Trillbilly Worker's Party - Bonus: What Do You Do When You're Lonesome (w/ Special Guest: Jonathan Bernstein)

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Friend of the show and journalist Jonathan Bernstein (Rolling Stone, Oxford American, et al) drops by to talk about his new Biography of singer Justin Townes Earle entitled "What Do You Do When You're Lonesome" available now wherever fine books are sold.

Welcome everybody to your bonus drillbillies for the week. I am your host, Tom Sexton. Join me as always is my right-hand man down in Atlanta GA, Mr. Aaron Thorpe. Aaron Thorpe. Yo, yo. How's it going, brother? Shilling, brother, man. Join us today.

We've got a very special guest. And I have to tell you, you too, John, before we even really get into this, you don't know this, but you've played a significant role in my financial future. He doesn't even know it, probably. Yeah. So our guest today's Mr. John Bernstein, who is a journalist. He's written for the Rolling Stone, the Oxford American, among other outlets of repute and import. And John helped set this program a flight, really and truly.

Wow. When we had Sturgle Simpson on in 2020, and you covered it for the Rolling Stone. And then that's when I could actually make a go of this as a full-time game. instead of, you know, it's like a part-time curiosity. So, oh, you're a great debt, my friend, and in many ways. So I'm glad that this could come together today, and we could kind of chop it up a little bit. And I always been a fan of what you do, too. Thank you, man.

I've always been a fan of the podcast, and I fondly recall doing the Trill Billy's Sturgle aggregation post on Rolling Stone all those years ago. I remember that one fondly. Before we get into the meat of what we want to talk about today, While we have somebody of your stature and repute on, I have to get your take on something that's pertinent to your particular beat. And that, of course, is the Live Nation antitrust debacle that's going on right now. And the emails that came out, I guess, a day or two ago, where these Live Nation executives were bragging about gouging fans

and tacking on all these fees and whatnot. And this is from Bloomberg, but two Live Nation Entertainment Incorporated ticketing directors bragged about the high fees the company charges fans at its venues, joking in internal messages that the company is, quote, robbing them blind. And that, quote, these people are so stupid. And that, quote, I almost feel bad for taking advantage of them. In a series of chats from 2022, Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold two regional directors of ticketing for Live Nation amphitheaters. which is, I guess that's being generous because, like,

the Live Nation owns like every shitty rock and roll dive in the country now. It's like a real estate scam, you know, masquerading as a, you know, ticketing outfit. Boasted about their ability to raise so-called ancillary fees like parking, lawnchair rentals and VIP access and still get concert. Oh, yeah, bro. The rock goes deep. In one exchange, Winehold gloated about raising VIP parking costs.

at a Virginia concert venue to $250, saying, quote, these people are so stupid. I almost feel bad for taking advantage of them, end quote. Baker wrote, adding later, quote, I gouged them on ansel prices, end quote. In another exchange, he bragged about charging $50 to park in the grass and $60 to park in closer grass. Robbing them blind, baby, robbing them blind, he said.

That's how we do it. The company said in a statement that the messages, of course, do not reflect their values. I was wondering if you had any comment, John, about Live Nation and it's, you know, a myriad, unscrupulous practice. It's like if you, like, drew up, like, a music industry comic book and I had, like, the comic, like, the really exaggerated comic book villain, music industry, comic book villain. Like, this is the dialogue that you would, like, you know, that a hack writer would come up with.

These are like the, these are like the Lex Luthers of the music, you know what I'm saying? The music ticketing industry. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, actually my, I have a colleague at Rolling Stone. I'm John Bernstein. I have a colleague named John Blistine, and him and I are kind of like our little doppelgangers at Rolling Stone. He's been doing amazing coverage of this very confusing, you know, and like, drawn out

legal battle. And so I encourage everybody to read his work, and he really, like, lays it out and explains just like to a normal music fan, what is going on in the ways in which this case is going to keep dragging on. but man, it's excruciating to read to see stuff like that. And I know that Live Nation's trying to claim that these were like junior level employees and they didn't know anything about it. But they also, I mean, there are also these awful comments that were found in these

