Jonathan Bernstein on the life and legacy of Justin Townes Earle

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

The seeds of actually spending several years writing a book about Justin came after Justin died in August 2020. I spent that fall interviewing people in his life, his bandmates, his ex, his widow, and his loved ones for a story for Rolling Stone about Justin’s life. That story was a big deal to me. It was like one of my first larger pieces for them. I interviewed more people for that story than I’d ever interviewed for a story I’d ever done. I was really proud of the story, and I also got more feedback for that story than anything I’d ever done.

But when I finished it, I had this feeling that I had never had before as a journalist: I felt like I knew less about Justin than what I thought going into it. I didn’t feel much of a sense of finality or achievement. I felt like there was so much more to say, so much more to learn on my part about this incredibly charismatic, complicated, vivid, larger-than-life person. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so that story sparked my interest and my sense that there is so much more to say about him. It made me really think that he deserved to have a proper book written about him. For the first time in my career, I felt less imposter syndrome about the idea that maybe I could be the person to write it. I felt at least semi-qualified, having written that story, to start diving into his life in a really big way. So that’s what started it. I thought about him and thought about the idea of it for about a year after writing that article without doing anything.

You have a history of fact-checking and verifying sources, and it seems like Justin loved spinning a tall tale. How did you go about discerning fact from fiction?

Great question. I joked with a lot of people while I was doing interviews for this book that my ten years as a fact-checker—and I’m still a fact-checker—had trained me for the job of biographer of Justin Townes Earle. Justin loved to tell tall tales. He loved to be a deep mythologizer, like his father. He believed deeply in the saying that you should never let truth get in the way of a good story. One of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest opportunities, in a way, was to try to let Justin’s version of his life have oxygen because I don’t think you can understand him without understanding the way he told the story of his life.

But [I wanted to] be very militant, almost too much so at times, about writing the story grounded in truth and making it very clear that when there are things that if I didn’t know if it were true, and make it clear that it’s just a story, but be very careful in the way that I worded everything and corroborated everything. This is such a recent history. Going into it, I almost thought it would be easier to pin down, like, what year was Justin hospitalized? What year did Justin record this and these demos that never saw the light of day? These things that happened in the early 2000s are only 20-some-odd years ago. A lot of people involved in them, not just Justin, were a little bit fucked up at the time. [They] were drinking and using some drugs, and memories are pretty foggy, and the internet in the early 2000s is not well-preserved. There aren’t that many letters written in a Victorian biography sense, to back up some of this stuff. So it was actually a really big challenge figuring out, literally, just when this stuff happened.

A lot of the work that I did was, frankly, going the extra mile to make sure that we’re not just telling a bunch of stories that we don’t know if they’re true. But what I found is that comparing and contrasting Justin’s version of events with the literal, usually more boring truth, is that the space between those two things is where the emotional meaning and deeper truth in Justin’s story lies. Justin loved to talk about how hardscrabble his childhood was. In the story he told about his childhood, growing up with his mother, he really emphasized how poor they were, how materially that they lacked, and was told no when he asked for milk one day from his mom. This is a story he tells and how his mom was never around because she was working three jobs to support them as a single mother. The truth, the reality there, is certainly more complex than that. Justin’s mom was receiving child support from his father every month, very reliably. Justin also had access to things, in some part through his father. Justin was the first kid in his group of friends in Nashville in the ‘90s to have a computer. That’s not something that a lot of kids had in 1994, right?

First you take Justin’s story. You understand what it is. You ask people about it in his life that grew up with him, you learn that the truth is much more complicated than that, and that he and his class position, for example, were pretty confusing and specific and not in some ways. He had a lot of resources, and in some ways not. Justin’s way of talking about how much he and his mom didn’t have materially was a safe way for him to talk about all the more painful stuff that he didn’t have, like his mom wasn’t very present for him in other ways, emotionally, and that was not something he really talked about. He was not receiving from either parent a really stable degree of supervision, structure, care, support, and love. Those things were a little bit harder for him to talk about. That’s just one example, but there are hundreds of examples of that where I really wanted Justin’s truth to be shown and given its oxygen, and I wanted to also figure out the more nuanced and less interesting reality of everything. The space between those two things shows what Justin’s friend Scotty Melton described as a deeper truth. In Justin’s half-truths, there’s often a deeper truth. I found that to be true.

It seems like even his tall tales, as apocryphal as they are, hint at something deeper about how he really felt about something. And so there is a truth to be gleaned from that, like you say, like more of an emotional truth.

His friend Scotty put it better than anyone else. Multiple people would tell me that the experience of meeting Justin Townes Earle was to be bombarded with him telling you his life story in five minutes. He was telling these fanciful, too-crazy-to-believe tales. And so what a lot of people would tell me is, like, “Justin would tell me this crazy shit about his past, and I honestly didn’t believe him. And then it turns out that he was often telling the truth; there was more truth to it than I thought.” And that was my experience, too. I went into the book not trusting some of the stories Justin told about his life, and pretty much always there was a more literal and emotional truth contained in them than I could have imagined.

