The Even Better Life

A couple of years ago Justin Townes Earle turned his back on the hustle and bustle of Manhattan – the city where he’d been living and which had so stimulated him creatively on albums such as 2010’s Harlem River Blues – to return to his native Nashville. Immersing himself back in the Deep South and its rich musical heritage paid handsome dividends on his next long-player Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now (2012), which dripped with the Stax-inspired country-soul emanating from neighbouring Memphis, but now the singer-songwriter has looked even further south-west to spark his muse.  

Desiring a new band to help him record, Earle headed to the fertile hunting grounds of Texas to assemble the crack squad that would combine to create his fifth long-player, Single Mothers. He already had renowned pedal steel maestro Paul Neihaus (of Lambchop and Calexico fame) at his disposal, and he then turned to one of his favourite country-rock bands – the criminally underrated Denton outfit Centro-Matic – to furnish the rhythm section (drummer Matt Pence and bassist Mark Hedman). Already knowing precisely what sound he was after for the record, Earle left no stone unturned in his quest to bring this mental picture to life.

“That’s one of the curses that I have as a writer, this drawn-out vision of what I want records and songs to be,” he tells. “I usually decide the endings before I decide the beginnings of things – I kind of write backwards. So far I’ve been able to pick my musicians very well in order to achieve that sound, and with this record I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get the sound that I wanted drawing from the Nashville bag of musicians. I needed people that had never thought about music in a Nashville style, who’d played a blues shuffle but had never played a country shuffle. I needed different kinds of players, so me and Paul packed it up and went down to Texas and we hung out [with Matt and Mark] for a few days and played together and then went out together on the road for the first time – I wanted a different sound that just couldn’t be done with the musicians from Nashville. There’s a feeling in the air there, and it’s not that they don’t have vision or creativity, but it was a sound that I’ve never heard come out of Nashville before that was in my head.”

Earle’s prior experience laying with Niehaus – and then adding a rhythm section with history together – gives Single Mothers a cohesion which belies the group’s nascent nature.

“Paul and I have been playing together a few years now – he’s played with me and my band, and we do shows where it’s just me and him playing both guitar and pedal steel,” Earle recounts. “In the same way the Centro-Matic guys came from playing for years together and having the thing that they do with the rhythm section, Paul and I came in with the thing that we do – the melodic portion of the album – so it was a lot easier because it was like two people talking as opposed to four people talking, and it made a lot more sense than just a bunch of guys who had never played together before. It made it much quicker and a no-brainer kind of thing.”

Getting to stretch out with a great band has also meant that Earle doesn’t have to carry such a heavy musical load on guitar.

“Oh yeah, I play completely different guitar with this band, with not as many strings – most of the time [playing solo] I’m striking two or three strings at once,” he gushes. “What people have to understand is that this is a different ball game – I’m fitting now into a sound that when my band asked what I was going for, I said, ‘I’m not thinking the exact same sound as this, but I want you to think of Booker T & The MGs and make one sound as opposed to a bunch of people showing their asses,’ like four people just jamming out.”

Of course while this musical unity is integral to Single Mother’s charm, Earles’ songs have always been buoyed by his strong narratives and this album proves no exception.

“There’s always a loose link between my songs on a record. I think that this record has a certain downtrodden-ness to it, but it’s starting to struggle its way out. I wrote this record before I met my wife and before I got married – I was finishing it up at the time – so it deals with life before marriage for sure,” he laughs. “But I can look at these songs now and see them in a different light because of that – I can see where the truth came through without ruining a story.”

Earle concedes that his new marital status and the resultant happiness may indeed come to the fore on future recordings.

“When something as monumental as getting married happens it had better change everything!” he beams. “Especially for men, if you’re just going to keep banging around why get married? But I think [being happy] does come through in my writing in the way that I think that I write with light at the end of the tunnel now – it’s the tunnel of my life basically – whereas before there was definitely no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s still enough a lot to write about; my parents long ago fucked me up and I’ve had to get better, and that will still come out, but I actually see half a way out of it now.”