emails about how about the ways that like wheelchair accessibility like seating was being referred to. What was that? I haven't seen that. Oh, man. Let me look that up. they're using slurs and stuff about that. I mean, that's just, you know, why you're looking at it up, that's just, I mean,

what more could you hope from like, you know, a corporation, a monopolistic corporation, right? But you would just think that something like music, and I know the price gouging people, but just enjoying music and just making it accessible to everybody, you know, it's just like a common, you would think that should be a common sense thing, you know? Yeah, I mean, I don't even, people are, there's an email and I don't really, I'm reticent to even kind of like recite these. There's just an email where they're just reciting like ablest slurs about, you know, wheelchair accessible seating for fans at shows and stuff like that.

Yeah. It's just like it's so shitty and, you know, I know that it to me it feels like a classic case where just like this behemoth corporation is going to end up just like with a little slap on the wrist and a figure that sounds big to us, right? but that is like a tiny little, tiny little piece of their yearly earnings. And I hope that they keep having to, you know, defend this monopoly in court, I guess, like the state, I guess it's going to move on to the states and a bunch of state suits I think are still active. But yeah, those were pretty hard.

Those were both simultaneously not surprising and pretty hard to read. You know, when I was in booking, it's been several years ago now. And of course, I just ran like a little 180 cap venue. but we'll talk about that a little bit more because I had actually had it we're going to talk about John's new book what do you do when your long sum it's biography at Justin Towns Earl and actually Justin came to our place like several times and I hung out with him several times and he was always just like top notch and enjoyed his company and everything but I remember like when Live Nation was going around buying a lot of those comparably sized venues and had we been in a bigger market we were just

kind of like a, like if a band was going to play Asheville or Nashville, like on either side of us, we could kind of get them on like a Tuesday night, some touring bands. And so we kind of punched well above our weight for like the small town that we had. But I remember like when I would negotiate these contracts with touring bands and I didn't really even know what I was doing. But when I would say like, you can keep like 100% of your merch, they thought I was like a fucking sane or something. I was like, it just didn't make any sense why I would be entitled to like any of that. It just seems like, you know what? But apparently, like, especially with the rise of Live Nation buying up all these venues and stuff,

they really gouged even the touring artists that come to their venues that they make money off of. Oh, man. Merch cuts have become, especially after the pandemic when, you know, like every artist was so desperate to get back on the road after not being able to play for a year, like merch cuts, the idea that a venue takes a percentage of the merch you sell every night became like a huge flashpoint. And I think very much still is. and I'm glad more and more artists are speaking out about that awful practice. Yeah, the great Lee Baines told me one time when we started up this

and we actually started making money at it and we started selling t-shirts and I was at the post office and he had texted me and he was like, what are you doing, man? And I said, well, I'm just mailing out a bunch of these t-shirts and he says, let me tell you something. He was like for many years, I thought I was in the rock and roll business. He's like, but what you find out later on is that you're really just in the t-shirt business. He's like, right now you think you're.

you're in the media business or podcasting business or whatever. What you'll find out is you're really in the T-shirt business. Trill Billy's T-shirt salesman with a side hustle and podcasting. That's exactly. Yeah, that's right. That's right. This is out. Anyway, yeah, so the music business, like many things in this world of ours at the moment are, you know, not great.

Not great. But to get into what we brought you here to talk about today, John. Like I said, you got this new book out, what to do when you're lonesome, which is biography of singer Justin Towns Earl, who we lost back in 2020. And, you know, I just wanted to like, you know, for the uninitiated, like, you know, what made you choose JTE as a subject and, like, how did this all come together? Yeah, definitely. Justin, I was an enormous fan of Justin's music. I first saw him in 2009 when I was in college. this little bar called the Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He's opening for Jason Isbell in the 400 unit. I had basically no idea who these people were at that point. I had mostly just gotten into like classic rock through my dad and just like old, you know, I would go see like LeVon Helm shows like in high school. Like that was kind of my vibe. I didn't listen to any music remotely of my generation. And I went to, I was doing college radio and I went to this show and saw this singer who was, you know, 27 years old at the time,

singing like he transported out of the 19, you know, 1942 and just performing these other worldly songs about, you know, train hoppers and, you know, taking diesel trains to Georgia and just singing old-fashioned country music, you know, and conducting himself in this kind of like larger than life, almost like medicine show salesman kind of way. Carnival Barker, you know, Opry Act. And I was just, I was completely blown away.

He's, you know, he would do that kind of like glitzy, fast-paced showbiz song, you know, one song, and then the next, he'd sing this song about his parents that would make you cry. And he kind of just hooked me for life and honestly sort of just honestly introduced me to an entire generation of kind of like his generation of musicians coming out of Nashville and making, you know, what we now call, I guess Americana or Roots music. And I became a huge. huge fan. I interviewed him once as a journalist, like once I graduated and became music journalists and started writing about his records. And then, you know, he died in 2020 in a really,

you know, during a really difficult time in the world. And in a really brutal way, he died of a fentanyl overdose. And we were all isolated at the time. And I spent that fall of 2020 talking to trying to write a story about his life and like learn more about him for Rolling Stone. And so that's when I first met people in his family, people that he played music with, his widow chiefly, but many others as well. And I wrote that story and kind of like for the first time in my career when I, it was the long, in some ways, the longest piece I'd ever done and the most people I'd ever talked to for a piece. But like when I published it, I was like, I barely know who this person is. And I feel like there's, I feel like his life is and his art is so much more complex and there's so much more to it than anyone ever knew. and I couldn't stop thinking about him.

So I, you know, I'd always want to write a book and I, you know, spent a year thinking about that, thinking about him before I did a thing. And then I just tried to figure out how to actually write my first book after that's kind of the short and long story. It's funny because I remember when we were booking him, I didn't really know much about,

we kind of like backdoored into that sort of nascent scene. That's like how I kind of got to know Sturgeo a little bit. We had Jason Isbell come through there, Tyler Chilber's many years later. Not Chris Stapleton as a solo act, but with the steel drivers and so forth. So all the guys that were like Kentucky guys came through there. But we also got a lot of the Nashville guys, a lot of Nashville like punk scene, like diarrhea planning a lot of those type bands.

And a lot of those guys had the same booking agents and stuff. And I remember thinking, like, is this like a guy that's like, you know, his like stage name is like an homage to the Copperhead Road guy. Towns Van Zanzan. It turns out he's the son of the Copperhead Road guy. And I guess

Towns is actually an homage from his dad too in some measure to Towns Van Zent. But I was wondering too if you could like maybe get into like a little bit

of the biography of him as a guy too a little bit for people that like you know might know about as much as I knew when I started booking him.

You know this just sounds like the Copperhead Roadman. His name's name sounds like it's like an AI generated outlaw country singer name, right? Yeah, yeah.

And his name, you know, his name is a good place to start with Justin for those who don't know much about him. You know, Justin's the son of Steve Earl, this very sort of like also larger than life, big presence, country folk legend kind of guy. Yeah, let me, I may say, I didn't mean to say the Copperhead Road guy. Oh, yeah, no, of course. He is also the Copperhead Road guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And his middle name comes from Towns Van Zand, you know, the, the, the, you know, the, the sort of folk genius, very troubled soul who died in 1997 and kind of has become, in the years since Towns's death, you know, like when I was going to college, like, I thought Towns Van Zant was like the second coming of, you know, of Shakespeare. And he's really kind of developed that reputation. And so Justin, he's born in the early 80s as this kid with this like incredibly loaded name. And he grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, born and raised. He was raised kind of like alternating by his mother when his, you know, his dad really struggled with, with substance use and drug addiction, which is something that, uh, one of many things that Justin ended up sharing with his dad. Um, so he's raised by his mom for many years. He's raised by his dad when his dad kind of sober's up in the 90s.