Obviously, this book deals with some pretty heavy and sensitive topics like addiction and domestic violence at some points. How did you go about navigating that with care and caution?

As a fact-checker in my day job, when a story is sensitive—legally, ethically and morally, addiction being a pretty good example—the stakes are always higher. The standard of rigor for a journalist, whether you’re fact-checking or editing or writing, there’s more responsibility involved. The requirement to go about your job to the highest possible standard is raised. There are many sections that deal with addiction, substance use, mental illness, and violence in this book. Those are, certainly on an emotional level, very hard to write and hard to talk with people about and the pain and harm and illness contained therein. I took more time pinning down those sections. For example, in instances of violence documented in the book, you have to do the work of getting the police records, if they exist. Sometimes that involves sending out letters with money orders, and that can be cumbersome, and it’s absolutely required to even begin to be able to responsibly write about these things.

I would say that in telling those parts of the story, I knew I needed to be honest and tell Justin’s story, and I knew that would require navigating some pretty gnarly parts of the book and parts of Justin’s life. And there are things that I don’t know about Justin’s life. Justin is a public figure, but most people in his life are fairly private people, and there are things that folks shared with me about his life that ended up in the book, and there are probably things that people did not share about his life. I wanted to be careful to not push people to talk about things that they weren’t willing to speak about.

You wanted to respect their comfort levels.

Everybody had different comfort levels. There are plenty of people with pretty brutal stories to tell that did not speak with me. Perhaps, and this is only speculation, it’s because they have some pretty hard memories, and there are people who spoke with me who definitely drew their own lines about how much they were going to share and how much they were not going to share. Oftentimes they told me, like, “There are some things I’m not going to tell you,” and your job as a journalist, of course, is to always create an environment where people are feeling as comfortable, relaxed, and trusted as possible, that they’re going to be more forthcoming, like in the way that I’m being very forthcoming with you right now.

But I did not see it as my job to press people on their boundaries. But yeah, to go back to your original question, you just take those things a lot more seriously. You want to make sure that everyone is on the record and that they’re comfortable with stuff being in the book. You go back to people, and you fact-check these things. In a more pragmatic sense, I was very careful to do that if someone talked to me about a really tense moment in their life that involved Justin, involved violence, or involved substance use. Going back and fact-checking that stuff with them is a way to make sure that they’re actually comfortable with it being in the book, and it’s a way to make sure that when you’re speaking off the cuff that you’re actually telling the truth, and that the journalist who’s receiving that has all the details. So I was going through all the procedures in that way.

On a lighter note, what parts of this book did you get the most joy out of writing?

Approaching this book as a fan, in some ways, was the biggest fan’s gift. Hearing stories that I’ve heard was fun, but honestly, the moments that just flipped me out with just childlike glee were the moments when people sent me music of his that no one’s ever heard before. I think back to a few treasure-trove Dropbox dumps of recordings. A lot of it was early recording, before Justin’s official career started and he released Yuma in 2007. He never released anything before Yuma, but he recorded a lot of stuff in a lot of different forms around Nashville for the better part of a decade.

I even tried to make a biographer’s sense of what it means and why it’s important, but just listening to it as a fan and hearing electric versions of songs that I knew on his later records, like “Rogers Park.” The first time I heard the electric, full-band, almost-Replacements-[meets]-Elvis-Costello version of “Rogers Park,” I went nuts. The first time I heard the Swindlers’ Chicken Shack recording of that same song and more of an almost bluegrassy, acoustic version, I went nuts hearing the harmonies that are being sung on that recording. Those were the biggest thrills for me, and they led to me having such a deeper appreciation for his art and his songwriting and how it progressed, developed, and matured. Those were some of the moments of the purest joy. Getting to hear those unreleased recordings and digging through the Internet Archive, through all the live recordings that existed of Justin’s career. I had dabbled as a fan, but I’d never systematically listened to every show, doing nerdy superfan stuff as part of my research process. There are a lot of things in this book that were emotionally complex for me and more challenging. But that stuff was just pure joy as a music fan.

One of the best parts of just being a music journalist is that the research process includes listening to a lot of music, so you just get to be a nerd and embrace the nerd in you.

Through Justin’s story, I also discovered a lot of artists that I frankly did not really know much of anything about through this process. Pretty early on, a lot of Justin’s teenage and early-20-something friends, they all started talking to me about how everyone in this scene in Nashville in the early 2000s late ‘90s idolized the singer named Malcolm Holcombe, who was a western North Carolina singer-songwriter who never got his due but was regionally important and influential. I didn’t know anything about Malcolm Holcombe.

