Copyright © 2026 by Jonathan Bernstein

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First Edition: January 2026

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2025944862

ISBNs: 9780306833274 (hardcover), 9780306833298 (ebook)

E3-20251120-JV-NF-ORI

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Part I: It’s Cold in This House

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II: Anywhere at All

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part III: Looking for a Place to Land

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Photos

Afterword

A Note on Sourcing

Song Credits

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Notes

Cover

Table of Contents

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For Dad

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Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy.

—Hanif Abdurraqib

Ever wake up with the so different blues, anytime?

Ever wake up with the so different blues?

And you couldn’t get on your Monday morning shoes

—Mance Lipscomb

INTRODUCTION

Nobody called him Justin Townes Earle. As a kid, his dad called him Cowboy. His mom and most of his family knew him as J.T. When he was a preteen, old enough to fabricate tall tales and spout nonsense, his friends coined the nickname Squirrelly Earle. When he began courting trouble as a gangly teenager touring with his father’s band, a fellow crewmate referred to him, behind his back, as the Prince of Darkness. As an aspiring twentysomething singer-songwriter gigging around Nashville in the early ’00s, everyone knew him, simply, as Justin Earle.

One day in December 2006, Joshua Black Wilkins, an aspiring photographer, showed Justin, then twenty-four, some album cover mockups for Yuma, Justin’s first recording under his own name.

And there it was:

JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE

Justin’s middle name came from Townes Van Zandt, the cult Texas songwriter known for his haunting country-folk poetry. Van Zandt had been a mentor, philosophical idol, and overall bad influence on Justin’s father, country-rock star Steve Earle, who idolized Van Zandt so much he decided his firstborn son should bear his name.

Justin carried the name with pride and resentment. Van Zandt would eventually be revered as a musical genius. But Justin hadn’t always cared for his father’s destitute friend.

“He was just boozy,” Justin once said, summarizing his childhood impression of Van Zandt.¹

He noticed the way his dad constantly sought Van Zandt’s approval. “As in a lot of these types of relationships,” Justin once said, “the hero is the tormentor.”²

After decades of alcoholism, Townes Van Zandt died of a heart attack at fifty-two in 1997, days before Justin’s fifteenth birthday. After Van Zandt’s death, Steve became the unofficial leader of the cult of Texas songwriters who idolized Van Zandt and worked to transform his life and music into something like a legend.

“In many ways I’ve wanted to be like Townes,” Justin once said. “And in many ways I’ve not wanted to be like Townes.”³

Glancing at mockups for Yuma, his debut EP, Justin considered it again: Justin Townes Earle. There was something eerie, something cursed with confidence, something almost comically predestined about a southern singer-songwriter embracing a name like that. The name was saturated with a legend so intertwined with his upbringing that it took years for Justin to label it.

But after getting sober in 2004 at twenty-two, Justin coined a term for it: the myth.⁴

The myth was a conception of art and music as a higher calling that requires suffering. It made young songwriters flee their families for the road, for the vans, bars, clubs, and motel room, any place that might draw them into depths of despair in the quest for mystical self-discovery.

According to the laws of the myth, self-sacrifice yields material, and pain is a currency cashed out in the form of two verses, a chorus, and a bridge. The myth prioritized song over selfhood, promoting the idea that the more one damages the latter, the more beautiful the former.

“Maybe she just has to sing for the sake of the song,” Townes Van Zandt sang in 1968. “Who do I think that I am to decide that she’s wrong?”

The name Justin Townes Earle conjured not one but two self-destructive songwriters—Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt—both of whom embodied the myth. By 2006, Justin had long grappled with this archetype he felt he’d inherited. In his adolescence and young adulthood, he was seduced by the romanticized mythology of the tortured troubadour, pulling from it in his songwriting, adapting it for his own image, and exemplifying it in his lifestyle. But as he grew older, he became increasingly aware of its pitfalls and bore intimate witness to its curse.