And Justin basically is like a, you know, he's a very talented and kind of out of control kid who was not being served super well by, you know, public school and formal education. drops out of school in eighth or ninth grade, kind of becomes this itinerant, sort of wandering, aspiring folk singer, kind of just roaming around Nashville for many years. Traveling in the region as well, going up to Kentucky and Lexington a bit, going east to Asheville and stuff,

Johnson City, Tennessee, in particular. He starts spending a lot of time there. But he starts, you know, he kind of discovers a whole community of like-minded musicians in Nashville in the 90s, and they really kind of start like fomenting this very cool, almost like early proto-americana scene. And Justin starts writing, you know, by 15, he's writing songs that will end up on his actual records. And he, you know, to be very brief about it, you know, Justin, he talked a lot.

In his adolescence, he kind of thought he was, he had to be this sort of tortured troubadour type. You know, he thought that was his inheritance and it was also his ticket to being a serious artist. And he later, you know, Justin later sobered up for a long period of time and kind of reflected on that and thought that like, you know, I grew up with this myth that I had to like fuck myself up and kind of destroy myself in order to make beautiful art. Because that's, you know, that's what I thought, you know, you had to do. So that's very, you know, Justin, like he's almost, he almost dies by the age he's 22. He's, he's really like in a bad way. And then he soberes up for many years and he starts writing many of his most beautiful songs. and after basically 10 years of being a local artist,

kind of just like ginging around Nashville, but not even really releasing music, he kind of releases his debut EP in 2007 and just sort of takes off. And, you know, his first few records coming out in the late 2000s, now they feel almost, it's almost like, you know, my high school English teacher used to talk about how Catcher in the Rye seems like kind of a derivative book because so much shit was influenced by it. Like Justin's records in the late 2000s,

you listen to them with no context now, you'd be like, oh, yeah, this is old school country. Like, this is a 30-year... But, like, no one was really doing that in the late 2000s. You know, he was making these, like, really profoundly uncool, like, 1950s kind of, like, you know, Ernest Tubb-Peb-Pierce-inspired records when, like, the coolest shit in the world was, like, animal collective and grizzly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing, too, is, like, that...

And I've always liked this about him as, like, with him, it didn't feel like... like Artifice, like JT's records are kind of like, I kind of feel about his records how I feel about like that first King Tuff record where I'm like, I don't know if this record came out in 1972 or 2017. Yeah. You know, and like there's like a lot of that with his stuff, but even going further back like you say with like some of the Ernest Tub references and Webb Pierce and so forth.

But yeah, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry, let me cut you off there. So John, can I just ask a question? Yeah, please. Because he has this very seemingly anachronistic kind of style, you know, and even sort of presentation. So what were some of his influences? And if you could just, yeah, I guess what were some of his musical influences?

Yeah, definitely. So Justin, like, the Justin Townsend's oral musical origin story that he always told, and that his dad always told is that Justin sitting in his room as like a 13-year-old in the early 90s, watching and or listening to MTV unplugged the Nirvana episode, specifically Kirk Cobain singing in the Pines, you know, where did you sleep last night? which Kurt learned from Leadbelly. And Justin thinks this is a Nirvana song. He's like, he's a kid.

He loves Nirvana. Growing up, he listened to like grunge and punk and, you know, West Coast hip hop and like normal shit for 12-year-olds in 19-19. Yeah, yeah. Listen to. And he discovers this song, you know, his dad explains to him like, no, this is not a Nirvana song, son. And it sends, it kind of lights just,

it lights Justin's kind of mind on fire. At this point, he was also a huge Beck fan. The influence he never talked about was Beck. He loved early back. And I think took a lot from the way Beck was starting to kind of modernize and sort to incorporate old Southern black blues traditions into his like early records and make himself seem like an old prophet guy himself and not just like a skater white kid in the 90s. Justin took a lot from that, I think, though he never talked about it.

