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Son Of A Gun
Sunday, May 31, 2009
It hasn’t taken Justin Townes Earle long to step out of the considerable shadow cast by his father Steve. He forges his own identity with his second album. By Brian Wise.
It hasn’t taken Justin Townes Earle long to step out of the considerable shadow cast by his father Steve. In fact, his double-barrel name gives him another musical giant to live up to in Townes Van Zandt. But it is not something that seems to worry Earle too much.
While a lot of other musicians with famous parents have been unable to find their own voice, Earle has managed to devise his own path and, while there are the inevitable echoes of his father, he is quickly emerging as a major talent in his own right. With the EP Yuma and then his first album The Good Life, Earle laid claim to being one of the freshest new artists on the scene.
On his second impressive album, Midnight At The Movies, the young singer songwriter ups the ante and hops musical boundaries with the ease that he brought to his knockout shows in Australia last year. Those memorable shows left no doubt that Earle did not need any odious comparisons, yet perhaps the one thing he undoubtedly shares with his father is his ability to talk – and talk.
When I caught up with Earle he was heading down I-65 somewhere between Louisville and Bowling Green, Kentucky.
What a fantastic tour you had of Australia. You must have been pleased.
We had a lot of fun and I was really pleasantly surprised by the turnouts. I had a really great time. It was one of those tours that kind of left an impression on me. There wasn’t anything gruelling about it. It was really nice and comfortable and I had a really great time and I can’t wait to come back.
Congratulations on the new album. It’s a terrific album and you played, I think, a few songs on your tour, didn’t you?
A couple of them yeah. I was kind of getting them and taking them out and seeing what they could do because I think we had actually already recorded Midnight At The Movies when I came over, I do believe.
It’s quite different to the first album, The Good Life, to the last album isn’t it?
Yeah and I kind of like that. There is kind of a big difference between Yuma and The Good Life too and I think that’s something that I like to keep up because there are boundaries to art but it’s fun to see how far you can go with them.
Well, you certainly cross a variety of styles - it’s almost like a summary of all you’re musical influences in one album.
I like doing that mainly just because records can be so boring especially a lot of the music I like is so kitschy. It’s really hard to make an old time record that is not cheesy. It’s really hard to make a piano laden album not cheesy. That’s where I totally take my cue from the great Randy Newman…….and that’s one of the things I always loved about Randy Newman is his records had everything on them: he’d rock your face off and then he’d have some easy listening coming right behind it.
One of the things that I really like about it, is the fact that it’s only 32 minutes long.
I did that on purpose because The Good Life I think was 31 minutes long, maybe. In the first interview I did last year, someone complained that my record was only 31 minutes long so I made this one 32 minutes long just for them. I can’t remember who it was.
Well, it’s about four minutes longer than some of those early Ry Cooder records.
The thing that I think about records is that a lot of them these days are just kind of too self indulgent and too long and they are hard to digest. So far I’ve made 30 minute records because most people have at least that much of a drive to work every day and so you can put the CD on and listen to the whole record on the way to work and you can decide whether you like it or hate it really fast.
The thing is because there are so many musical styles you get a bit of everything within that 32 minutes, don’t you?
Yeah, I think so I mean we kind of went for the grab bag on this one and gave it a little bit more. The Good Life was a pretty broad spectrum but I think we just concentrated more on strictly southern music on The Good Life. On this one we went a little out of the box, brought a bit of that Minneapolis love into it and maybe a little bit of Memphis, bringing it all back home basically, everything that I’ve been studying my whole fuckin’ life.
I love you’re version of The Replacements’ ‘Can’t Hardly Wait.’
Thank you. That was a lot of fun to do. I’ve been listening to that song in particular for years it was one of my Mum’s favourite song when I was a kid and so I heard it a lot and I’ve been a big Replacements fan for years.
I think they are one of the most under-rated American bands of all time.
I think they are pretty close. I think they underrated themselves, with their behaviour, but they are still one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll stories of all time, one of the most interesting anyway.
Tell us about RS Field your producer, who produced it with Steve Poulten who is somewhat of a legend in Nashville, isn’t he?
