Justin Townes Earle

It’s tough for an emerging artist to be saddled with two imposing surnames, but Justin Townes Earle, the son of alt-country hero Steve Earle and the namesake of Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt, hasn’t been encumbered by other people’s expectations. After a tumultuous adolescence (Earle kicked a nasty drug habit), he’s releasing his third solo album, Midnight at the Movies. In his gooey southern drawl, Earle talked to eMusic about his move to New York City, Bruce Springsteen and what it means to be from the south.

Aside from the weight of your own personal lineage, Nashville is a city with an almost overwhelming musical legacy. Do you feel like you fit into that history?

I’m reaching back for a better slice of its history. I think [Nashville] is well on its way to ruining its history right now. It’s unfortunate, because there are a lot of things you don’t see and don’t hear about going on there, and those things are really great. Being a part of that group of people really excites me. But then again, I’m not living in Nashville anymore.

Right, you’re in New York City now. How has that transition been?

It was the right time. I’m always going to be Justin Townes Earle from Nashville, Tennessee, and when I buy a home, I’ll buy a home in Tennessee. Nashville is my hometown, but it was time for a change. And when it’s time for a change — that makes the transition pretty easy. I live way out in the asshole of Brooklyn. It was just something I needed to do. I’ve wanted to live in New York most of my life, so I figured I needed to do it before I turned 30.

Are you writing differently here?

I don’t think it will change my format. But it’ll give me more stuff to write about, more stuff to relate to. At this point, in Nashville, I’d gone about as far as I could go. It was just time. It wasn’t about — I just needed new things to see. I know New York like the back of my hand, because I’ve been coming here for years, but it’s still ever-changing. I need a city that changes around me, not me changing faster than a city.

It’s interesting, when I think about New York City’s musical legacy, I think of people who didn’t really know how to play their instruments properly. Whereas the session players in Nashville — that’s a whole new level of expertise, of professionalism.

I think that’s also why hillbilly players have always been able to come to New York City and do good! Because they can’t actually play their instruments. [Laughs]. That’s one thing about the style of music that I play and our live performances, there’s a kitsch to it — but people get really, really upset when you start taking liberties with these old formats, taking it too far. And I am kinda one of those people. Half the shit out there that gets called old-time music isn’t old-time music. That’s the thing. Up here, I run into it a lot. It’s like, I’m from the south, and as far as that kind of music goes, it’s really, really rare — and this is just the way it is — that I run into a band in this part of the country that’s playing old-timey music and is impressive.

You think there’s something missing.

JTE: I mean, you can know all the licks. You can sing just like Buck Owens and Don Rich and you can play like fucking Papa John Hughey, but the reason that people from the south are better at the kind of music is because it’s our music. It’s ours. Don’t get me wrong on this, I think it’s bullshit when a kid who grew up in Nashville writes a song about plowing fields and horses and tractors and shit like that. Because I grew up in Nashville, and I never saw a goddamn horse. I never worked a plow. But there’s a feeling. That music is about a way of life. It’s about a way of life that’s completely different from anything that exists in the north. It doesn’t happen here. I mean, up in Maine, there’s some backwoods shit up there. But it’s not the same feel. It’s not the south. You gotta be laid back, you gotta be a laid-back person for this music to work right.

At the same time, you refer back to a lot of tough, working-class, northern songwriters, too. Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen. Do you consider their work an influence?

Definitely. That’s the deal with Springsteen. He took existing formats but he related it to Jersey. You hear a Springsteen song, there’s no way in hell anybody else — I mean, people everywhere relate to the songs and the feelings, but people in Jersey have heart for those songs. Because they represent Jersey to a T. That’s fucking cool. That’s how to do it right! He made a really conscious decision, especially when he made Born to Run, that he was going to make a different kind of a record. He was going to make a Wall of Sound record, a Phil Spector-type record, instead of this jangly stuff he was doing before, and he was going to find a different place in his chest to sing from, he was going to sing like Roy Orbison. And he was going to kinda shoot for a concept. And he did it, and he did it really successfully, and he’s done it successfully ever since.

That sense of it being a Jersey record, of being of a place — that’s what folk music should do, right?

That’s the thing, he’s a singer of the people. That’s what makes the difference. Rock n’roll belongs to Memphis, Tennessee, but Bruce Springsteen — the Boss — belongs to fucking New Jersey. It is its own brand of rock ‘n ‘roll, and it’s really fucking good.

You’ve talked about making sure that your live show is a dynamic thing — that it’s not too contemplative or serious. Are you influenced by the old Opry performances — the Nudie suits, the harmonies, the storytelling, the showmanship?

What happened, really bad, is that in the mid ’90s, the grunge thing fell through, and all those guys in all those bands needed a place to go, and where they went was alt-country. Country music is already a really emotion-laden form of music, and you couple it with extremely depressing, northerwestern rock n’roll, and you end up with this stare-at-your-shoes, don’t talk to the crowd because they might talk back to you kind of frontman. That can be good sometimes — Jay Farrar is not the most outgoing guy on the face of the earth, but Son Volt is great, Jay Farrar is great. But we don’t need twenty fucking hundred Jay Farrars. We don’t need another Conor Oberst. Conor Oberst does great on his own, we don’t need that. I just decided that those guys — they can do their thing, and my thing, I was a hyperactive kid, I’m a hyperactive adult, and I might as well harness that energy into a live show that actually has a chance of sending people home with more. There’s more to it than just the songs. The song is where it all starts, but there’s a lot that comes after that. I think that people need to get some old footage of Gamble Rogers. Get some Gamble Rogers footage, and if that doesn’t excite you and make you want to tell stories, then you’ve got a problem. I like to move around, I like to give the crowd a little bit of hell.

The new record is called Midnight at the Movies, and I think you really capture that kind of melancholy, which is a really specific, almost Tom Waits-ian kind of melancholy — when you sit down to write, do you think in terms of atmospherics? Do you think about the mood you’re trying to evoke?

I’m a very intentional writer, I’m very exact. That’s why I’ve never been able to just sit down and write — I’ve never sat down with a frame, with an opening line, and been like, let’s see where this goes. I know exactly where it’s going when I sit down, it’s just: how do I get it there? If I sat down and did that I’d be banging my head against the table, trying to make all the bends and curves right, trying to massage it into place. That’s why I write on scraps [of paper], so that I can put it all back together. This business is enough work. I think people have this idea that it’s a lot of fun and games, but it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of driving. So anything you can do to keep it from seeming like work is for the best.

It can be difficult for critics to write about this genre of music — your genre of music — because the terminology just feels really inadequate. Are you comfortable with being called Americana?

I don’t know what Americana means, in the first place. I just think that I’m an American musician. I tend to represent an older period of American music that I guess falls into Americana, just like rock n’roll and jazz.

So it’s a word that means so much, it means nothing?

Yeah. It’s kind of like alt-country. [Laughs] I think people just label things. It’s funny, because you make a record like the way I make records, where they’re kind of un-labelable, and it gets called Americana. But I just make records, I just write songs and make records. Where people put me is up to them.