Craig Finn<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nWhen Finn sings, \u00b4I want to give you something to hope for,\u00b4 over punchy horns and female \u201cla-la-las,\u201d the intention is sincere but whether that promise can be delivered is clouded in doubt.. The song\u2019s narrator is seeking to assure his girl that there\u2019s something better in the mountains, away from this Rust Belt town with its sticky-floor taverns and nicotine-stained apartments. You know, that old promise about the other man\u00b4s grass !<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We, the listeners, are only hearing one side of the conversation, but it\u2019s clear that he\u2019s not convincing her, and according to Himes, \u00b4it\u2019s not even clear he\u2019s convinced himself !\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have all suffered romantic betrayals and economic betrayals in the past, have always held on to a belief in something better, and the continual slow erosion of that belief may be the biggest betrayal of all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Himes says that we also hear just one side of a conversation in Earle\u2019s \u201cAhi Esta Mi Nina,\u201d which is Spanish for \u201cHere\u2019s My Little Girl.\u201d A Puerto Rican convict has just gotten off the bus in the Bowery after getting released from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. He runs into his daughter by chance and offers to buy her a coffee at the corner bodega.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We don\u2019t hear her reply, but it\u2019s clear that she\u2019s resistant and resentful of a long-absent father whose decisions wrecked her family. The narrator doesn\u2019t expect forgiveness; he just wants to share a cigarette and a coffee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both songs reflect astonishingly skilful writing. Using just one-half of a spoken dialogue, Finn and Earle each evoke a time, a place, a history and dreams so battered that even the most modest version of those once enormous hopes is hard to hang onto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Himes suggests that anyone wanting to understand how a culture can become so embittered by the past, so entrenched in the present and so distrustful of the future, might find these two songs a good reference point from which to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finn was, and is the lead singer of a great rock \u2019n\u2019 roll band, The Hold Steady, which has now lapsed into a part-time endeavour. So, Finn has carved out a solo career that\u2019s different in sound and perspective. While the band played songs with out-of- nowhere riffs and tumbling momentum about communities of young people trying to find their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, when performing or recording solo, Finn delivers quieter, moodier pieces about one or two people, a decade or two older, who\u2019ve lost their way. On these projects, the words are out front where they can\u2019t be ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whilst now ostensibly a solo act, Finn has found two key collaborators: producer\/multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman and percussionist Joe Russo. This threesome has created what Himes describes as \u00b4a shadowy rock-noir sound\u00b4 perfect for Finn\u2019s four-minute stories, which have filled a trilogy of terrific albums: 2015\u2019s Faith in the Future,<\/em> 2017\u2019s We All Want the Same Thingsand this year\u2019s I Need a New War.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nJustin Townes Earle bears the burden not only of his father Steve\u2019s last name but also of Townes Van Zandt\u2019s first name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Against all odds, he has lived up to the expectations of his birth certificate with a concise, conversational lyric style that examines complicated relationships through three-minute songs. It took him a bit longer to find a musical identity to complement that particular type of lyricism, but on his third album, Harlem River Blues,<\/em> he crafted a swinging country-blues sound that perfectly complemented his drawling tenor vocals.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe lyrics and music locked in on his 2012 masterpiece, Nothing\u2019s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now, <\/em>and The Saint of Lost Causes is that album\u2019s companion.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHe worked with his co-producer\/bassist Adam Bednarik, topAmericana guitarists Joe McMahan and Paul Niehaus and Old Crow Medicine Show\u2019s multi-instrumentalist Cory Younts. Together they created a soundtrack for those who have slipped through the cracks of the new American triumphalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new album begins with the title track, a late-night reverie fuelled by wavering guitar reverb. The narrator sees himself as \u00b4a wounded hound backed into a chain-link fence\u00b4 and the world around him as \u00b4a big mean kid poking me through the fence with a stick\u00b4. That\u2019s followed by a bouncy country-blues shuffle, a smart-ass complaint about not having any money. Those first two songs set the template for the whole