Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Bernstein has written ‘What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome,’ the authorized biography of Justin Townes Earle, produced with the full cooperation of the Earle estate and already earning a starred review from Kirkus, which calls it “a superb biography of a singular life.” When Earle died of an overdose alone in his Nashville apartment, his death sent waves of grief through the country and Americana community. The son of alt-country hellraiser Steve Earle had long wrestled with mental illness and addiction, punctuated by encouraging stretches of sobriety that included the years leading up to his 2010 album ‘Harlem River Blues,’ a career peak that announced him as one of the most authentic troubadours of his generation. By the time of his death he had recorded eight albums, leaving behind a striking and original body of work.
Bernstein unravels the backstories behind Justin’s greatest songs and traces his feral, formative years as a rootless kid developing a unique guitar style while absorbing the musical influences of Nashville, alongside the emotional displacement, economic anxiety, and wandering that ran through both his life and his lyrics. The book also captures a shadow world of neglected children of Nashville legends, wrestling with the legacies of hard-living, road-weary, often absent parents. Justin’s marriage to Jenn Marie Earle and the birth of their daughter represent some of the book’s most hopeful passages, moments of genuine promise in a life that Bernstein chronicles with deep care and unflinching honesty.
What makes ‘What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome’ essential reading is its refusal to reduce Earle’s life to either tragedy or myth. Bernstein documents what Justin himself called “the myth,” the destructive idea that an artist must suffer for their art, and shows how powerfully that belief took hold.
