The Good Life From Now On

Earle accepts congratulations on his first full-length CD, The Good Life, released March 25 on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records. “It took a while, didn’t it?” he says with a crooked smile. “Some of these songs I wrote in my teens. Been singing them forever, so it’s good to get them out.”

He previously self-released an EP, Yuma, which came out in early 2007 and earned him a wider range of club bookings across the South and Midwest. Yuma featured minimalist arrangements built around Earle’s syncopated, blues-to-ragtime acoustic guitar. After signing with Bloodshot, he recorded with well-regarded producer and madman R.S. Field, who has worked with Billy Joe Shaver, Buddy Guy, Sonny Landreth and Allison Moorer.

Steve Poulton, a longtime compatriot of the 25-year-old Earle, co-produced. With Richard McLaurin as engineer, the recording took seven long days in Nashville’s House of David Studio. The songs mash up swing, Texas shuffles, mountain folk ballads, old-time hillbilly and bluesy singer-songwriter tunes.

Earle’s style is too wide-ranging, and his imprint too distinctively his own, to pigeonhole him in one genre. His personality comes through clearest on raucous vaudevillian tunes, where a rakish swagger informs “Hard Livin’,” “South Georgia Sugar Babe” and “Ain’t Glad I’m Leavin’ ”—the latter of which warns, “If you ain’t glad I’m leaving, girl / You know you ought to be.”

Self-deprecation is inherent in his style. So is an easy kind of cockiness. He’s had those traits most of his life, but the newest addition is hard-won humility.

“It’s taken a long time for this record to be realized, and I’m really proud of it,” he says. “But a lot of that is working with all these great people. I’ve had to learn to trust what other people bring to what I do. I wasn’t always like that.”

He hired Field a week before recording began. A former Nashville resident, Field currently lives in his native Mississippi. “I told him it would be a lot of work, and we don’t have a lot of money, and the best we can do is send you a Greyhound bus ticket to get here,” Earle recalls. “R.S. being R.S., he liked the idea of coming into Nashville by bus to make a country record.”

The band included two colleagues who have played with Earle since his days in an old-time acoustic band, The Swindlers: Cory Younts plays a variety of string instruments, and Skylar Wilson plays piano, from barrelhouse to Moon Mullican honky-tonk. “Those two are absolutely essential to my sound,” Earle says.

Earle and Field also brought in several roots-music veterans: bassist Bryn Davies, steel guitarist Pete Finney, fiddler Josh Headley and drummer Bryan Owings. “We didn’t know until we started, but it was the right band for this record,” says Earle, whose finger-picked guitar provides the core of each tune.

The album’s biggest surprise may come in how accomplished Earle is at traditional country. “Lonesome and You” sounds like classic countrypolitan from the ’60s, while “The Good Life” and “What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome?” are ace-in-the-hole Texas swing. Told the songs sound like ’50s Ray Price, Earle says, “That’s exactly what I was listening to when I wrote those songs.”

Not so surprising is the aching emotion of two singer-songwriter ballads, “Turn Out My Lights” and “Who Am I to Say,” which most illustrate his father’s influence. The bluesy story song “Lone Pine Hill” could have been a Van Zandt cover, but, like every song on the album, it was written by Earle.

“It’s not strictly a country record, even though it has some songs that are more country than anything they’re doing on Music Row,” he says. “It’s not an old-timey record, although it has some of that. I’ve been saying it’s a singer-songwriter record that draws on a lot of forms of Southern music.”

His interest in the sounds of earlier eras started at age 14, when he began staying at his father’s Fairview home. “The unplugged record by Nirvana helped him get into what he’s doing now,” says Steve Earle. “Cobain does that Leadbelly song, which he calls ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,’ but its actual title is ‘In the Pines.’ That got Justin digging into my records, and Leadbelly was in the same area as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. Justin got into all that, and all of a sudden he was finger-picking an acoustic.”

The young Earle also found his father’s VHS documentaries on Hopkins and Lipscomb by documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Using a remote’s pause and rewind buttons, he studied how the old bluesmen placed their fingers on the frets.