But basically, you know, Kurt Cobain leads him to leadbelly, which leads him to just like the history of American folk music, basically vis-a-vis his dad's education as a, you know, teenager. And he has he has access to his dad's, you know, pretty large record collection. He discovers Woody Guthrie. He discovers, you know, country blues, southern country blues, Texas bluesmen like Manslipscomb, people like Mississippi John Hurt. These are all enormous influences. and Justin just starts lapping it all up and studying it. He discovers the Carter family. He discovers gospel music in the staple singers and Stacks Records.

And he kind of just falls for all of it. And I think early in his career, the first stuff that we hear, like that the world gets to hear are more the kind of old school country sounds. Really sort of like, yeah, mid-century sort of classic country music. But later on in his career, you know, he basically like, you know, Justin would basically use each record as an excuse to explore a different one of his musical loves and influences. He makes a soul record at one point. He makes a more sort of like Billy Holiday, almost jazz feel type record at one point.

He makes a record called Kids in the Street in 2017. That's like more New Orleans stride piano, Professor Longhair. So he basically just becomes, you know, Justin has left school by the time he, you know, shortly after that Kurt Cobain moment. and he basically just takes it upon himself to just like become a foremost student of American music history in all of its forms. So it's a great question, Aaron. Like he, uh, those were kind of the historical influences,

but he also sort of, he starts lapping up, you know, sort of soaking in stuff around him. He becomes obsessed with the great, uh, and also recently, uh, late great departed a North Carolina singer, Malcolm Holcomb, who's just like this folk singer that's like a legend. that's like a legend in western North Carolina, East Tennessee, and is not super known elsewhere in the country,

but he takes a lot of his guitar style from someone like Malcolm, who is in Nashville in the early 2000s as well. So he kind of just starts like doing that American folk music, Bob Dylan thing of taking your 19 favorite influences, putting it into a blender, and like coming up specifically for him with a guitar style that sounds super unique. Yeah, that's a good.

It's funny you bring that up because one of the things that I remember about, you know, hanging out with him a couple times as he was just really into, like, Wadsberg, our hometown was where ID Stamper was from, Roscoe Hawkins was from not too far down the road, and a lot of these guys. And everybody was always like, whoa, but he had like that encyclopedic knowledge. Right. What was the first year? What was the first year you would have booked him, roughly? Do you remember?

Probably would have been somewhere between 13 and 16. Cool. so we hadn't probably two or three times three or four times somewhere in that ballpark around that era but yeah no that's interesting that you that you bring that up it's like it's like funny because I think everybody's made especially if you're like a fan of like you know country music

or anything like that made the Kirk Cobain mistake where like when you were talking about in the pines like the first time I heard in the pines was like Gary Stewart's version who was my mom's cousin that's my claim of fame my country bono. I just finished the Gary Stewart bio that's coming out soon. The Jimmy McDonough on? Yeah.

It's good. It's good. I actually met, I met his daughter. Sturgel invited us to go to his Kentucky Music Hall of Fame induction. And it was, Gary Stewart was getting probably, in my estimation, way too late. It was getting inducted at the same time. And I met his daughter, Shannon out there. And I was like, you don't know this, but we're cousins.

And I was telling her the story about when the floods hit, Weitzberg in 22, the only picture that we hadn't like, you know, like we've been talking about digitizing all of our pictures for years and just never did it. And the flood hit and we lost everything. But one of the pictures that survived was my mom as a little girl being held by George Stewart, who was Gary Stewart's dad at the UMWA mining union hall in Jenkins, Kentucky, back when she was like a little girl. And there's a little boy running behind it. I've always wanted to confirm whether that was Gary, because I knew that was his dad, like my aunt was telling you. that's Gary Stewart's dad or whatever.

But it's the only thing that survived before. That's crazy. But yeah, anyway, yeah, everybody's made that, like, Kurt Cobain mistake where you think somebody cut this song and you didn't know there was 16 other people. And sometimes the paper trail is even more obscure than that. And you realize some of these songs go way, way, way, way, way, way, way back. Yeah, for sure. It's an honest mistake.

