They lived and toured and gigged together. He was with Moorer for eight years – his longest marriage. Nor have I met somebody with so many stories. Syllables merge into one and consonants are dispensed with entirely, so the word “centre” becomes “sinner”. Three years on from their divorce, you sense he is still coming to terms with separating from Moorer.Įarle looks like an ageing Hells Angel – long straggly grey beard, waistcoat, T-shirt, jeans, tattoos. Its message might be bleak, but the song is uplifting. This Is How it Ends is a duet with country star Miranda Lambert, reminiscent of Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner in their prime. It is about love and loss and another form of recovery. Despite the bravado of its title, Earle’s new album, So You Wanna Be an Outlaw, is one of his most tender yet. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. It’s a fitting farewell on this album, showing the world both the man and the talent we lost. It recalls one of Steve’s best compositions, “Goodbye,” but it also brings to mind several of Justin’s songs, as though the father has learned from his son. “Just know you did, it makes me sad.” The melody is simple and fleet, conveying immense confusion and hurt just beneath the words. “I don’t know why you hurt so bad,” he sings. Using their final phone call as a framing device-which means their last words to each other were “I love you” and “I love you, too”-Steve ponders the pain his son felt and wonders what he might have done to ease it in any way. JT ends with the set’s only original from Steve, a short remembrance called “Last Words.” It’s the only time he specifically addresses his son’s death, the only time he acknowledges the very real loss that motivated this album. “I don’t know where I’m headed, and I don’t care,” Steve sings on one of his son’s earliest songs, “I Don’t Care,” and it sounds like a sentiment that would alarm any father. To hear Steve sing Justin’s songs is to hear him erase many of those differences and emphasize their similarities: their brutal candor, their emotional rawness, but most of all their shared belief that a sturdy song was the perfect weapon to beat back their darkest demons.

By contrast, Steve has a voice like a gravel driveway, a punk’s steely bravado, and what appears to be an abiding belief that a song’s imperfections are what make it so relatable. Justin was a songwriter with a concise sense of melody, a singer with an eloquent approach to phrasing, and a guitar player with a style that gracefully combined traditional folk and rural blues picking. That loose quality plays up the differences between father and son. It’s multifaceted in its messiness: a leather hide wrapped around a tender heart. Steve settles into “Far Away in Another Town” like it’s a Texas Hill Country classic, bringing the same gravity and reverence you might hear someone apply to an old Hank Williams tune, and he musters a bluesy dread on “Turn My Lights Out.” (Its refrain, “I know it’s gonna be alright, when I turn out my lights,” is one of Justin’s pithiest and most devastating lyrics.) Only “The Saint of Lost Causes” doesn’t work: its brimstone sermonizing sounds like another songwriter altogether, and is weirdly out of place on this record. Other tunes have a different perspective on country’s favorite subjects: love gone bad, immense loneliness, an abiding desire for human connection.

Some just have a good story to tell, like “Lone Pine Hill” and “They Killed John Henry,” which reveal a songwriter with an abiding interest in American history and a keen empathy for the people who lived it. That’s just as well, since that might distract from the craft of the songs and the immediacy of the performances. Drawing mostly from early in Justin’s career-half of these ten covers are from his first two releases-Steve doesn’t attempt any of the songs about him or Justin’s mother, who split not long after he was born. “Lord I’m going uptown, to the Harlem River to drown,” goes one of his best and most beloved songs both father and son sing the lyric with a calm determination that seems to grow with every block north they walk. JT is not an autopsy, but many of these songs address Justin’s struggle with addiction by necessity: He wrote often about his own demons, such that any cross-section of his catalog will expose dark struggles.

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