Tracing the Past: An Interview with Justin Townes Earle
Justin Townes Earle is coming through the northeast next week, with stops in Cambridge, Fall River, Connecticut, and New York. He released Kids in the Street last fall and it’s been widely acclaimed as his strongest record yet. If you haven’t gotten to know, you really should. It reaches back into blues and soul music but doesn’t imitate. The song that gets me every time on this record is the last one, “There Go A Fool”–it’s spare and emotional and gorgeous. But it’s chock full of great tunes that drive and groove and it’s well worth your time. We had the pleasure of chatting with Justin ahead of this string of shows through our neck of the woods about process and the importance of knowing your history.
RLR: You’ve had Kids on the Street out for six months or so–has your relationship to these songs changed over that time?
JTE: That’s been true with all my songs. The tempos change, or you find these little inner workings that you didn’t find when you recorded them. You find some things you wish you’d had when you recorded them. That little inner melody, and it’s like ‘Damn it, I wish that was there on the record.’ So I find that with every record I’ve ever made; there’s always going to be this evolution of the songs, especially when you bounce between doing live band, solo, and duo. There’s going to be pretty noticeable differences.
RLR: Do any songs in particular stand out that way?
JTE: One that always jumps to mind for me is “Mama’s Eyes.” When I hear the recording of it, it’s so fast, and nowadays, I play it a good bit slower, and I find it a lot more moving to me. And songs like, “Champagne Corolla,” I play it faster live, especially when I play it solo, because I’m trying to keep as much going as I can.
JTE: It’s a vast difference. I have an easier time adjusting to doing the solo shows than I do adjusting to having the band. I’ve come to where I really enjoy having the band. But over my career I’ve played so much more solo than I have with a band, so it’s more of a jolt to go out with a band right at first.
When you’re going out solo, you’re trying to figure out ways to fill the space that’s on the record and still make it interesting, and something that will lift an audience. I’ve never been, and don’t want to be, one of those folky-strummy singer/songwriters. I want it to have a good, bluesy kick to it, I want it to be upbeat. [Laughs] In between every tour, solo or band, my biggest challenge is remembering my songs.
RLR: Even though this one is a solo tour, you said that it can be a jolt to go out with a band. How do you think about getting a band on the same page with your songs and your project?
JTE: In the past, it’s definitely been a bit more of a challenge with players I’ve gathered together. And I’ve had to say: “No, no, don’t do that.” You know, something might have worked on the record, but isn’t going to work live. But the past couple bands I’ve had, I’ve had members of Centro-matic in the band. And I didn’t have to tell them anything. This past tour, I had The Sadies and you don’t got to tell The Sadies a fucking thing. It’s pretty incredible. So I have gotten this idea of instead of putting together bands, just taking whole bands out.
RLR: That’s really interesting. What do you see as the difference?
JTE: When you collect players, they have to find how to read each other, and how to play off each other, especially with your rhythm section. If you have a rhythm section that’s never played together before, that’s gonna be a challenge for the bass player and the drummer to get in line with each other. But with the established bands, you just don’t have to worry. So, it’s like, “Holy shit, I get to be a frontman.” And that’s the other thing it gives to me: you get to learn how to be a frontman of a band, as opposed to being the whole show.
RLR: I read that you came to some of the blues music through Nirvana–how do you see contemporary music in conversation with music that was written generations ago?
JTE: There’s one thing that songwriters and bands have to be aware of: there are very few artists in the history of music that you can’t trace where they came from. You got like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Malcolm Holcombe. Yeah, with Waits’s early records, yeah, you can find a bit of where he came from, but with the stuff that he’s been doing for the past thirty years, no. No way you can trace that stuff.
But when I listen to The Replacements, I hear Carl Perkins in there. I that’s something we have to look at as songwriters, and realize that our chances of doing something original or writing the great American folk song are slim to none. So you have to learn to pay homage to the people who come before you and try to put a new spin on it. Going back to “Champagne Corolla”–I’m not the first guy to write a song about a car. But I’m the first guy to write a song about a Corolla!
JTE: I think that’s absolutely true, and there’s a whole lot of music that’s out now where you can tell that kids have listened to nothing but shit that’s been out for the last ten years. Even though there’s a lot of people who do well with that, it’s doing a great disservice to future generations. I mean, I was never a Phish fan at all, but one thing they did do was they did Mississippi John Hurt songs. And they introduced [him to] their fans, no matter how jumbled up and acid-headed it was. They showed their generation something that came before and inspired them. And I feel that more than ever that people aren’t as much inspired by something that came before them as they are inspired by fame. My dad said to me when I was young, he said: “Do you want to be an artist, or do you want to be famous?” And I think we’re running into a point where the artistic portion of music is getting lost very much.
RLR: And that trajectory of figuring out what you want to be is different, and there can be this pressure on artists to put out as much as possible as fast as possible.
JTE: I think that people don’t spend as much time honing their craft anymore before putting out records. I went to hills of Appalachia when I was 15 because I wanted to know more about where the Carter Family came from and Appalachian music. I went to Chicago when I was 17, because I wanted to understand why blues went electric. I don’t think that people delve and do the research like they used to do; I don’t think they gig like they used to. I don’t think guys get out there and play as many shows as they possibly can; get out there and play 200 shows on the road. So there is this lack of incubation period.
RLR: Coming back to Kids on the Street, and this concept of incubation, it’s making me think about process. You wrote this last album more or less alone in California, which seemed like a new process for you. How much of that process have you maintained?
JTE: When writing my other records, I was living in New York for years, so I would write for a little while and then I’d go out and socialize. When I wrote Kids in the Street, I was living in a village of 13 people, right on Highway 1. And it’s what I had [available to me] to do, just locked in to totally writing the songs. There was no party to go to at the end of the day, there was no bar to go to. The most conversation I had was walking up to the little convenience store and getting a sandwich at lunchtime, talking to the kid behind the counter. For some reason, it made me look more outward and think about how things affect other people, where I think my earlier records very introverted, and very much about me.
RLR: That’s an interesting paradox: when you were in New York, you’re writing more introverted songs and when you go to the solitary place, you’re looking outward. Have you thought about why that is?
JTE: I haven’t figured that out and, you know, I don’t know that I want to figure it out. It might change everything!
Catch Justin Townes Earle at The Sinclair next Monday. Lilly Hiatt (just nominated for Emerging Artist of the Year by the Americana Music Association) opens up the show, so get there on time. Tickets are here.