Jonathan Bernstein What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome
Fathers and sons. It’s always fathers and sons.
But in What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, his carefully researched and sensitively written biography of Justin Townes Earle, author Jonathan Bernstein is careful not to make Justin’s lineage the whole story. Bernstein acknowledges inheritance without letting it become destiny.
Justin Townes Earle emerged in the late 2000s as one of Americana’s most searching songwriters, blending folk, blues, and country traditions with a sharply contemporary attention to class, place, and moral consequence. His father, Steve Earle, appears throughout the book largely in outline—present as context rather than narrator—not because Bernstein avoids him, but because Steve declined to be interviewed. The effect is that the story unfolds not as confrontation or reckoning, but as lived experience, shaped by proximity, silence, and expectation.
Bernstein gives us a portrait of an artist who was often lonely in the midst of visibility—touring, recording, surrounded by people—and who found his most consistent solace in a small number of places that recur throughout the book. One of them, the Chicken Shack, is described by Bernstein as “a one-room cabin packed with guitars, hand-rolled cigarettes, and blues records.” It was a clubhouse, a shared creative shelter, a place where music, conversation, and companionship overlapped without pretense. Bernstein returns to the Chicken Shack repeatedly as a refuge—one of the few places where Justin could belong without performing. Alongside it sits the act of making music itself. Justin’s songs, in this telling, were not expressions of torment so much as temporary shelters from it.
That understanding shapes the book’s greatest strength. Unlike many music biographies that drift toward pathology or spectacle, Bernstein keeps the music front and center. He writes as a Justin Townes Earle fan—openly and unapologetically—and remains one even as the journey grows rough. Addiction is present and unsparing, but it is never allowed to eclipse the work. Music here is not the byproduct of suffering; it is the thing that made survival, however brief or incomplete, possible.
Bernstein’s book matters because Justin Townes Earle mattered—quietly but decisively—to the shape of modern Americana. He occupied a space that few of his peers managed to hold for long: rooted in traditional forms but emotionally contemporary, literate without being precious, political without grandstanding. His songs bridged generations, speaking fluently to listeners steeped in folk and country history while offering younger artists a model for how vulnerability, craft, and restraint could coexist. Long before “Americana” hardened into brand or circuit, Justin’s work suggested another path—one where songs were intimate without being insular, socially aware without being didactic, and disciplined enough to reward close listening.
Bernstein’s approach as a biographer is central to why this portrait holds. He comes to the project as a fan, but also as a careful listener, more interested in understanding how a life unfolded than in imposing a thesis upon it. His reporting is deep and patient—drawing on interviews with nearly everyone who shared Justin’s orbit—yet his tone remains restrained. He resists both mythmaking and moral verdicts, allowing contradictions to stand rather than forcing them into narrative resolution. The result is a book that feels guided by empathy but anchored in rigor.
In contrast to other biographies of musicians who died tragically young—such as Charles R. Cross’s book about Kurt Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven—Bernstein’s biography resists explanation and closure, choosing instead to remain with the songs and the unfinished life around them.
That restraint is especially evident in Bernstein’s treatment of the 2017 arrest that forced Justin’s addiction into public view. The episode is neither sensationalized nor framed as a redemptive turning point. Instead, Bernstein presents it as evidence of how narrow the margin had already become between the life Justin was trying to build and the one he was barely holding together—a moment that exposed the limits of discipline, acclaim, and good intentions.
Throughout, Bernstein emphasizes that Justin kept returning to the work itself—writing, recording, collaborating—not as proof of resilience or recovery, but as evidence of where Justin continued to locate meaning. As Bernstein writes, “Justin kept writing through it all. It was what he understood to be his purpose, how he derived self-worth and meaning, what he cared about the most. No matter where he was—pacing backstage, plopped on an 11th Street bar stool, sobering up in his cramped apartment, crunched together in the back of a van on the road—Justin continued to write.” Writing is not salvation here; it is orientation, the one practice that still made sense when so much else did not.
There is a temptation in stories like this to frame loss as destiny or addiction as explanation. What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome resists both. It insists instead on returning to the songs—to what they offered, what they carried, and what they made briefly possible. That insistence does not lessen the tragedy of Justin Townes Earle’s death. It deepens it, by reminding us how much was built, carefully and honestly, before it all came apart—and why his music still rings true.
You can find the book here: https://lyon.ecampus.com/what-do-you-do-when-youre-lonesome/bk/9780306833274
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: Show Review: Justin Townes Earle and Lydia Loveless at OKC’s Tower Theater Could Be Concert of the Year
