“I did not want to be asked to be on a tribute record with several people that I thought absolutely were enablers and helped kill him,” Earle said, his words flecked with expletives.
He was also wary of being roped into anyone else’s memorial. 20.) Earle, who had largely avoided speaking publicly about Justin’s death, wanted the album to be his statement. By the time they began recording, Justin had been dead for less than two months. He worked fast, sending his band preparatory notes by text message. TO RECORD “J.T.,” Earle, with the help of his son Ian, 33, winnowed Justin’s work to a list of 10 songs - two of them, “Turn Out My Lights” and “Far Away in Another Town,” Justin wrote with Scotty Melton - and booked a week at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Are they here because they like my music, or are they here because they like my dad’s music?” “So there’s this bit of distrust with the audience from the very beginning. “When you get out there, there’s going to be this built-in audience of people that are curious to see what Steve Earle’s son is like, or what Waylon Jennings’s son is like,” Jennings said. For much of Justin’s youth, Earle was touring or lost in the depths of drug addiction. He and Justin’s mother, Carol Ann Hunter, split up when Justin was 3, around the time that Earle’s recording career began to take off. Justin was born in 1982, while Earle was a journeyman songwriter in Nashville. “J.T.” is, in a sense, a double portrait of father and son.
Recording the album “wasn’t cathartic as much as it was therapeutic,” Earle said. “Give my money to my baby to spend.”) “Turn Out My Lights,” about the phantom-limb ache for a former lover, takes on an eerie double meaning when Earle sings:Įven though I know you’re gone I don’t have to be alone now You’re here with me every night When I turn out my lights (“Tell my mama I love her, tell my father I tried,” it goes. “Harlem River Blues” contemplates a drowning death. Recorded with the Dukes, Earle’s longtime backing band - including Chris Masterson on guitar, Eleanor Whitmore on fiddle, Ricky Ray Jackson on pedal steel guitar, Jeff Hill on bass and Brad Pemberton on drums - “J.T.” includes some of Justin’s best-known songs, like “Harlem River Blues,” “Champagne Corolla” and “The Saint of Lost Causes,” the title track of Justin’s final album, released in 2019.Įarle’s craggy-voiced performance underscores dark themes that were there all along. Proceeds from the LP will go to a trust to benefit Etta. 4, which would have been Justin’s 39th birthday. Within days of Justin’s death, Earle, 65, began work on what would become “J.T.,” an album of 10 of Justin’s songs, and one new track by his father, that will be released on Jan. “I was connected to him in ways that, you know - he’s my first born, he did the same thing I did and we both had this disease.” “I’ve never loved anything in this world more than him,” Earle said. Among Justin’s survivors are his wife, Jennifer, and a 3-year-old daughter, Etta St. Justin was hospitalized with pneumonia over the summer, having aspirated vomit in his lungs, and was told by a doctor that he would die if he did not quit drinking, Steve said.īut while Steve eventually got clean - after spending time in prison in 1994 on drug and weapons charges - his son succumbed to the disease. Alcoholism plagued him throughout his career, and took a hard toll in his later years. Justin, like his father, also spent years as an addict, using heroin since his teens.
0 kommentar(er)