Neither did I!

His song “Who Carried You,” one Justin loved and covered late into his career, is one of my favorite songs that I’ve heard in the last 5-10 years now, so that was a really rewarding thing, too, just as a fan and as a music journalist to discover.

Do you see some parallels between people like Malcolm Holcombe and Justin, where, in their time, they weren’t properly appreciated, but now they have a legacy that’s taken a bit more seriously?

Definitely. The clearest example of that is Justin’s middle namesake, Townes Van Zandt, who in the last few years of his life, was playing clubs to a couple dozen people. He was not the avatar of country-folk genius that he is now. It was almost crazy researching this book and realizing how much that was almost recent. I started listening to Townes Van Zandt in college in the late 2000s. He had only died ten years prior to that. In a larger sense, I do believe that Justin’s going to become an artist that is appreciated, revered, and respected in the canon and as a great songwriter in a way that he never fully was during his lifetime. Something that I learned about Justin is that he really identified as a working musician, and he really wanted to be seen as and associate himself with musicians who really cared about the art that they made. It was in many cases, the most central part of their identity.

But oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes they did not care whether or not that resulted in great fame or notoriety. Writing this book about Justin and getting to know his community introduced me to so many people, even just in Nashville today, who are musicians that, like Malcolm Holcombe, I just didn’t know about. They’ve never become nationally famous, but someone like Steve Poulton, who I got to really know through this process and who produced Justin’s first two records. He makes really great music under the moniker Altered Statesman in Nashville. Music heads in Nashville all know who this guy is. I don’t know that Steve Poulton has any kind of national profile, but he is the type of musician that Justin surrounded himself with and felt most comfortable and a kinship with. Though Justin would go on to have a national profile, sell out mid-sized clubs all over the country, and attain a level of success that a lot of his peers did not. He always associated himself and identified with the type of musician who doesn’t totally care about that stuff, and that may be one of many reasons why he often self-sabotaged his many opportunities to achieve even wider success.

It almost reminds me a little bit of the Replacements and Bob Mehr’s book Trouble Boys. I got hints of that while I was reading your book. Everyone thought the Replacements should’ve been bigger. And it didn’t seem like they were really that interested. They almost were happy to occupy the space that they did.

Justin idolized the Replacements. Justin was such a student of musical history and American music history and knew everything about it. But he was also a real student of music and rock mythology and the stories that are told about it. Justin took in a lot of stories told about artists like the Replacements or Billie Holiday or Gram Parsons, or these stories about artists that often ended in tragedy and ended in artists being broke or not really achieving the level that they should have. For Justin, there was some glamor and beauty, and he had a real reverence for that story of the person of the genius band that doesn’t care about stepping on its own foot and will continue to do so. He was very self-conscious in the way that he was acting out some of those tropes that he had ingested as a kid. I mean, his father was Steve Earle, like he just knew. He knew all these histories, and he was very aware of what he was doing, and when he did stuff that completely shot his career in the foot and switched sounds or rejected certain parts of the industry,he knew the lineage that he was being placed in. He loved Big Star. He loved the Replacements. He loved these stories of art. A lot of his favorite artists were quite obscure, too.

How do you see Justin’s legacy today? How do you see his imprint on music being made right now?

I think Justin’s legacy is only beginning to be fully appreciated and discovered for later generations. But I think his influence has never been in some ways more pronounced, even if it’s sometimes still quiet. He was ahead of his time in many ways commercially, and the type of music that he made is today receiving the types of commercial opportunities and spotlights that were almost unimaginable 10-15 years ago. People like Sierra Ferrell and Charley Crockett, both of whom cover “Harlem River Blues,” Justin’s biggest song, are playing stages 5x bigger than any stage Justin ever played. There are people who are selling out stadiums like Tyler Childers and Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan. You can trace their influence several degrees back, and you arrive at Justin pretty quickly, even if they’re not explicitly talking about how they’re Justin Townes Earle superfans in the way that Charley Crockett is. Justin came up at a time when he was in this Mumford moment, and he influenced a lot of those guys. Mumford and Sons have this great quote where they say that, once people discover Justin, they’ll realize what frauds they are, which I love.

15 years later, that music has this huge resurgence in our culture with the Lumineers being as big as they are. Of course, I’m looking for it as Justin’s biographer, but in these past few years since his death, I see new artists popping up all the time, whether they’re releasing records like Margo Cilker, who’s this phenomenal artist who has a song about Justin on her most recent album, or just people on YouTube, or people in bars playing “Harlem River Blues” or bluegrass bands adding that to the repertoire. The process of Justin’s full cultural influence is in early bloom.I think that it’s going to continue to reverberate for many, many generations of artists who never got to see him perform.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.