We went for breakfast (without the girl) at the Washington Square Diner, an old-school place at the end of the block where they fix you eggs any which way and pour you endless refills of watery coffee and give you a bill that rarely comes to ten bucks and Justin slowly came to life.

 

Then we walked around the corner and talked for an hour or so on a park bench about his life, and he told me that his father – Steve Earle – had bought the apartment on West 4th Street because it was the street where Bob Dylan had strolled, with Suze Rotolo clinging to his arm, on the iconic cover of his Freewheelin’ album when he was 22.

 

He told me a lot of other stuff, and I’ve decided to cut and paste it out of the Sunday Times pay wall because, even though I’m against doing that on principle, I’d prefer people to read it now that he’s gone rather than skip on by. It shines a light on a brilliant but fatally flawed talent whose life was a constant struggle – a story of abandonment, despair, resilience and recovery. Until now. His final words haunted me then. They still do.

 

 

“You don’t have to be f***ed up or tortured to write songs,” Justin Townes Earle says. But, as the saying goes — and as he knows better than most — it helps. It also helps to explain the naked truth and honesty that shine through his tales of hard times in the 21st century, set to music with roots in the hard times of the past.

 

The 29-year-old troubadour’s life story makes Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse seem staid: a former drug addict, dealer and alcoholic, he has been shot, stabbed, beaten, arrested, jailed and sent to rehab, most of it before he was out of his teens. Or, as he describes it: “I was a lunatic screaming raving junkie, toting guns around, doing terrible things.”

 

Still, he cannot match the rap sheet of his father, who has reputedly been arrested more than 50 times. He is Steve Earle, a musician who has navigated his own successful career through addiction, jail and seven marriages. Clearly, father and son share an affinity for incarceration and chemical dependency, as well as an eye for the ladies, a taste for old-time folk, blues and country, and a talent for turning their turbulent lives into music.

 

Now, as Steve’s beard grows ever longer and greyer, his smooth-chinned son is attracting a younger, hipper crowd to his brand of Americana. Justin’s latest album, Harlem River Blues, has won him critical plaudits, award nominations and a new generation of fans, while a forthcoming British tour, including festival dates, is sure to spread word of his gifts.

 

Not that it has been a smooth path.

 

Justin grew up with his mother, the third of Steve’s seven wives, in an impoverished inner-city district of Nashville, far from the cowboy hats and honky-tonk bars. Here, the sound of the streets was hip-hop and metal, and you lived by your wits. “I was always a wild kid,” he confesses. “I drank first, but I began smoking marijuana when I was about 10 years old. When I was 13, I was the kid hanging out with older people who I really shouldn’t have been hanging out with.”

 

He had been aware of his father’s (then) drug habit since Steve flew him out to LA, aged seven, to go to Disneyland — but stopped off en route at his dealer’s. “I knew what was going on,” he smiles, stretching out his 6ft 5in frame. “I was a seven-year-old who knew what an eight-ball was. I knew how many grams of cocaine made one. A lot of my friends’ parents were dealers, junkies or prostitutes.”

 

Initially, he was apprehensive about following in the musical footsteps of his father and of his namesake, Townes Van Zandt, the brilliant songwriter whose career was cut short by alcoholism. Earle Jr drank away a record-company advance when he was 18 and played in a local rock band until he discovered old-time folk, blues and country music through an unusual route. “It was Nirvana Unplugged that did it,” he says, “when my dad told me that Where Did You Sleep Last Night? was by Leadbelly, not Kurt Cobain. Listening to him turned my whole world upside down. It was like brutal truth.”

 

It’s the same brutal truth that Earle brings to his songwriting, channelling the ghosts of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Hank Williams without losing sight of his father’s dictum: “Never write about anything you don’t know. He told me that very early on. I like to make your heart beat fast, I like to make your palms sweat and make you remember something you maybe don’t want to remember. I think that’s why my music gets people.”

 

Earle left school and home at 15, moved to Chicago and was still in his teens when he joined his father’s touring band, getting fired two years later for his unreliability.

 

A spell in rehab in his early twenties was followed by five years of clean living and constant touring, but he fell off the wagon while working on Harlem River Blues. “I was in a dark place when I was writing it. I had been completely sober for five years and I had slipped back into really severe alcoholism, drinking vodka for breakfast and taking mountains of cocaine every day.”

 

The inevitable fall came last September, when, on the eve of a European tour, he was arrested after a row with the promoter at one of his own gigs in Indianapolis and charged with assault, public drunkenness and resisting arrest. A week later, he checked into rehab after a drastic “intervention”.

 

“I woke up one morning and my lawyer, booking agent and business manager and then girlfriend were standing around my bed,” he recalls. “I hadn’t had a drink in two days at that point, which was really dangerous. I was lying in bed shaking and delusional. I was seeing things and hearing things, and I had slipped into delirium tremens in a serious way. I could have died right there in bed in New York, in my apartment on 11th Street, and the intervention guy gave me a drink because I was at high risk of a heart attack from the sudden detox. He got me a bottle of vodka, and after a few drinks he talked me into a treatment centre.”

 

Today, sober and chemical-free, Earle lives close to his father in New York (they appeared together in the New Orleans-set TV series Treme) and has a modelling sideline as the face (and body) of Nudie Jeans in Britain. He is adamant that he would not rewrite his life story, even if he could: “I’m not ashamed of a single thing I’ve ever done, because it’s what’s made me what I am today.

 

“A lot of things have tried to kill me — people, drugs, alcohol — and none of them have succeeded. I’m really fucking hard to kill.”