disc: a ghostly reverie is followed by a funky blues stomp or a snappy hillbilly two-step, six of these quiet-then-lively pairs of songs add up to a dozen in all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Finn\u2019s album, the verses tend to simmer with clipped rock \u2019n\u2019 roll guitars and seething keyboards, while the choruses tend to erupt with horns, female vocals and harmonica. The verse lyrics begin the stories with crisp details of lives going off the rails, but when the big, romantic choruses come along, you expect the stories to take a similar turn to the upbeat. But they don\u2019t\u2014and out of that paradox emerges the album\u2019s compelling drama. The most Finn allows us is the stoic acceptance of reduced expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finn, and his reviewer Himes, have somehow between them there found the headstone engraving for a generation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Magic Marker, for example, is the story of a Desert Storm veteran back home and trying to figure out how to jumpstart the rest of his life. After some hard partying, feeling \u201c\u00b4wasted, wild and bored,\u201d he does something illegal for a man and makes $16,000. He tries to double his money in Oregon, but gets pistol whipped so badly that he has trouble with numbers, even after the reconstructive surgery. Punchy, cheerful horns come in, but the expected happy ending doesn\u2019t arrive. The narrator, now working at his uncle\u2019s paint shop, stares at the pretty girls but they no longer look back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On A Bathtub \u00cdn The Kitchen, the narrator is someone who has moved on with his life and doesn\u2019t know what to do with old friends who haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A similar contrast between optimistic music and pessimistic words sparks Talking To Myself, the final track on JT Earle\u00b4s The Saint Of Lost Causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A sweet pedal steel figure and a bouncy country two-step raise expectations of satisfied love and the comforts of home. Instead the narrator is living alone in a cheap apartment with only bad memories for company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The album\u2019s centerrepiece is Appalachian Nightmare, which supplies the details of how so many of the record\u2019s characters wound up alone and desperate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of these are happy songs. These are the stories of folks who had the odds stacked against them and failed to clear the high hurdles. So why are we, the listeners, drawn to them? Perhaps it\u2019s because these songs ring true in a soundscape of so many songs, newscasts, advertisements and social-media posts that ring false. These songs are not trying to sell or spin something, but neither are they trolling anybody. Finn and Earle aren\u2019t softening the facts about these characters, but neither are they blaming or condemning them. They\u2019re trying to inhabit their experience long enough to maybe understand how they got there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such acts of empathy are needed in any era but especially in this one, where only winners are celebrated and losers are forgotten. Most of the characters in Finn\u2019s and Earle\u2019s songs are white, working-class folks like themselves, but the songwriters do make an effort to reach beyond their own circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earle sings about a Latino ex-con on Ahi Esta Mi Nina, and Finn sings of a Latina data processor with a no-good boy friend on Carmen Isn\u2019t Coming in Today. On Earle\u2019s remarkable Over Alameda, the narrator is the son of a black woman who left Mississippi in hopes that Los Angeles would be the promised land, only to find that California has its own kind of segregation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s not a lot of hope on these albums, but that makes the few glimmers stand out all the more. On Earle\u2019s Mornings In Memphis, the narrator is a traveling musician trying to sober up as the sun rises over Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He may be lonely and hung over as he stands on the bank of the Mississippi, but, damn it, look at how \u00b4the muddy water turns to gold.\u00b4Finn\u2019s I Need a New Wartakes its name from the time when Ulysses S. Grant, twice promoted during the Mexican-American War, was back in Galena, Ill., foundering in his attempts to become a farmer and shopkeeper and wishing there was a new war to showcase his true talents. Finn\u2019s \u201cGrant at Galena\u201d takes place not in 1860 but in 2018. The narrator has the electricity turned off in his garden apartment, so he hikes to the mall to read the new Grant biography, hoping that maybe this is his own Galena turning point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mary Gaughtier<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nFinn and Earle aren\u2019t the only ones doing this work. Tyler Childers, Patty Griffin\u00b4*, Jon Dee Graham, Mary Gauthier*, Jason Isbell, Patterson Hood, Sam Baker, Kevin Gordon, Ketch Secor, Kelly Hogan, Hayes Carll, Brian Henneman, Dave Alvin*, Alejandro Escovedo, Louis Perez, Rhiannon Giddens