For sure. One thing I would talk about, we talked a little bit about a lot of the themes that run through the book here, Diction. obviously the calamity. There's like a part about the Nashville flood in 2010 and stuff happened around that which obviously hit home to me for reasons I just mentioned. But, you know, I've talked to, I've talked to like, you know, I've got to be friends with Tyler Mayan Coe over the years because we've had him on the show several times and stuff like that. And I remember when Justin passed, he had posted a picture of them when they were like little

kids and they had like very similar upbringings for a lot of reasons. And I don't think Tyler would be upset for me like mentioning this here. But, you know, something that, you know, he's talked about, obviously, being the son of David Allen Coe is like, you know, in my mind, I'm like, well, these guys were like, you know, commercial successes in Nashville and stuff. They must have had like, you know, like cushy upbringes. And Tyler was like, no, we almost never had any money. And it seems like that was kind of a similar deal with Justin. Despite his dad's relative success, you know, his upbringing would be a more normal or even like struggling one at times it seems and i was just curious if you'd talk a little bit

more about like that part of his life like kind of being in like you know his famous father's shadows but not really having the cushy life associated with something definitely jeston had a very i would describe justin's class upbringing as super confusing and unique and really hard to pin down you know Justin the story that justin told to the world is that he grew up rough and tumble with an absent father and a working class mom who's working three jobs and they had no money. And there are elements in which that was very much true. You know, Steve was providing, you know, a spousal support, child support every month. But Justin had, yeah, in some ways, he was definitely, like, had a very incredibly working class upbringing. And, but then there were these other confusing things where

his father was a rock star. His father would get infusions, you know, signed. record deals or whatever. Have moments certainly. I mean, his father in the late 80s is touring like enormous venues. And so Justin would also have these material things that his friends, he was the first, you know, he was the first one of his like preteen friends to have a computer in his own room, like in the early 90s. So he also had access to, you know, and he's taken planes to Australia as a, you know, 10 year old to go on tour with his dad.

So he has this very sort of confusing. he's not just the son of a star who has a privilege upbringing by any means, but he's also, you know, his father, when his son was struggling, his father would send him to really good private schools for kids who are struggling or, you know, at one point he went to a teenage wilderness camp, like a good one, like an expensive one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's, he has access to, you know, these material things, you know, fancy guitars among other things. that his other kids who are just kind of like working class kids from you know families who are

split up and stuff in in Nashville the time do not have but but at the other but at the same time he all he's also living with this pressure of like this I don't know how to describe it but like he's also living with the assumptions that all a bunch of kids probably do think he's a rich kid just because they only know that he's that he has a famous dad and they don't know that he's living with, you know, a mom who's kind of struggling to make ends meet. So he has, he's living with, in a, he had a very sort of confusing upbringing in that sense. And, uh, kind of like, from a young age before he ever even picks up the guitar, he's kind of like dealing with the expectations and the assumptions that the world has about him and what kind of kid he is or

should be. Right. So do you, do you know, do you know at all if, um, because I feel like sometimes when you have children of great artists or great athletes as well, right? Do you think that did, was he naturally drawn to music? Was it something that he wanted to do as, as not just like a hobby, but as like a passion? Or did he feel like he had to move towards a more commercial direction, perhaps, or to put himself out there to kind of live up to his father's name? If that question makes any sense. Because I guess you can, at one point, you can enjoy it and be introduced to it through,

father, but there's the pressure of, okay, I have to make this my life's work, you know, and trying to balance that with this is something I actually enjoy and want to keep enjoying. Yeah, yeah. I kind of think it was a mix of all those things in a lot of ways. I think Justin, when he was a really little kid, he, like, rejected music and he viewed it as, like, the source of why his dad wasn't around. And, you know, he talks about having a guitar, like, unplayed in his closet for many years that he was gifted as a little child.

