When Walter Becker died three years ago, my friend Thor rushed to my side, bought me waffles at a local diner and sat with me to spin a couple Steely Dan records and watch Oh Hello On Broadway.
So when the news trickled in that Justin Townes Earle, 38, had been found dead in his Nashville home of a suspected drug overdose on August 20th, Thor was the person I texted, disbelieving, having to write the words myself to make them into the quiet reality. He didn’t believe me at first. “Oh my God,” he wrote back. “How do I even begin processing that?”
JTE had been with us almost as long as we had been friends; two small-town expats who didn’t know each other back home but found themselves living in the same city, working on the same production of The Odd Couple: Female Version. We bonded over music and stories of the weird teachers we had (including a showgirl-past-her-prime music teacher who frequently showed up to work hung over). We both had that very quiet loneliness that frequently manifests in rural kids.
So when Thor showed up for dinner one time with a copy of Midnight at the Movies (2009) for my newly discovered turntable, it was like finding another one of us, a brother we had never met. We could hear that same ache, that loneliness in his voice that stayed with him from Yuma (2007) through The Saint of Lost Causes (2019). And it deepened our bond as friends, giving us a musical thread to bind us. His version of The Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait” became our song, the one he played on Instagram for my birthday when the pandemic kept us apart.
I’ll admit that I’m not especially well-versed in country music and the various spinoffs. It’s a blank spot for me, something I keep meaning to dig into but never quite get around to. But JTE was different. His music had the twang I always found endearing, but a punk edge I found exciting. When he wrote about a woman betraying him in bed, it was because she was sleeping in the middle of it, hogging the covers (I am in this song and I do not like it). His America wasn’t confined to the plains and the back-counties to be driven in beat-up pick-up trucks; his characters worked on the MTA, they drove Corollas.
But more than that, all of JTE’s music seemed to come from some lonely place inside of him, some torn-out hole that could never be filled. His struggles with addiction are not unknown; his troubled childhood with a single mother and an absent famous hell-raiser father. He mined all of that for his music, directly and indirectly. These things—and so many other injustices, personal and national—haunted him, across “Rogers Park,” across “Single Mothers” and “Farther From Me” and “Flint City Shake It,” but he was always tender with these hurts, treated them like the fragile things they are.
Before Thor left for New Mexico, he bought me Harlem River Blues (2010) on vinyl, to keep me company, so that I would remember him. I played it on repeat throughout the winter in a house that didn’t hold heat very well. I imagined deserts and straight roads. I cast Walton Goggins in the lyrics of “Mama Said” because I was watching Justified and it all seemed to fit. To this day, it remains my favorite song. It’s the line “Boy you keep moving and you never get caught” that sticks with me.
We all get caught, one way or another. He just got caught too early.
By spring, Thor had come back east, and when JTE came to town, he got us tickets. We sat at a table draped in black with a little electric candle in a room of about 20 people, nowhere near as packed as it should have been. I don’t remember the setlist, but I remember being in love with all of it. He described “Christchurch Woman” as being written about a “real white trash” gal, which made us all laugh. He didn’t hang around afterwards, but I sent my record back with a roadie and it came back with his scrawl.
We saw him one other time, with Lilly Hiatt, at a little theater in Albany in 2018. He had a sore throat and ate Fisherman’s Friend cough drops between songs, chatting with the audience with the practiced ease that the shy among us recognize as painfully forced. But that awkwardness vanished when he began to play, as though none of us were there. And we in the audience were fine with that. He wasn’t playing locally on the Saint of Lost Causes tour, with the closest stop in New York City, so Thor and I decided that we would just catch him on the next one.
Now I wish we’d made the trip to the city.
I reviewed Kids in the Street for Albumism and The Saint of Lost Causes for Paste. In the end, Earle’s people enjoyed my review of Lost Causes; they not only sent me a requested vinyl copy of the album, it was signed. I took that signature out of the plastic the day he died and touched it, as though it might cosmically connect me to him, as though it might send a signal through the ether to let him know he would be missed.
But with JTE’s death striking in the time of COVID, there was no diner to have waffles in. Instead I bought us ribs and pulled pork and cornbread, hunkered down in my record nook to play Harlem River Blues and The Saint of Lost Causes on vinyl, the others awaiting us in the digital space. Because we all have to find our ways to say goodbye, hold funerals for those we cannot be beside, when they are laid in the ground.
LISTEN: