On Fucking Up And Less Than Perfect Parents

Americana-inclined singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle is visiting the in-laws in Park City, Utah before heading off on yet another long-haul flight to Australia. He claims that he’s killing two birds with one stone: doing the right thing by his new family – he married Jenn Marie Earle (nee Maynard) in 2013 – and also getting a head start on his voyage to Australia, Utah being closer in proximity to his LA departure point than his native Nashville. In the last few years Earle has become something of a fixture on Australian festivals and stages, and he loves coming down this way as much as we enjoy having him.

“Absolutely, Australia’s been my favourite place to tour,” he offers brightly. “Just the other day I was trying to count how many times I’ve been down there and I figure it’s somewhere between eight and ten times – and that’s just since [2009 sophomore album] Midnight At The Movies came out. It’s been great. I’ve gotten a lot of good press and a warm welcome from fans and everybody. Obviously it’s a lot easier to become very well-known in Australia, but I couldn’t ask for a better place to be my best market.”

"There’s nothing super-human about me, I’ve fucked up more if not just as much as your average human."

This tour finds Earle kicking off at Byron Bay’s annual Bluesfest shindig, the perfect environment for somebody who doubles as a bona fide music aficionado as well as being one of his genre’s fastest rising stars.

“Oh yeah, that’s always a great time,” he enthuses. “I love the north up there – obviously it’s a gorgeous place, and after spending the winter here I’m ready for some warmth. But I shared a dressing room with Taj Mahal the second time I played Bluesfest, and I saw Taj Mahal play that night and I saw The Flatlanders – [frontman] Jimmie Dale Gilmour is one of my favourites – so it’s always been a great thing being surrounded by such great musicians. Every festival has some bullshit, but it’s not going to be all bullshit [at Bluesfest].”

Earle threw a curveball to many of his fans on his last visit down by bringing his bandmates – the three additional musicians who played on his recent companion albums Single Mothers (2014) and Absent Fathers (2015), namely Paul Neihaus (pedal steel), Matt Pence (drums) and Mark Hedman (bass) – but explains that this time around he’ll be on his lonesome again, just like on his early forays.

“Yep, I’ll be playing solo,” he reveals. “Something funny that’s come along is that it seems that a lot of my fans want to see me solo – they like the band but they’ve always known me as a solo artist, and it’s a completely different experience. I’ve been doing what I do so long, and I don’t think you can do the same thing for long and still be artistic – you’ve gotta have something different – and these days my favourite show is playing with my band, just having the creativity of other artists around you. I happen to have a band that I’ve wanted to have since I was a teenager, it’s like one of those ‘dream come true’ things – I’m playing with guys who are much older than me but who I’ve respected for years, and it’s a great thing to have a group of people around you that you respect and they respect you and they want to accentuate your songs – they’re not looking to be ‘Johnny Badass guitar player’, or something like that.”

In particular the input of gorgeous pedal steel by Neihaus – who also plays in Lambchop and Calexico – adds so much resonance to Earle’s songs, both on album and on the live front.

“Yeah, I love Paul playing with me,” Earle continues. “We do a lot of tours that are just me and Paul – him playing steel and me playing guitar – and it’s a lot of fun to do. Paul and I definitely have something that we’ve worked out over the five years we’ve been working together, and everybody seems to like it and I love doing it. And the rhythm section from that band are from a band called Centro-Matic, that I’ve just loved forever – one of the most creative bands in the history of music, I guarantee – and the fact that people don’t know who they are is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. People are so stupid! They are they’re stupid – they don’t search for anything, and they have no adventure to them. You want to make sure that you make music for the people, but not the lowest common denominator that’s for sure.”

There’s a completely different feel to the performance watching Earle in solo mode compared to with his band – with his band mates he tends to ease off the pedal a bit and slow things down – and he attests that he has no problem flitting between the two formats as circumstance requires.

"That’s just not my writing style – I’m usually a very cautious and a very slow songwriter."

“There are different movements in the tempo when I’m solo compared to when I’m with the band – my songs tend to be a lot faster by myself, maybe because I feel like they need a bit more ‘oomph’ to them,” he smiles. “But the record that I’m starting to write now – and I haven’t got any further than about eight lines into the first song – is going to be a lost faster of a record, although it’s still going to have that groove. My records have always represented where I am at certain times, and at times I’ve been in a dark place – I’ve been sober for thirteen out of the last fourteen years, but that doesn’t mean everything gets better. A lot of times it gets worse because you feel it.”

Is it usual for him to have such a certain feel for what an album is going to feel like so early in the creative process?

“Absolutely,” he says without hesitation. “I don’t see anything really genuinely artistic about randomly writing songs and trying to fit them together – I prefer a continuity to my records that represents me and the time and place where I am. That represents what I feel like what the people around me and the average person goes through. Because it’s just really hard to touch anybody with randomness.”