“I believed the myth for a long time,” Justin later said, “and I believed that I had to destroy myself to make great art.”⁵

As a child of the early nineties, Justin saw the myth everywhere he looked. His hero, Kurt Cobain, went from generational voice to immortal icon after dying by suicide at twenty-seven in 1994. At that time, Justin was living as a preteen with his father—who was newly sober following years of rampant substance use—after a long separation; he saw the way Steve was celebrated for having courted death and survived with a song to sing. The books he read, on his father’s advice, featured the self-destructive romance of beat authors like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Many of Justin’s favorite artists (the Replacements, Billie Holiday, Gram Parsons) were revered for their chemical-induced antics, for how their own tragic legends became intricately entwined with their art.

It was impossible to avoid the intoxicating fumes of the myth as the firstborn son of Steve Earle. Steve was, among other things, an evangelist and spokesperson for the generation of song-chasing Texas-associated geniuses a decade or so his elder: Van Zandt, Guy and Susanna Clark, Terry Allen, Jerry Jeff Walker. Steve often explained to anyone within earshot that these troubled artists left a permanent mark on popular music.

“Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world,” Steve once remarked, “and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”⁶

The myth was old and persistent, something Steve Earle surely didn’t invent, even if he stood on coffee tables and shouted it like the gospel.

As Steve’s biographer, Lauren St. John, later put it: “He liked the idea of ‘art at all costs.’”⁷

Later, especially once he embraced sobriety, Steve tried to deflate the myth even as he perpetuated it.

“I don’t really see a correlation between creativity and killing yourself,” Steve said in 2001. “I’m not sure that there are more self-destructive artists, proportionally, than there are self-destructive carpenters.”⁸

The myth was not unique to Nashville, Tennessee, Justin’s hometown, but it had long shrouded the country music city in a thick fog. Since the mid-twentieth century, the city had served as the American center for turning simple three-chord songwriting into industry. In the sixties, when songwriters like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell made it seem like pop songs were high art, a corresponding group of songwriters—Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Tom T. Hall among them—brought that spirit to Nashville. The perfect country song, the town insisted, was a noble pursuit worth celebrating, no matter its cost.

Justin lived his life reckoning with its cost. As a young boy he yearned for his famous father, who’d waved goodbye, hopped into a van, and didn’t return. That’s how Justin recounted growing up with his mother, Carol Ann: abandoned by his dad, struggling in his absence.

Justin wandered the hallways of his Nashville schools, where fellow children of country singers and musicians suffered the same absence. “In Nashville there’s this whole group of girls my age that won’t date a musician,” Justin once proclaimed, “because they hate their fathers.”⁹

The children’s mothers—always the mothers, because even if they were also musicians, the women were the ones forced to sacrifice songwriting dreams to maintain the family—commiserated about their wayward husbands. In his thirties, Justin wrote a song about all this. It went, “Single mother / Absent father / Broken home.”

As a teen, Justin rebelled in all the ways he thought he was supposed to. He roamed the streets of Nashville, popped prescription pain pills, and wrote songs. He started acting like a “mean little dope-dealing, pistol-packing shit,” as he put it.¹⁰ By late adolescence, he’d become yet another aspiring singer-songwriter pledging allegiance to the myth.

“I thought I had to live up to all these people,” Justin said. “It was a really miserable existence.”¹¹

What began as preteen experimentation quickly descended into full-blown chemical dependency. “I believed I had to destroy myself in order to make great art,” Justin said. “I used my music as an excuse to get high.”¹²

Eventually, his young body failed him.

In July 2004, Justin, twenty-two, was admitted to the Vanderbilt ICU after having almost died from drug use.

Prior rehab stints had failed, but after his time in the ICU, sobriety stuck. Justin spent the next several years confronting his substance-use disorder. The twelve-step program, another subject of his father’s evangelizing, played a transformative role in helping Justin see the myth for what it was.