Like, I'm talking, like, elementary school at that point. But it was also, it was not only his dad's business. is also what his mom did. Justin's mom was like a roadie and a light, like she rigged lighting at the Starwood Amphitheater in Nashville and like, you know, worked in the music business as well. And more of a just like she was, yeah, she was like a laborer in the music business. And he there's a strange, you know, I talked to, Justin joins this band called the Swindlers in like the late 90s. And it's the thing that fascinated me so much about that band is that every kid in the band's dad was in the music business. And, and it's, and it's the thing that fascinated me. And and was a artist to some degree. And none of them were as famous as Steve Earle, but there were record producers, songwriters, you know, touring drummers. And I talked, you know, one of the members of that band,

you know, he talked to me a lot about how just like, when you're a kid growing up in that environment in Nashville, just like you view it as like vocation and a trait almost. It's like, you know, your dad's a mechanic. Like you're going to learn. You're going to apprentice and become and join the family business. And so there's, there's something very like ordinary about it you know very very very just like normalized you just

you just think when you're a kid in Nashville in this part of Nashville like you just think it's what working is it's just like being a true it's the air that you breathe it's the little air that you breathe it's just like oh yeah when you grow up you become a troubadour like all my all my friends from Nashville are like they including my buddy crystal just trying to call me like his mom like moved to Nashville, and was like an RCA artist, like in the 70s. Like, all of them have like a, like some weird tie to the business and like their dad will like run like an H-FAC business, but their mom was like, you know, signed to like Columbia in like 78 or something. Yeah. So like, you know, that kind of a weird existence. The elementary school that Justin goes to like, you know,

how Ketchum's kid goes there. Like record executive kids go there. The music teacher at Aiken Elementary is like the formal former fiddle player for Charlie Daniels band. Like it's just all so fucking weird and normal. And so there's that element of it too. And then there's also, to your point, Aaron, it's like there's this air that he breathes and there's just this expectation, I think this almost unarticulatable expectation that Justin, I think, and pressure that Justin, I think, feels that not only is this is what I'm supposed to do in a cosmic sense, it's kind of the only thing that I can do. Like that's kind of drilled into him because that's,

you know, that's the way most singer-songwriters talk about themselves, right? Like, well, if I weren't doing this, what else would I? It's the only thing I know how to do. And Justin kind of internalizes that in ways that I think are both kind of like, kind of heartbreaking and also maybe inspiring from a very young age. Like, this is my path, whether or not I like it. And so I may as well, you know, learn more about America.

music than anyone else and become a better guitar player than any of my peers because it's all I got, sort of. Yeah. That's, yeah, that's, they're forming sort of the, the kid's super group

is kind of like, what was it? It's like an industry town thing. Was it, who was it, was it young black teenagers? It was like Jimmy Kahn's son, Brian Austin Green,

who was later on 9-0-2-0, and then Alchemist, the guy that would become the producer, DJ Alchemist, They formed like that like It's like three Jewish kids from LA I was gonna say that I wasn't familiar with their band

But for some reason they crossed my timeline On Twitter a couple weeks ago And I just thought the name was really funny Given that no one in the band is black I don't think And I think like you're The Swindlers Justin's group They literally named their band

After the concept of You know they said They said like let's call ourselves the Swindlers and basically steal. You know, there's this old public domain, like Memphis Jug Band song called Stealing, Stealing. And they, this is a bunch of white teenagers who have,

you know, all varying degrees of that sort of confusing son of a musician, middle class to, in some cases, upper middle class, you know, identity, who kind of get together in these backyards in Nashville in the late 90s. And they're, you know,

they're teenagers, basically. And they're trying to like, you know, like teenagers do, they want to, understand what the outside world is. They want to experience thrill and danger. And their English, many of them had this high school English teacher at Hillsborough High who like basically gives them this compilation of these old blues and jug band songs about like moonshine and knife fights and reefer madness and stuff. And they and they go nuts for it.