and especially James McMurtry* are creating similarly devastating character studies. (Those marked* have long been honing this particular craft) If you really want to understand these perilous, bewildering times, turn from the famous and the buzzy to these singer\/songwriters, who are too often as marginalized as the people they write about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Justin Townes Earle was born beneath the heavy weight of two names. Steve Earle was his father; Townes Van Zandt was Steve\u2019s mentor; together they were two of the greatest American songwriters of the late 20th century. Together they also struggled with drug and alcohol problems from the \u201870s into the \u201890s. We don\u2019t yet know how Justin died at age 38 on Thursday at his home in Nashville, but he was upfront about his own battles with addiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the weight of those names, Justin improbably emerged as one of the best songwriters of the first decades of the 21st century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Equally improbably, he sobered up enough to reel off a string of five masterful albums from 2012 through last year\u2019s The Saint of Lost Causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like anyone trying to climb out of the shadow of a famous parent or famous mentor, it took Justin a while to find his own voice. His first three releases\u2014the 2007 EP Yuma,<\/em> the 2008 LP The Good Lifeand the 2009 LP Midnight at the Movies\u2014showcased his already considerable skills as a wordsmith, but the records owed an obvious debt to Townes\u2019 folk minimalism and Steve\u2019s country-rock maximalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt was on Harlem River Blues that Justin found his signature sound: a kind of country blues with a lazy, pre-rock swing to it. The lyrics were a bit generically retro, and he sabotaged the record\u2019s release by falling off the wagon, but he was clearly onto something. His breakthrough came in 2012, when he married his new sound to his earlier way with words and created the masterpiece Nothing\u2019s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00b4I\u2019ve never heard it put like that,\u00b4 Justin said about this analysis in 2012, \u00b4but, yeah, that does make sense. This record is sort of the culmination of the process. I did my folkie thing with Yuma,<\/em> my honky-tonk thing with Good Life,<\/em> the experimental thing with Midnight,<\/em> and I\u2019ve arrived at this more bluesy, more country, more Staple Singers-like sound\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn this album, maybe the J.J. Cale came out of me. Cale had that way of singing real softly into tube or ribbon mics, where you get really close and sing really softly and let the microphone do its work.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In one of his greatest songs, Unfortunately, Anna, the song\u2019s narrator is driving down Fatherland Avenue in East Nashville when he sees an ex-girlfriend walking in the rain. He rolls down the window and asks, \u00b4Where you wanna go?\u00b4 She says, \u00b4I don\u2019t know, just anywhere but here.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The song opens very quietly with acoustic guitar, pedal steel and Justin\u2019s hushed, sad tenor. It\u2019s as if he were reluctant to tell this story or to look in this woman\u2019s face because it might be a reflection of his own. Like him, she\u2019s been walking the streets alone at night. Like him, she\u2019s been wondering how her mama has been doing in another town. Like him, she feels all the pressures of life \u00b4pushing down on me [till] I\u2019m about to scream.\u00b4 Like him, she\u2019s hoping that a change of scenery will mean a change of luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The listener can feel the pressure building on the car\u2019s two occupants as, slowly but surely, fiddle, bowed bass, drum brushes, trumpet and saxophone are added to the melancholy music. On the song\u00b4s extraordinary bridge, the driver watches Anna in the rear-view mirror and gives her the only answer he can, the only answer he can give himself, an unpalatable truth: \u00b4All this time you\u2019ve been waiting for the world to change, but unfortunately, Anna, it\u2019s you who needs to change.\u00b4 On those last five words, all the instruments fall away but the high-pitched steel and Earle\u2019s raspy, anguished voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00b4In Unfortunately, Anna, I was trying to show the confusion that exists among my generation,\u00b4 Earle explained at the time. \u00b4We are a generation without connection. It\u2019s the least-voting generation in a long time. We saw young people get really rich really fast, which created this money-hungry stampede where we stepped on anyone in our way. All the schemes that were funny when we were in our \u00b4twenties aren\u2019t so cute anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was an already-screwed-up kid who got a job that allowed me to run away from everything for a long, long time. Eventually, though, I built up enough crap that it started catching up with me. Most people who run figure that out eventually: If you run, you\u2019re going to get caught. Yeah, Anna\u2019s on the street, but what\u2019s that guy doing driving around on the same streets? A lot of times when we try to save people, we\u2019re the ones who need saving.