“My life had become unmanigable,” Justin wrote in a journal, “but it took me years to admit it to anyone most of all myself.”

When Amy Winehouse died in 2011, Justin was devastated by the news. “I really take it personally when addiction takes one of us,” he said. “It’s a really hard thing… especially when you come from where I come from and know there’s a fucking way out of it.”

“The myth,” he continued, “is going to continue to kill us.”¹³

Yet, at the dawn of his career, how could Justin not have been seduced by the siren call of his full name?

Justin Townes Earle.

The name, it was quickly decided that day in December 2006, would be printed on the cover of Yuma, below a photo of him staring into the camera with his deep eyes. Soon after, Justin walked into a tattoo parlor and had six cursive letters, TOWNES, inked into his chest, just below his neck.

From there on out, Justin started building his own legend. He toured the country in a pickup truck. He shook hands and signed autographs and slicked back his hair and smiled wide. He started working and did not stop, releasing four records in four years, culminating in Harlem River Blues, which came out in 2010.

That album arrived at the precipice of the most successful period of his career. And although it also came amid a devastating personal crossroads, Justin’s voice found its moment.

Harlem River Blues was a mix of rambling folk tunes about New York (subway conductors, cramped Brooklyn apartments, the FDR Drive) set to southern gospel. It was released in the shaky period following the Great Recession. In those years, old-time-conjuring music with banjos and fiddles enjoyed an unlikely resurgent mainstream popularity as groups like the Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons presented bluegrass-infused music to pop audiences.

Justin Earle had spent his youth wandering through Nashville practically method acting the role of the wandering folksinger. After roots music boomed when the economy collapsed in the late 2000s, songs from a faraway American past, real or imagined, became popular as Americans, especially young adults, felt, themselves, rootless and burdened with economic anxiety.

Anchored by an upbeat sing-along title track about suicide, Harlem River Blues established Justin Townes Earle as the real-deal manifestation of this postrecession folk boom, a millennial Woody Guthrie type who sang his aimlessness back to a generation searching for somewhere to stand.

With his sharp sense of fashion, commanding charisma, bad-boy backstory, and knack for self-promotion, Justin Townes Earle seemed destined for the type of crossover stardom that would’ve plastered his six-foot-four frame on college dorm-room posters. He appeared on Letterman, won awards, packed large rock clubs, earned rave reviews, and was named one of the twenty-five “Most Stylish Men in the World” by GQ.

All the while, Justin shared stories and cigarettes with his fans, befriended bouncers and bartenders, won over grandparents with his southern manners, and seduced journalists eager to print his legend. Something about his mischievous grin and his disquieting openness about past demons made people fall in love with him.

“If he’d wanted to,” said his longtime agent, Andrew Colvin, “Justin could have become governor.”

To anyone who saw him perform in the late 2000s, stardom didn’t seem far-fetched. Justin Townes Earle was a lightning bolt of magnetism: part vaudeville showman, part aw-shucks country rube, part Grand Ole Opry showbiz act, part Depression-era carnival barker, part revival-tent prophet.

He poured his heart out one song, wisecracked the next. His percussive, drop-thumb blues guitar picking produced a sound so full it left crowds wondering if he secretly played to a backing track. He talked ten miles a minute, stomped his boot on the down beat, danced around the microphone, and fixed his big eyes out into the middle distance of the crowd, as if he were focusing so intently on his songs about freight trains and cross-country rambling that he’d become entranced.

“I haven’t strayed from Bruce Springsteen’s formula of girls, cars, and sex,” he told one enraptured crowd, before adding a qualifier: “Oh, and mama.”¹⁴

Mama, always mama. The least rock and roll of song subjects, the one Justin couldn’t stop writing about. Lurking behind his retro cadences and old-timey quips lay the twin subjects of so many of Justin’s songs: mom and dad.

