Remembering an artist who struggled with—and against—loneliness, abandonment, estrangement, addiction.
On the 20th of August 2020, American singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle died in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 38 years old, and the likely cause of his death was a drug overdose.
While Earle achieved only modest commercial success in the Americana, folk, or alt-country musical space, he was widely regarded as a first-rate songwriter and musical stylist, drawing from a broad range of popular American musical traditions, and developing a unique signature guitar technique, recognizable across his eight full-length albums.
He was also transparent about his struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, which often found its way into his music, and to which he finally succumbed.
This was a struggle that JTE, as his fans refer to him, inherited from his more famous singer-songwriter father, Steve Earle, and his namesake, Townes Van Zandt, Steve’s close friend and, in the opinion of many critics, the most important songwriter in the tradition in which all three toiled. Steve Earle has been no less candid about his addictions, but by his own account he has been clean and sober for many years, and has forged a very successful recording career. Townes Van Zandt, on the other hand, suffered the same end as Justin Townes Earle, succumbing to the accumulated effect of his dependence on drugs and alcohol.
Both Steve and Justin have been frank about their often strained relationship. Steve divorced Justin’s mother when Justin was a young boy, and before Steve’s commercial success, leaving Justin and his mother destitute. While there were some public indications that the rift had been healing, Justin’s struggle with drugs and alcohol were never far from his contentious relationship with his father.
For example, in “Mama’s Eyes”, from his album, Midnight at the Movies, Justin sang:
I am my father’s son
We don’t see eye to eye
And I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never tried
. . .
I was a young man when
I first found the pleasure in the feel of a sin
I went down the same road as my old man
I was younger then
In “Am I That Lonely Tonight?” from his 2012 album Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now, Justin wrote:
Hear my father on the radio singing ‘take me home again’
300 miles from the Carolina coast and I’m skin and bones again
Sometimes I wish that I could get away
Sometimes I wish that he’d just call
Am I that lonely tonight?
I don’t know
And in “Movin’ On”, from the same album, he sang:
Well I talked to my mom today, she seems like she’s doing fine
Tell her I’ve been getting sick again, we both pretend we don’t know why
She says “one more drop of rain” . . . she swears we’ll all be drowned alive
And she asked my how my father’s been, we both pretend we don’t know why
Later in the same song he mused:
Maybe I should trace my life back to the night my folks first met
Maybe I could find the moment where my father broke my mother’s heart in half
. . .
But I’m trying to move on, I’m trying to move on baby
I’m trying to move on, I’m trying to move on oh …
In 2014 and 2015, JTE released a pair of albums, Single Mothers and Absent Fathers, which were sustained meditations on these themes.
I do not know the state of Justin’s relationship with his father in the time leading up to his death. I’m even less competent to conclude a specific causal connection between JTE’s historical alienation from his father and his drug addiction. Finally—though it hardly needs saying—I know nothing about the state of Justin’s soul at the time of his death. But I do know something about loneliness, addiction, and the struggle to move on.
My own father died in an automobile accident three months before I was born.
My mother raised my older sister and me alone for about nine years, before she took up with an emotionally and physically abusive man, who alienated me from my mother and exacerbated the loneliness that I experienced from my absent father. Later, after years of trying to deal with the emotional and psychological loneliness, I developed an addiction to alcohol.
By God’s grace, and the mediating prayers of a loving wife and many friends and saints, I’ve been sober for nearly 17 years.
As with JTE’s addictions, I am not competent to say that my addiction is caused by the loneliness from an absent father. Nor do I blame it on other contingencies of my childhood and adolescence. The correlation, however, cannot simply be dismissed. If drugs or alcohol are the cure for loneliness, the cure is always—always—worse than the disease.
In “Sharing Demons with Hank Williams”—a 2010 New York Times essay about Williams’s death from drug addiction (framed in the context of her own sobriety)—Martha Woodroof wrote:
[W]hen you’re an addict, the rest of your life is a shadow no matter how many songs you write or places you go or people you please. Or how many good times you have, for that matter. There’s no bargaining with alcohol and drugs once you have to have them. You either stop drinking and using or you die.
I don’t know the source of Woodroof’s strength to stop drinking. But I do know that mine comes from confessing my weakness before God, seeking the sustaining prayers of the whole communion of Saints, and falling helplessly on God’s grace and mercy.
Justin Townes Earle’s last album was called The Saint of Lost Causes, featuring an image of St. Jude on the cover. We cannot know whether he considered himself a lost cause, or whether he sought the consolation of the saint of lost causes in the hope that he was not. We do know that God’s mercy is not constrained by Justin Townes Earle’s or anyone else’s demons. RIP JTE.
Kenneth Craycraft is a licensed attorney and the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He holds the Ph.D. in theology from Boston College, and the J.D. from Duke University School of Law.
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