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those who ever interviewed Justin Townes Earle found him to be \u00b4always smart, sceptical and unfiltered\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One interviewer said that, \u00b4unlike his father, a legendary motor-mouth who could turn a single question into 10 minutes of oratorical showmanship, Justin got straight to the point with scalpel-slicing efficiency and never seemed to care if that point reflected well on him or not.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If he was surprisingly candid about his parents\u2019 gifts and failures, he was just as blunt about his own. And his parents never complained about his interview comments or his song lyrics about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00b4No one\u2019s been offended by it yet,\u00b4 Justin told me in 2015. \u00b4My mother and father know they\u2019ve had a huge effect on me. I\u2019ve never said anybody\u2019s name, and I\u2019ve never laid our specific scenarios. My father, during his career, has done the same thing; if anything, he\u2019s been a little more bold. There\u2019s nothing artistic about diary entries. You have to know the difference between emotions and emotional songs. It\u2019s an easily misunderstood line.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Justin was 12 years old he saw his favourite band Nirvana play Leadbelly\u2019s Where Did You Sleep Last Night (aka In The Pines) on MTV\u2019s Unpluggedshow, and the youngster began to make connections between his world and his father\u2019s world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00b4Nirvana\u2019s Unpluggedrecord changed the way I listened to music,\u00b4 Justin said in 2017. \u00b4There was a darkness to Where Did You Sleep Last Night that I really liked\u2026. By the time I was thirteen, my friends were listening to nothing but hip-hop, which I loved, but I had to sneak off to listen to John Wesley Harding so my friends wouldn\u2019t give me shit about it.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He lamented the vanishing of that neighbourhood, a victim of Nashville\u2019s relentless gentrification and rising rents. He missed the astonishing variety of his friends then and all the wild things they did, even if they seemed crazily perilous in retrospect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the song 15-25, set to New Orleans funk, he claims that he has \u00b4no regrets,\u00b4 but in the next breath admits, \u00b4I\u2019m probably lucky that I survived,\u00b4 because \u00b4I could be doing 25 to life.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00b4At this stage in my life,\u00b4 he said in 2017, \u00b4I\u2019m able to look back and see clearly that I was a dangerous, wild kid. I wasn\u2019t music-industry arrogant, but I was definitely adolescent arrogant: \u2018I can get away with anything; just watch me.\u2019 When I say in that song, \u2018I could be doing 25 to life,\u2019 I actually could have done a lot worse than that. The person I was then contained a lot of different pieces, and some of those pieces are still here, but there\u2019s also the need to move on. Now that I know how far I can go, I also know how far I can\u2019t go.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I read this piece back, wondering how much to edit, I was at first very worried about how many voices were taking part in this dialogue, Himes, Justin Townes Earle, Craig Finn and others who would not claim to be spokesmen for their generation but who each had a unique viewpoint to show us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, somewhere in the background is my voice, not as eloquent as those aforementioned, and neither of the same early forties age group as represented by not only the artists discussed here, and by my own son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The social comment and politicising with a small p is far more sophisticated than that of my generation of sixty and seventy year olds who, in the words of Buffalo Springfield, used to carry banners mostly saying \u00b4hooray for our side\u00b4 knowing that there was \u00b4something happening here, but what it was wasn\u00b4t exactly clear.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And now, when we need more of them more than ever, one of the current generation of songwriter-social commentators has gone. Justin Townes Earle !<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THOSE WHO TELL IT LIKE IT IS by Norman Warwick in memory of Justin TownesEarle A status on Justin’s Facebook page read: “It is with tremendous sadness that we inform you of the passing of our son, husband, father and friend Justin. So many of you have relied on his music and lyrics over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aata","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2643"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2656,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions\/2656"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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