Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Bernstein did not set out to sanctify Justin Townes Earle, nor to reduce him to a cautionary tale. With What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, Bernstein instead accomplishes something far more difficult: he restores dimensionality to a life too often flattened by myth. The result is a biography that neither looks away from pain nor exploits it. Bernstein’s work honors Earle’s music by insisting on the full human cost behind it.
At the heart of Bernstein’s book is Saint of Lost Causes, the 2018 album that now reads as both culmination and elegy. Bernstein returns to the sense of momentum that surrounded its creation. Earle was energized, creatively alive, and deeply engaged with the band around him—Adam Benarik, Joe McMahon, John Radford, and Paul Niehaus. They were locked in, not merely executing songs but imagining futures. There were ideas for follow-up albums, multiple directions sketched out, collaborations assumed rather than hoped for.
In Bernstein’s telling, Saint of Lost Causes was not meant to be a final statement. It was the opening chapter of something new.
That unrealized future is one of the book’s quiet devastations. Bernstein is careful not to rank tragedies—Justin Townes Earle’s death contains multitudes of loss—but he does not shy away from naming the creative rupture. The work that might have come matters, too. One detail Bernstein mentions, almost in passing, captures the album’s deeper lineage: during the sessions, Aretha Franklin died. The band paused to listen to Amazing Grace (1972). It was a moment of reverence, but also of inheritance—a reminder that Earle’s music, especially on Saint of Lost Causes, tapped into something older and distinctly American, both musically and spiritually.
If the record captures Justin Townes Earle at a moment of clarity, the book traces the long, uneven road that led there. One of Bernstein’s central concerns is dismantling the romantic mythology that equates artistic greatness with suffering and self-destruction. In Earle’s case, that mythology was not theoretical. It was formative. Reading Earle’s interviews and personal writings, Bernstein sensed an internal conflict: an attraction to the idea that pain produced truth, coupled with an awareness that it was killing him.
The Conditions of Chaos
That mythology, Bernstein argues, was part of the air Justin Townes Earle breathed growing up. Born into instability, he spent parts of his childhood living beneath his father, Steve Earle, during periods when Steve himself was struggling with addiction, incarceration, and volatility. They survived with food stamps aid. Structure was elusive. Care was inconsistent. Justin absorbed not only the chaos but also the stories told about it—stories that framed survival and suffering as proof of authenticity.
Reconstructing Justin’s early childhood proved one of Bernstein’s greatest challenges. Justin spoke about those years in broad strokes, offering impressions rather than specifics. Much of the public narrative had filtered through Steve Earle’s formidable storytelling voice, reinforced by decades of biographies and interviews. Bernstein’s work became one of careful triangulation: reading books about Steve Earle, parsing inherited narratives, and—most importantly—listening to those who cared for Justin.
Three women emerge as essential witnesses: Justin’s mother, his aunt, and Lou-Anne Gill, Steve Earle’s former wife, who served as a primary caretaker during key periods. Their recollections reveal not a single defining trauma but a sustained emotional reality: a severe lack of care, supervision, and stability beginning early in Justin’s life and persisting throughout childhood. Bernstein describes emotional abandonment, isolation, and a loneliness that seemed to take root before kindergarten. These were not wounds Justin ever fully escaped; they were conditions he carried into adulthood and into his art.
Justin Townes Earle’s complicated relationship with his father looms large but is carefully reframed. Bernstein resists turning What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome into an indictment of Steve Earle, even as he documents failures, absences, and moments of deep hurt. Instead, he shifts the perspective decisively: this is Justin’s story, with Steve Earle as a powerful, sometimes loving, sometimes eclipsing presence.
Their relationship often played out publicly, almost as performance art; two gifted storytellers amplifying drama, consciously or not. Bernstein’s task is not to retell that spectacle, but to recenter the son whose life was so often discussed only in relation to the father.
That reframing sharpens the book’s most heartbreaking moments, including two incidents from 2010, the pivotal year of Harlem River Blues. At Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, Justin was invited onstage to sing “The Weight” with one of his heroes—a moment of benediction that left him glowing. Immediately afterward, Steve Earle took the stage, commanding attention in a way that, intentional or not, displaced his son.
A similar dynamic unfolded at the release event for 2010’s Harlem River Blues. For Bernstein, these moments crystallize the relationship: love tangled with rivalry, pride shadowed by an inability to step aside.
A Life Shaped by Absence
Throughout his life, Justin Townes Earle searched for substitutes for the fatherly care he lacked. Bernstein traces his compulsive behaviors—substance use, of course, but also spending money on shopping and antiquing. Thrifting and collecting became both pleasure and compulsion, a way to impose meaning and continuity on a life shaped by absence. What began as shared delight eventually tipped into another form of excess, one addiction muting another.
Bernstein is unsparing in his account of Justin’s legal troubles, arrests, relapses, and the damage he caused along the way. He refuses to romanticize these episodes, treating them instead as consequences—painful, real, and often ugly. This clarity extends to the book’s final chapters, which chronicle a prolonged descent rather than a sudden accident. Justin Townes Earle’s death, Bernstein makes clear, occurred within a multi-year death spiral, exacerbated by mental illness, prescription drugs, and the brutal unpredictability of the illicit drug supply.
Yet What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome is not about death. It is about music, and what remains when the noise fades. Justin Townes Earle’s work, Bernstein argues, has been misunderstood—his anti-commercial instincts mistaken for failure rather than intention. Again and again, Justin pivoted away from success just as it arrived, rejecting lanes that might have made him famous in favor of sounds he needed to chase.
Albums like Single Mothers (2014) and Absent Fathers (2015), once dismissed, now read as daring, austere, and emotionally exacting. Their influence can be heard in a generation of artists who followed, whether they know it or not.
Bernstein closes his book—and his reckoning—with the final song on Justin’s final album, “Talking to Myself”. It is here, at last, that the mythology falls away completely, replaced by a voice stripped of bravado and illusion. Bernstein does not analyze the lyrics. He lets them stand, as confession and truth:
“The drinks bring no joy to me
I just can’t remember when
All the drugs begin to fail me
Left me only with a lonely child to fend
‘Cause I tried to love and I failed
I’ve put my heart on a shelf
These are things I say only when I’m talking to myself”.