Absent Fathers came out early this year hot on the heels of Single Mothers – only four months separated their respective releases – and Earle admits that was this always going to be the case from quite early in the process.

“They were written really close to each other – I basically wrote Single Mothers, and that writing process bled straight into the writing process of Absent Fathers,” he recalls. “Originally it was intended to be a double-record released all as one piece, but I know what my attention span is like – I take medication for my attention span – so I’ve always trusted the Tom Petty model, which is ‘songs that that are two-minutes-and-fifty-seconds long or not much over, and records that last between 35 and 45 minutes’, so that

a person can sit down and listen to the entire record without taking a huge part out of their day, and then they can see it as a single piece.

“It was very intentional – the songs that ended up on Single Mothers were written as a group to be on Single Mothers, and once again it helped that continuity together. I was in two very different places when I wrote both of them – one is a lot more representative of what I used to be, as compared to what I am now. I’m a lot more settled in, and I have confidence now, and I’m married – very happily married – and that changed a lot. So there was a lot more input for the second one, and because it came in a torrent it was the fastest that I’ve ever written a record – it came in a three month period where I wrote that record. That’s just not my writing style – I’m usually a very cautious and a very slow songwriter, because I don’t want to have that thing where the opening line is great and the middle of the song is filler. Too many people do that and it’s just so lazy – it’s so fucking lazy.”

The two albums’ covers also represent a form of conceptual art piece – Single Mothers has people playing two younger versions of Earle and his wife and is bathed in sunlight, while Absent Fathers features Earle and Jenn Marie themselves in the flesh but clouded in relative darkness, a striking contrast. Each of his albums to date has featured himself with a female companion, but he tells that this will be the last such occasion.

"And you shouldn’t let anyone read your diary, and who the fuck wants to?"

“[The contrast in the covers] represents how when you’re a kid everything’s pretty bright and sunshiny until you know better, which is probably ten [years old]. Or nine. I think it was eight for me,” he laughs. “That picture [on Single Mothers] was taken in the park where I grew up playing, and the boy who’s on the cover is a songwriter called Sammy Brue who I met several years ago – he’s about 14 years old and I’ve been listening to his songs since I was about 11. I promise him that he could be on this record cover, and I had this idea for this actual record cover long before I had the idea for Single Mothers. My photographer and I have always had this rule that states ‘you don’t ever have anybody that you’ve slept with on your record cover’, so that’s stayed true until the very last woman who will appear on my record covers and that’s my wife – the woman on Absent Fathers is my wife.”

The fact that Earle is the son of country music icon Steve Earle has been done to death in the media from the earliest days of the younger Earle’s career. Originally it was seen as a blessing for Justin to be raised around such a legendary music figure, but over time a clearer picture of a somewhat wayward childhood was painted – both in interviews and in song – where it was obvious that Earle senior wasn’t always around to provide a steady father figure. These two album titles (and much of the content) again reflect this not so rosy relationship between father and son – does Justin ever tire of having his private affairs made so public, or is it necessary for his art?

“My Dad’s always mentioned me in his songs,” the singer reflects, “like [Earle Sr songs] Little Rock ‘N’ Roller and The Boy Who Never Cried – I’m the boy from that song, because evidently I never cried as a child so they thought there was something wrong with me of course. But, you know, we’ve always been personal – my Dad was always very personal with his songwriting – but people always read more into it. My father and I create by picking up from the people around us too – they’re without question heavily compounded characters, because otherwise it’s a diary entry. And you shouldn’t let anyone read your diary, and who the fuck wants to?” 

Is it a blurry line that he straddles in this manner between fiction and autobiography?

“Yeah I’ve got to feel where the song is – feel the time and place – but it’s about 50/50,” Earle offers. “The thing is that I don’t feel anything different than you do – when it comes to intensity, maybe yes – but we all as humans feel the range of emotions and things like that, the same range of feelings whether it’s hurt or happiness and all of the stuff. I try to stick to that human aspect of it, and I think that’s where my fans are able to get in with it, because I’m not presenting myself as any more than they are. I think that’s very important too – there’s nothing super-human about me, I’ve fucked up more if not just as much as your average human. I think that’s very important too, that you remind your fans – and remind yourself – that you are just human, period. Nothing more and nothing less.

“And with the parental thing, I don’t think there’s anybody who wasn’t fucked up somewhat by their parents; no parent is perfect just like no human is perfect. There’s definite sympathies as well as scoldings in my songs, and there’s definitely this progression of growing up through the content of my songs – it’s very important growing with your crowd and just making sure that you’re just staying as human as you possibly can. There’s nothing intrinsically valuable about what I do, period – life would go on without me. It’s the same thing with my favourite sport baseball – there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about being able to hit a ball 350 feet. So you have to remember that, that you’ve been given a position in life and yes it’s hard to hold to but it’s something that you keep up, and I don’t feel that great changes – especially drastic changes for the worse – are best for your career.”