Yeah, he is. RS is kind of like one of those guys. He’s a great producer because if you listen to a RS record it’s hard to identify an RS Field record by the sound of it - you’ve got to look at the credits to know that it was an RS Field record. He is really good at getting with an artist and letting artists be the artist. He’s really good at steering in directions, putting little curves on things that really helps things out. But then to work with RS Field you’ve got to learn his language. He speaks this kind of Martian Mississippi language and it takes even the thickest Southern man at least a week to start to comprehend.
He’s really great to work with. RS is really easy going: he likes to have a good time, he likes to eat good food. He tells these great little stories and is always saying something weirder than you’ve ever heard. I think he got a reputation for being an intense guy a few years back, but if he was, it’s all gone now.
Was he responsible for getting the musicians together or are they friends of yours?
Well, the studio thing, all the musicians are friends of mine. I mean it’s Nashville, you don’t need to go very far to find a picker. But it’s all the same players from The Good Life - it’s exactly the same, right down to the guy that turns the knobs on the board. When you find something that’s good it’s really hard to walk away from it.
I’ve been fortunate in the fact that I’m a songwriter who has found a group of people that are not only passionate in helping me realise the songs but they also know how; they also know what I’m shooting for. They have been with me long enough and they understand how I work as a songwriter and when I say crazy shit to them, like The New York Dolls and San Francisco Philharmonic, that’s what I want to hear, they know how to do it. I want it to sound orange, make it orange.
It’s like Captain Beefheart.
Yeah, I’ve just been real fortunate with that because I suffer from severe ADD where I know exactly what I want to do but I can think of fifty different ways to get to it, so then I need some people to help me narrow it down to one or two.
It’s funny that you say that because you expend such an incredible amount of energy on stage.
Yeah, I like to keep it moving, you know. When I walk off stage every night I’m absolutely spent, I’m absolutely spent. I couldn’t go out and party if I wanted to. I think that’s they way it should be, people pay their hard earned money for a ticket and it’s time to give them a show.
It’s only been a year or so since your last album but you sound about five years older.
Yeah, especially in the past year I did a major amount of growing up. I think that I was just trying to, basically with this record, starting to broaden my shoulders a little more. A boy from a medium-sized Southern city can go really far but there is only so far he can go in a medium-sized Southern city. I had to change a lot of things about my life and I think this record says that it helps me move on and grow up and do something different.
Well, if that last record was by a boy from a Southern city, this is certainly a record by a man from a Southern city, isn’t it.
Yeah, I will always be a very Southern man I can’t get away from that.
There are some fantastic songs on this album Justin and I just want to talk about a couple. Can you tell us about the song ‘They Killed John Henry’ which is a really interesting song that takes you to some more traditional themes?
Well, I wanted to do two things with that song I wanted to a- honour my Grandfather. My Grandfather was a really great storyteller so I obviously owe a lot of what I do to earn a living to him. Obviously, John Henry is a big story in the South and also Joe Hill. Believe it or not left-wing politics don’t start with Steve Earle in my family.
So I wanted to write a song for my Grandfather without it being cheesy and the best way I knew to honour him was to put him up against these two images that were so big and they meant so much to so many people. Then, I also wanted to try my hand, like really seriously try my hand, at the Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan school of borrowing and not only working within existing formats but actually working with a really, really set theme that’s been used and run over a million times and see if you can do something that’s a little bit different from it.
So I just decided to take John Henry and Joe Hill and then my Grandfather and slam them all into one song and see what I can do with it. You know, I hope I don’t’ ever sit back and think, I hope I pulled it off, but God I hope it pulled it off.
I think you did pull it off and it’s a great tribute to your grandfather. I don’t need to ask you about Steve really because it’s all self explanatory in the song ‘Mama’s Eyes,’ isn’t it?
That was just me needing to set the record straight that I am my father’s son but I am first and foremost my mother’s boy.
Finally, tell us about the title track Midnight At The Movies, it’s very evocative.
I was trying to think of something that’s so lonesome. What’s the most lonesome thing that you can think of? I thought about going to the movies by myself. Also it brought about a lot of the imagery. When I was eighteen I was really into the Beat Generation, I studied all that Jack Kerouac and all of them stories about them beating around times square in the mid 40’s when it was all dirty book stores and dirty movies theatres and heroin and all that just wonderful stuff just mixed together. It was using that imagery coupled with one of the most lonesome images I could think of.
Midnight Movies is available now through Shock.
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