“Jason Isbell and I have a kind of friendly wager on who’s gonna make a record first,” Justin explained in 2013. “He’s gonna make a record that doesn’t have any daddy-issue songs, and I’ll make a record that doesn’t have any mommy-issue songs.”¹⁵

By that point, Justin’s career had already started to recede. Back in 2008, he’d shifted his hard-line definition of sobriety. He started smoking weed. Alcohol soon followed. Right as he was poised to seize his stardom, Justin succumbed, again, to the illness he’d been fighting since he was a child. He entered rehab in 2010, ten days after releasing Harlem River Blues.

The rest of Justin’s life was a fight against and with his addiction. With the support of loved ones, Justin often made stunning strides and comebacks from places his addiction had brought him, even when many feared he’d never recover. He liked to claim, as a point of filial pride and connection with his father he so adored, that because Steve Earle had also survived many near-death scares, so too he, Justin Townes Earle, was invincible.

Like dad, Justin believed deeply in the power of sobriety, dishing advice and wisdom and serving as a model and inspiration for countless fans, fellow artists, and friends. But that didn’t diminish his struggle.

In his last couple of years, the parts of himself he’d long fought to keep hidden started screaming to the surface. He began performing encores shirtless, his torso on full display, visibly incapacitated. The crowd stared at his middle name—Townes—etched into his body.

On August 20, 2020, Justin Townes Earle died at the age of thirty-eight after purchasing cocaine that he didn’t know was laced with fentanyl. He’d grown estranged and detached from many of his friends and family, including his wife and young daughter, and was living alone in Nashville when he died in a sparsely furnished temporary apartment. His body was discovered three days later.

Long before the myth ended, yet again, in utter tragedy, Justin Townes Earle had begun the work of transforming his life into legend. The teller of that legend seemed unusually forthcoming, but those who knew Justin most intimately understood that the heartsick, smiley, bullshitting Nashvillian contained even more within him than what Justin Townes Earle disclosed in public. He was hilarious, hard-edged, stubborn, silly, solemn, generous, exasperating (gentle one moment, violent the next), kind, commandeering, compulsively chatty, and chest thumping. But beneath his bluster was a fragile yearning and a desperate desire to make his hurt heard.

Beneath the pistols, pickup trucks, whiskey, fistfights, and emotional barriers he put up was “a big kid trying to navigate the world,” as one friend, Amanda Shires, put it.

Beneath the drinks and drugs that robbed him of reality in the last years of his life was a man, just shy of forty, who admitted he needed to finally face his demons but didn’t believe he was up to such a daunting task.

The masks, tall tales, half-truths, and half-lies that Justin wielded and waved became a central part of his swaggering legend, a shield he formed around the profound beauty and deep truths of his best work.

“As much as Justin was trying to write great songs,” said one old friend, Sean Locke, “he was trying to write the Justin Townes Earle story, too.”

Justin was still revising that story on May 22, 2019. It was just after noon, and Justin was drunk, grinning, and staring into a camera in a Manhattan office as Rolling Stone asked him questions to promote what would end up being his final record.

Slurring his words, Justin jumped into the tale he wanted to tell: how he started using his middle name.

Telling the story made Justin smile.

As he explained, his friend Joshua Black Wilkins had lovingly encouraged him to do it when prepping Yuma: “He was like, ‘So you wanna be Justin Townes Earle, right?’”

“I was just like, ‘No, I’m Justin Earle.’”

“He goes, ‘No you’re not. You’re Justin Townes Earle.’”

“And I go, ‘You think I should do it all?’”

“And he goes like, ‘I don’t care what you want. That’s what I’m printing on the formatting.’”¹⁶

The way he told it, Justin Townes Earle had no control over his destiny, no chance to tell the world who he was before the world told him, no way to articulate the difference between tempting and choosing his fate. And as was usually the case, even when Justin Townes Earle was bullshitting, he was more than a little right.

¹