What Do You Do When You're Lonesome
The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle
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- 99,00 kr
Publisher Description
"A superb biography of a singular life."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A Rolling Stone journalist presents the story of the late singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle.
When Justin Townes Earle died of an overdose alone in his Nashville apartment, his death sent waves of grief through the country-Americana music community. The son of alt-country hellraiser Steve Earle had long struggled with mental illness and various addictions. There had been encouraging periods of long-term sobriety and active recovery in his adult life, including the years that led up to his career peak when he released the 2010 masterpiece Harlem River Blues, a career-making album of rambling folk blues set to Southern Gospel.
He sang of cramped Brooklyn apartments and crippling hangovers, about emotional displacement, economic anxiety, and the wandering that characterized his feral, formative years as a rootless kid rambling around Nashville, developing his own unique guitar style and absorbing the musical influences that surrounded him. He was anointed by critics as the next coming of the authentic troubadour. By the time of his death, he’d recorded and released eight albums, creating a striking and original body of work.
Jonathan Bernstein, with the full cooperation of the Justin Townes Earle estate, unravels in these pages a short but incredibly creative life, and reveals the backstories behind Justin’s greatest songs (“Mama’s Eyes,” “White Gardenias”) and what happened when it all fell apart while also capturing a shadow world of the neglected children of Nashville legends who wrestle with the legacies of their hard-living, road-weary, often absent parents.
Justin’s journey to near-stardom is a harrowing story shot through with moments of clarity and promise, including his marriage to his wife Jenn Marie Earle and the birth of their daughter. But what Earle called “the myth”—the idea that one must suffer for one’s art—proved to be too powerful.
This heartbreaking, deeply researched tale is an exemplary music biography.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music journalist Bernstein debuts with a vivid chronicle of the short, turbulent career of singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle, who died of a drug overdose at age 38 in 2020. Earle grew up in the shadow of his father Steve Earle, a country-rock singer whose frequent absences during Earle's childhood spurred him to seek refuge in music. After dropping out of high school, Earle played in seedy clubs, building up a vast repertoire of original songs and developing a drinking and drug habit that dogged him throughout his career. (Earle recognized the destructive nature of the myth that "art and music as a higher calling.... requires suffering," Bernstein writes, while remaining somewhat powerless against its appeal.) Shunning the polished sound of Nashville's Music Row, Earle drew on the Great Depression–era folk tradition for an earthy, roots-inspired sound. Mainstream success arrived in 2010 with Earle's third album, Harlem River Blues, cementing his reputation for alternative songcraft even as the fame jeopardized his fragile sobriety. Revealing and raw interviews with Earle's family and confidantes add emotional depth to this comprehensive portrait, which also touches on such contemporaneous developments as the gentrification of East Nashville and the commercialization of indie music. The result is a rich character study and an insightful appraisal of the toll art can exact from its makers. Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly attributed a previous book, Lenny Bruce Is Dead, to the author. That book was written by Jonathan Goldstein.
