A new perspective

Justin Townes Earle on marriage, sobriety and not whining about the past

0

People talk about how life can be a real roller coaster, and few know this better than Justin Townes Earle. From struggling with alcohol and drug addiction — not to mention a double-digit number of stints in rehab — to signing his first record deal while still in his teens, Earle has definitely seen both sides of the coin. And the years leading up to his just-released new record, Single Mothers, were no less mixed.

“There was a long period of time between making Nothing’s Going to Change and Single Mothers, or at least longer than I usually take,” says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter. “A lot happened in that period that was kind of strange and peculiar. Some of it was life-altering in a bad way, and all of a sudden things got a lot better really fast, so there was this wave of ups and downs.”

One of the ups was Earle getting married for the first time last October. Between the love of a good woman and getting clean and sober, he now has a different perspective on what makes for a healthy life, physically and emotionally. This is part of what makes Single Mothers an intriguing project: It looks at relationships through the lens of someone who now knows what it’s like to be on each side.

A hip-shaking rock track like “My Baby Drives” extols the virtues of his wife metaphorically driving their relationship in the right direction, but this is also juxtaposed against more somber material like the bluesy, folk-tinged title track which tells the story of a fractured family — a subject he knows something about, since his father, legendary artist Steve Earle, left him and his mother when he was a toddler — from the perspective of the mother, father and child. And the country number “Picture in a Drawer,” with its story about remembering a deceased mother, is contrasted nicely against “Wanna be a Stranger,” which highlights that urge to unplug from life as we know it and go experience something else without any emotional attachments. As deep as the album is however, Earle cautions listeners against thinking it is more autobiographical than it really is because Single Mothers is not a series of journal entries.

“[When you write like that], it gets to a point where you’re kind of whining and there’s no direction,” Earle says. “I think it is a difficult line to ride, but you just have to learn the difference between emotion and emotional, you know? Feeling an emotion is a whole different thing than being emotional, and I think emotional is a bad time to go to work, because you don’t process things well.”

Now that Earle has left his hard-charging life behind him for a more stable one, he has a clarity which is not only positively impacting his personal life, but his creative one as well.

“It took me a long time to not believe the lie, but I don’t believe it takes drugs or alcohol to write anymore,” Earle confesses. “I think it was part of an evolution of me as an artist. It’s been a long climb. I spent a lot of years living out on the road, and now that I’m here, I feel like I’m ready. It was 10 years [from signing his first deal to actually releasing an album] before I got anything going. If you don’t learn a lot in that situation, then your eyes aren’t open.”

Earle has learned a lot about heartache, love, addiction and perseverance, as well as second and 12th chances. God knows it would have been easy for him to make Single Mothers a self-righteous missive on what it means to be good and to act like he had all the answers, but he steers clear of that. Instead, Earle opts to paint a picture of life in all its beautiful messiness, and let the listener decide what to glean from those experiences.

“I made the choices I did to step into that world,” he says regarding his troubled past. “And I think it made me a better man, but I like to leave a lot to interpretation in my songs.”

Now Earle has stepped into a different world, and it looks like this roller coaster is only going to go up for him. 

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com