It was announced on Sunday that the singer and songwriter Justin Townes Earle had died, at the age of thirty-eight. His family did not give a cause of death but confirmed the news on Earle’s Instagram account, writing, “It is with tremendous sadness that we inform you of the passing of our son, husband, father, and friend, Justin.” He is survived by his wife, Jenn Marie, and a three-year-old daughter, Etta St. James. Earle was named after Townes Van Zandt, the extraordinary but deeply troubled folk singer whose addictions ultimately undid him; Earle, too, struggled with serious drug use, beginning when he was young. Earle is the son of the musician Steve Earle and Carol-Ann Hunter, and was raised in and around Nashville, mostly by his mother. In 1994, when Earle was just twelve—the year, he has said, he first began using heroin—his father served a jail sentence for weapons and narcotics possession. Certain demons—actual, inherited, metaphysical—were omnipresent in Earle’s life from its outset. Yet those who loved him were moved by his frankness, charisma, and tenacity—a steadfast determination to transmute suffering into beauty.
Earle released his début full-length album, “The Good Life,” in 2008. Prior to starting a solo career, Earle had played in a few groups around Nashville, and, for a brief while, was a member of the Dukes, his father’s backing band. His style mixed traditional country, gospel, blues, and rock and roll—a raucous, heavy mélange that critics tended to label either alt-country or Americana, depending on the decade. It’s a genre that’s often thought of as intrinsically nostalgic, a deliberate and sentimental re-creation of a bygone era, and, while there are artists who do indulge in a kind of old-timey pageantry, there’s little about the form itself that feels irrelevant by design. Though Earle often performed in tailored suits, and had the gangly, eternally wayward carriage of Hank Williams, he always struck me as a man very much of his time and place, someone who understood, on a cellular level, the richness and cruelty of the modern world.
I met Earle in 2009, just before his second record, “Midnight at the Movies,” was released. At the time, he was living in New York, in a neighborhood he described as “way out in the asshole of Brooklyn.” He liked it here—the city was constantly reinventing itself, making new and different demands of him. “I need a city that changes around me, not me changing faster than a city,” he said. Earle was an electrifying showman, and his concerts made for riveting theatre. “The song is where it all starts, but there’s a lot that comes after that,” he told me of performing live. His voice was round and a little bit wild—like Buddy Holly, if Holly had been in a few more bar fights—and he had a particular way of playing guitar, which he once explained as “a swat kind of thing, almost like a clawhammer, except you’re keeping your index finger free to get in the middle.”
Lyrically, Earle often leaned into dark moments with insouciance and dry humor. He had a punk-rock heart, and liked the fission of desolation and ecstasy, the sacred mixing with the profane: “Lord I’m going uptown / To the Harlem River to drown / Dirty water’s gonna cover me over / And I’m not gonna make a sound,” he sang on “Harlem River Blues,” from 2010. He performed the song on “Late Night with David Letterman,” with Jason Isbell on guitar. Each time I watch the clip, I’m reminded of how liberating it can feel to hear someone sing calmly about feeling thoroughly lost. “Harlem River Blues” was a fraught period for Earle. He relapsed that year, and, while on tour in Indianapolis, he was arrested and accused of destroying his dressing room and punching the club owner’s daughter.
Eventually, he got sober again, and more records followed, including a suite about his parents—“Single Mothers,” from 2014, and “Absent Fathers,” from 2015. No matter how good Earle’s records were, one still got the sense that there was a masterpiece coming at some point down the line—he just needed to get his desires and vulnerabilities lined up in the right way. Though he was drawn toward melancholy, he knew the shape of joy, too. In 2017, he appeared on his father’s Sirius XM show to promote a new record, “Kids in the Streets.” He played “Champagne Corolla,” a perfect ode to small pleasures: “But you can't trust a rich girl / No farther than you can throw her / Need a middle-class queen riding by in a champagne Corolla,” he sings.
Earle released his last record, “The Saint of Lost Causes,” in 2019. The cover features a painting of Jude the Apostle, whom Roman Catholics know as the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. It’s a potent symbol, even independent of a religious context. I keep a decaying concrete statue of Saint Jude propped up in a corner of my garden, simply for the daily reminder that no matter how dire or grim circumstances may seem, hope is never senseless. Earle seemed to both embrace and reject the idea of his own redemption. The record ends with “Talking to Myself,” a brutal self-interrogation buoyed by pedal steel. “And I know better than to think that it can be fixed / Best that I can do is just to learn to live with this,” he sings.
One of my favorite Earle performances is an acoustic cover of Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” which he recorded in 2017 for Hamburger Küchensessions, a German series in which musicians perform from the corner of a kitchen. Take a breath before you watch it. His eyes are fluttering, and he appears unshaven, a little jittery. But his voice is beautiful—fragile and strong. “Graceland” is a kind of American hymn, a song about tragedy and heartache and also the part of a person’s spirit that tells them to keep going anyway, always—to atone and reclaim, as many times as it takes. Earle speeds the song up, and doesn’t quite cling to the melody or the lyrics as Simon wrote them, but his rendition is heavy, spare, and stunning. “I’m going to Graceland,” he promises, over and over as the song ends. It feels good to think that he is there right now, received and at peace.
