Justin Townes Earle interview: Coming of age

YOU'D think Justin Townes Earle would be sick of talking about both drugs and his dad by now. The 26-year-old son of country-rock firebrand Steve is five years clean, working flat-out on his own musical career, and soon to release his second album, barely a year on from the first. He's nonetheless happy to acknowledge the media value of a colourful backstory – and even that the endless rehashing of his precocious narcotic appetites might be good for him.

"I think it's something I constantly need reminding about," he says in a molasses-thick Deep South drawl, speaking from his newly-adopted home of New York. "It's still not that far removed from my life. Where I live now in Brooklyn, for example, it's a big heroin neighbourhood, and I can spot the transactions from two blocks away.

"I've no interest at all in doing any heroin, but I can already tell you which dealer sells the best shit. Addiction does haunt you, so it's important for me to recall."

Any chippiness about the attention inevitably attracted by his parentage, meanwhile, is conspicuous by its absence. "As far as my father's concerned; that's my family, my blood. Dad and I have our problems, everybody knows that. Find me a son of any age who doesn't.

"That part has nothing to do with the public, but when it comes to music I'd probably be pretty offended if somebody didn't mention him. He came first, after all."

For the record, Earle Jnr first got into prescription drugs, as well as alcohol, in his early teens, rapidly graduating to cocaine, heroin and eventually crack, until his fifth major overdose landed him in intensive care with respiratory failure. ("You know you're in trouble when they don't make you wait in the emergency room," he told an Australian interviewer last year. "And you know you're in double trouble when they start cutting your clothes off.")

Raised by his mother on "the wrong side of the tracks" in Nashville, as a boy Earle saw little of his father, whose career was then in its first ascendancy, until he went to live with him aged 14. Dad's absence during these years was also due to his own well-publicised travails with drink and drugs, including a 60-day prison stretch in 1993. Given the similarly cautionary example of Justin's namesake, Townes van Zandt, who died in 1997, did none of that provide any disincentive?

"I'm a strong believer that addiction is genetic: you're a junkie before you start using," he says. "Whether my father had been a banker or a musician, I was going to find heroin. As far as him being able to put me off, a normal teenager doesn't listen to their parents, and I grew up in an inner-city neighbourhood where nobody had anything; I grew up hustling. Add in enough cocaine to kill a horse, and you've got a mean little bastard on your hands. I wasn't a very happy person at all; I just didn't know how to feel anything, and if I was high I didn't have to feel."

As well as such self-medicating, the young Earle also sought solace in words, which led him eventually into music. "I've always written," he says. "When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet. And then I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across."

More specifically, it was hearing Nirvana's legendary MTV Unplugged session, including Kurt Cobain's magnetic rendering of Leadbelly's Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, that set Earle to learning the guitar, and to rifling through his father's record collection for vintage country and blues – sounds in which his own songs are steeped.

"I grew up in Tennessee, half of my family's from Texas, and my mother was the first generation in her family to live outside Kentucky. Her father grew up listening to the Carter Family," he says, by way of explaining his throwback tastes. "This kind of music just really speaks to true Southern people; we own this shit.

"What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing. I've never been good at rock'n'roll songs, anyway; either I'm blessed or I'm cursed, but whatever I write comes out sounding old."

These grittily timeless qualities in Earle's music – as heard on last year's debut The Good Life, and mined further on his follow-up, Midnight at the Movies, due out in March – have certainly proved efficacious in distinguishing his sound from his father's more rock-oriented style, and winning him widespread plaudits in the American press. After years of short-lived stints in bands – including his father's, the Dukes – which were sabotaged by his determination to self-destruct, Earle was finally jolted by that last hospitalisation into cleaning up, and is now equally determined to make up for lost time.

"I work like a madman," he says, when asked what now replaces drugs in his life. "My first album came out nine months ago, and I've done 250 shows since then. Now I've got the second one coming up, and I'd like to do another record this year.

"I wouldn't say it's a conscious replacement, but I am conscious that I lived really, really hard for a long time, and I know I shaved some years off. I don't feel old, but I do have some health problems I probably shouldn't have at this age, and I just want to make sure I do everything I want to do in whatever time I have."

• Justin Townes Earle plays the ABC, Glasgow, tonight, and the City Halls Recital Rooms, Glasgow, tomorrow, as part of the Celtic Connections festival. Midnight at the Movies is released on 2 March.

MUSICAL DYNASTIES

IF YOU want to make music for a living, being the son or daughter of someone who is very famous for doing exactly that can be a poisoned chalice. It might make record labels more likely to return your calls, but it is likely to make audiences suspicious that you've only got as far as you have because of a leg-up.

It helps if the music you make is nothing like that of your parents – as with Rufus Wainwright, son of folk star Loudon Wainwright III, who has found his voice writing lavishly produced, Technicolor pop songs before moving into opera. Or Emma Townshend, daughter of Pete Townshend, whose 1998 solo album Winterland saw her tinkling away quietly at a piano, in a manner entirely unlike The Who. She later become a gardening columnist.

What doesn't generally help is if you: (i) are the spitting image of your famous father; and (ii) sing a bit like him too. Spare a thought, then, for the likes of Julian Lennon, who could only have lived up to his father's reputation if, like him, he'd formed one of the most successful and groundbreaking pop bands of all time. No pressure there, then.