Like father, but more like son

Justin Townes Earle's music stands on its own

AUSTIN, Texas - It's mid-March, 90 degrees, sunny, and crowded in the backyard of the Yard Dog Gallery. The line for beer stretches a good 50 feet, but most everyone has crammed under a tent to watch a tattooed country singer dressed in a full suit with cocked cowboy hat, sounding like the second coming of Hank Williams.

Justin Townes Earle, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter with a cigarette usually dangling from his fingers, is in town for South by Southwest shows for Bloodshot Records, the so-called "insurgent country" label that released his debut, "The Good Life," last month.

He has just played to an audience that hooted and hollered for one more song, and afterward new fans are interrupting one another to congratulate him on the brief set. He appreciates the support, but once he finishes an interview, he's off to an early dinner with his girlfriend and her parents, who have flown in for the show. Earle has just met them the previous day, and it went as well as it could have.

"Well, you know, I have a lot going against me when it comes to meeting parents," he says flat out. "My dad has been married seven times, he's a recovering heroin addict, and I'm a recovering heroin addict."

That's Justin Townes Earle for you: jarringly honest with nothing to hide and a mighty legacy to live up to, starting with his name. His middle name refers to the late, great Townes Van Zandt, a singer-songwriter who battled his own demons and died too soon at 52. He gets Earle from his father, Steve, also no stranger to addiction and hard times. You don't have to compare father and son, though; Justin will do it for you.

"One thing I kind of had to come to terms with was the fact that I am my father's son," he says. "I thought for years that I was nothing like my father, and it turns out I am exactly like him."

If their music doesn't sound especially similar - Justin, who plays at T.T. the Bear's on Tuesday, is more of an old-school country artist in line with Shooter Jennings and Hank Williams III, other spawn of country legends - their backgrounds have mirrored each other.

"I started using drugs when I was really young. I mean, I was 10 the first time I got high," Earle says. "By the time I was 17, I was severely addicted to methadone and heroin; I was an alcoholic. When I was 20, I was doing enough blow that I got a hole through my septum. I was a speedball junkie for a long time, and it nearly killed me."

At 22, he had had enough, or more likely, his body had had enough.

"I had a severe overdose of heroin and cocaine, and I ended up in the hospital with a massive respiratory failure," he says. "I came out of it, and I used for about another week, and then decided that it was time to check myself into treatment again."

Earle has been clean for four years, and throughout that time, his father has weighed in with support and advice.

"I was always kind of a hellion, but my family is definitely one of those come-as-you-are kinds of families. [My dad] has always been supportive of me," Earle says. "He's been saying in press recently that I'm the son that he deserved to have because I was a pain in the [expletive]. So he's getting his due."

Steve Earle laughs at that while acknowledging it's not entirely true. He and his son have had their ups and downs, as all fathers and sons do, but these days he's mostly proud of what Justin has become and he likes Justin's new album.

"Justin's best songs are as good as anybody's," the elder Earle says. "It's not always the record I would make, and it shouldn't be because I'm not him. He has to do his own thing."

Still a dad first and foremost, Steve Earle remembers how he got nervous recently watching Justin play a show. "But I did the same thing when he played soccer as a kid, and he was good at that, too."

Justin says his dad wasn't around much when he was growing up, though he did show his support other ways, sometimes in song. Justin is the "Little Rock 'n' Roller" in question on "Guitar Town," Steve's breakthrough debut from 1986. The song begins with a threadbare confession: "Hey, little guy, I can't believe you answered the phone/ I guess I didn't know you could do that/ God help me, have I been gone that long?"

Justin respects his father's music - he even lists him as an influence on his MySpace profile, right between Elvis Costello and Patti Smith - but his songs are his own. "I always tell people that we don't play your father's country," he says. "We play your grandfather's country."

Nowhere is that more evident than on his rousing new album. Earle dabbles in driving, traditional barn-burners ("Hard Livin' "), and you can easily envision the old-timers twirling around the dance floor to "What Do You Do When You're Lonesome" or "South Georgia Sugar Babe." It's all entertaining and pretty breezy, but there are echoes of his father's quietly unsettling songwriting. On "Who Am I to Say," Earle takes an autobiographical turn: "So you take your pills and poison/ Drink yourself to death/ Give yourself away until you ain't got nothing left."

Born and raised in Nashville, Earle knows he's an anomaly in the local music scene: "There's absolutely nothing like what I do in Nashville, Tennessee, right now. Well, on lower Broadway it exists, but people aren't writing it," he says. "They're playing old standards and stuff like that. But I don't know any other people that are reaching back."

That said, Earle also recognizes why the city hasn't turned out more hard-line country artists.

"Kids who are born there have gone so far away from country music. A lot of kids born in Nashville can't even tell you who the [expletive] Ray Price is or George Jones. And if they do, they think it's something stupid that their parents listened to or their grandparents listened to," he says. "So there's a huge indie-rock scene, and there's a lot of great bands in that - tons of stuff that I go out and see all the time. I love that music, but nobody got into the old country."

But even if he feels like an outsider in his own hometown, he'd never want to leave it. After all, an outlaw country singer has his standards.

"I love Nashville. I wanted to live in New York for a while, and I'd love to have a place to go to up there, but I'm not going to just move to New York," he says. "I'm too much of a country boy, and you can't own a gun on Manhattan island."

James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.