Across The Margin : The Podcast celebrates the life and music of Justin Townes Earle with the author of What Do You Do When Your Lonesome, Jonathan Bernstein…
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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Jonathan Bernstein, a senior research editor and writer at Rolling Stone, who before that was a freelancer for Oxford American, The Guardian, GQ, Vulture, Pitchfork, The Village Voice, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, and American Songwriter. His book, What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome : The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle, is the focus of this episode.
When Justin Townes Earle died of an overdose alone in his Nashville apartment, his death sent waves of grief through the country-Americana music community. The son of alt-country hellraiser Steve Earle had long struggled with mental illness and various addictions. There had been encouraging periods of long-term sobriety and active recovery in his adult life, including the years that led up to his career peak when he released the 2010 masterpiece Harlem River Blues, a career-making album of rambling folk blues set to Southern Gospel.
He sang of cramped Brooklyn apartments and crippling hangovers, about emotional displacement, economic anxiety, and the wandering that characterized his feral, formative years as a rootless kid rambling around Nashville, developing his own unique guitar style and absorbing the musical influences that surrounded him. He was anointed by critics as the next coming of the authentic troubadour. By the time of his death, he’d recorded and released eight albums, creating a striking and original body of work.
In What To Do When You’re Lonely, Jonathan Bernstein, with the full cooperation of the Justin Townes Earle estate, unravels a short but incredibly creative life, and reveals the backstories behind Justin’s greatest songs and what happened when it all fell apart while also capturing a shadow world of the neglected children of Nashville legends who wrestle with the legacies of their hard-living, road-weary, often absent parents.
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