It's tempting to assume that after getting married last year, Justin Townes Earle might have softened up. But really, if you look past the rocky history, the brash tweets and sometimes-steely exterior to lyrics that serve as snapshots of a life dragged through addiction, family turmoil and affairs of the heart, it's pretty clear he's never been shy about being vulnerable in the first place.
"One thing I end up being able to accomplish is a certain level of sensitivity," Earle says in his slightly nasal gentleman's drawl, calling the Scene from his new loft in downtown Nashville in the old WKDF building. He recently traded his house for an apartment. He was sick of driving to the store to get cigarettes or a bottle of ginger ale — the sort of tasks he could accomplish on foot easily when he lived in New York City. "It's a level that I don't think a lot of people, especially men, are comfortable with. I think it does take a semi-brave — brave or stupid — person to put things out there that most people wouldn't, and speak frankly about their past. But it's what I've always done."
Certainly few men in music these days — whether they make country, roots or something else — devote an entire album to exploring the plight of modern women, but on Single Mothers, Earle does just that. Always relatively open about his roller-coaster relationship with his famous father, Steve Earle, the lanky native Nashvillian pays tribute to the maternal struggle with his own mother, Carol-Ann Hunter, in mind.
"I wrote a song that mothers can relate to," he says of the title track, which inspired the thematic thread of the LP. "It's for single mothers as a whole. I've always found them to be amazing for the most part. I think it's extremely commendable and I'm always in awe of women."
It's a particular woman, his wife — a tattooed Gyrotonic teacher named Jenn Marie from Salt Lake City — who motivated Earle to proclaim on social media, "I think I know what it means to be truly happy now!" back in 2013. (Don't worry — he isn't all sweetness and light, and still tweets gems like, "Yup! Faith Hill is still ugly.") Even so, the nuptials have provided a sense of peace in what was once a rather unstable world, post-addiction, living under the prickly veil of the Steve Earle myth.
"[My marriage] definitely has a major effect on my emotional state in every part of my life," he says. "But I'm not walking on sunshine. There have been 31 years of being fucked up and one year of being married and feeling like everything is good. So I have plenty to write about. Anyway, you're not going to always feel the same way unless you're some overgrown child that still wears their goddamn fraternity hat and drinks light beer every night."
Earle has always drawn from his emotional personal arsenal, yet he's a rare writer whose songs never come across as blatantly confessional. Somehow, he can spin personal tales that are delivered as narratives, avoiding self-indulgence despite a rather public persona. He doesn't deliver a sad song in a tear-jerking voice. Instead, there's a sly smile, the mood delivered through a signature guitar slap that Guy Clark once likened to that of a sledgehammer. While Earle's fourth album, Nothing's Going to Change the Way You Feel About Me Now, dabbled in a Memphis-steeped sound, Single Mothers reconnects with his own breed of country-blues — a style that predated the mainstream Americana craze when it debuted on his first EP, Yuma, in 2007. Earle doesn't pull punches when it comes to his thoughts on the genre.
"In the beginning, 'Americana' meant bands that were unclassifiable," he says. "Or that you made less than 10K a year. Now it's starting to collect a specific sound, and unfortunately it's not good a lot of the time."
Classifiable or not, Single Mothers is full of moments like "White Gardenias" and "Picture in a Drawer" that use Southern embellishments like steel guitar and heavy-as-molasses beats but still capture his own achingly sparse yet never-unfinished sound. But it was Earle's relationship with another Americana artist — Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett — that put Earle's recording future in jeopardy. After Earle signed to Lovett's label, Communion, the relationship quickly deteriorated.
"When that fell apart, it was shocking and a little bit devastating," Earle says. "But in the long run, it turned out to be a very, very good thing."
Earle ultimately found a home at Vagrant, and he'll be headlining the Ryman in November.
"No one is going to push me around," he says firmly. "I'll quit making records before I do that shit."
Email Music@nashvillescene.com.