Like that's their as a group, that's their, that's their collective like Kurt Cobain lead belly moment. They're like, whoa, what is what is blues music? It is interesting. I mean, I'm not too familiar with not just the music industry, but even like, I've been listening to the same stuff for years, like East Coast hip hop from the 90s, right, being from Brooklyn. But it's just interesting to me how in any niche subculture, whether it's music or people who, you know, consume other forms of media, that there's always this form of nostalgia, especially with younger generations. Like, I'm 35, so even younger than me. And it's always, I've always felt, and I still feel this way, I've always. I've always felt that, I can imagine these kids would feel this way, that not that they were born in the wrong time, but their sensibilities, right,

are just not either commercially viable or they're just not trendy. And I feel like out of that, you know, that appreciation, and with Justin, the sort of like deep dive into the history of Americana music and pulling from all these different resources, that's when you can really create something that's your own, you know? That sure sounds new, but you're doing this anachronistic thing where, like Tommy, you were saying, you don't know what decade it came from, you know?

Totally. That's exactly what Justin, that's exactly what Justin's band, the Swindler sort of did and kind of crystallized for themselves. And, like, they were like, well, you know, if we're a bunch of, if it's 1999 and a bunch of 17-year-olds are singing like about, you know, like cocaine blues from the 1930s and all these obscure jug band songs, like this will sound eventually something new and original will come of this. And that's kind of like, that's all the like lava that forms Justin Townsendownsville, the artist. basically. So you nailed it.

Yeah. I'm always impressed by people like that that can just kind of like have that encyclopedic knowledge like that. Me and Terrence, when we first started this show, we started that WMT 88.7 for those that don't know, the hip-hop giant in the mountains is what

we would always call it, but it was kind of like a famous, like, old-time station, they'd play a lot of that stuff. Like Steve Martin and R. Crum would like donate a lot of money to MMT, for example. And like guys like that really get into this kind of music like just like our crumbs got books about like people even from letcher county that i'd never heard of where i'm from you know what i mean just going way way way way way

way back so people that are in that same thing happens i mean you know aaron you've told me about your dad you know on a record store and was it kingston yeah yeah like the same thing like dance hall and reggae a lot of times we're like you don't know who cut that first you know because it goes so far back a record store a record store might add that i've told you bob marley used to frequent But, I mean, at the time, I don't think he was a global international sort of icon. But in Jamaica, he was a superstar, you know. Wow. That's amazing.

That's fun. I got to hear more about that. Well, John, listen, man, I appreciate you being with us. You got some events coming up next week. Yeah, if anyone happens to be, wants to learn more about Justin, I have a couple events that are, like, going to be music-oriented as well, one in Asheville on Wednesday, this coming Wednesday, I think that's the 18th. And at the Grey Eagle, a venue that Justin played in many times.

I'm just going to do like a book reading and a talk and then some musicians later that evening are going to play some songs inspired by him. And then the next night on the 19th, I'll be in Johnson City, Tennessee, basically opening for a man named Scotty. You know, opening as in talking about my book, to be clear, at the folk club, the downhome, which is a club that meant a lot to Justin for the great songwriter, Scotty Melton, who kind of co-wrote a lot of Justin's first

earliest great songs with Justin. So that should be a really cool kind of celebration of him. So just, yeah, if anyone's around. Oh, yeah. Hell yeah. We'll go check that out. And is the book out already? Is it coming?

Yeah, the book just came out in mid-January. And, yeah, it's available in bookstores and all that. So go get that wherever fine books or sold. John, I appreciate you so much, man. Yeah, I appreciate you coming on, man. Oh, it was... Yeah, let's run it back sometime. I would love that.

I appreciate talking to both of you guys. Seriously, it's an honor. Thanks, man. Thank you, brother. And if you're out there listening to this for just $5 a month, you can get all these bonus episodes, and you can get just a whole wellspring of content out there for, you know, not much money.

we've not raised our prices. I always like to say this. We've not raised our prices with inflation. Inflation cannot cause us to bend, you know. Yeah. We're like the cloudy a shine bomb. You see the President of Mexico said, we're not going to raise gas prices.

Well, we have the same ethos here. And so in that same spirit, just go and give as God would direct you to and just know you'll be blessed for it. And thank you guys out there for listening. John, thanks again. Thanks again, brother. Thank you guys.

Both of you. Thank you.