APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, The Saint of Lost Causes —the new Justin Townes Earle album—has an Orthodox icon of St. Jude on the cover. In Catholic lore, St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and desperate cases. But if a person can still turn to a saint for intercession, the cause isn’t entirely lost. The desperate act of prayer implies at least a sliver of hope for grace and mercy, and that’s mostly where the people in Earle’s new batch of songs are: down to their last desperate prayer but still hoping.
At the beginning of the album, in the title track, Earle lays it out, singing: “Now it’s a cruel world / But it ain’t hard to understand / You got your sheep, got your shepherds / Got your wolves amongst men.” Over the course of the next 11 songs, we see the world mostly from the point of view of the sheep. We hear from some fracked-out citizens in “Don’t Drink the Water” who are growing increasingly restless as some oil company hack keeps claiming that their poisoned land and water, and the occasional earthquake, are all an “act of God.” Later, in “Flint City Shake It,” a streetwise Michigander fills us in on how General Motors assassinated his still-resilient hometown. Then there’s the junkie desperado of “Appalachian Nightmare” who hopes God can forgive him at the moment of his death.
Justin Townes Earle bears the mixed blessing of a famous name and the genetic curse of a predisposition to substance abuse. His father is the legendary singer-songwriter, ex-junkie, and ex-con Steve Earle, and Earle the younger has had his own serious drug and alcohol problems and attendant brushes with the law. However, despite both father and son being classified in the “Americana” section of the music library, Justin Townes has clearly distinguished himself from his predecessor.
For one thing, his voice is sweeter and more supple than his father’s ever was. The son’s Nashville twang has always come with a strong undertow of Memphis swing, very much in evidence on The Saint of Lost Causes. And although Steve Earle has always placed his Left politics in front of his life and work, his son’s music had been dominated by close examinations of the tugs-of-war beneath the surfaces of family ties and romantic entanglements.
Until now. For this new album, Justin Townes Earle said he wanted to work from a broader palette and “look through the eyes of America.” And, apparently, what America sees—in the third year of Trump—is pretty grim. In “Flint City,” Earle tells us, the town once made “Buick cars and GM trucks, Chevy engines, AC spark plugs” before General Motors’ president Roger Smith “cut our throat with the stroke of a fountain pen.” Smith must have left that pen in a desk drawer on his way out, because his successor, Mary Barra, just did the same thing to Lordstown, Ohio.
St. Jude, pray for these folks, indeed. Even though they’ve already got somebody singing for them.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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