used a lot “carpetbagger country” and the only reason that exists is that—I mean, you got a lot of hillbillies and country music up there [in Chicago] but it’s the kids coming up and not doing the research that look like assholes. Kids come on up and talk big about Boss Hog and—man, if you knew anything about Boss Hog, you would know he’d wrap your ponytail around his fist and beat you into a bloody pulp with it. Hell, he would kill me and I’m from the South cuz I’m covered in tattoos! There’s just this big misconception that they have the ability to know all about the sound because they’ve got the Internet. But you gotta get to the source. You gotta dig at the root. There’s nothing easy about music.
Justin Townes Earle rolls through Chicago this Sunday (5/7) for the Metronome Festival at Milwaukee and Armitage. He begins his set at 8:00 PM (but if you don't go to the whole thing, we'll be very disappointed in you). His sophomore release "Midnight at the Movies" can be found here.
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