Album Review: Steve Earle & the Dukes: J.T.

Steve Earle told the New York Times that recording his latest album, J.T., “wasn’t cathartic as much as it was therapeutic...I made the record because I needed to.”

J.T., Steve Earle’s second album of 2020, is a tribute to his son, Justin Townes Earle. The 38-year-old Nashville singer-songwriter died of an accidental drug overdose in August of 2020. Despite the album’s tragic context, J.T. is more celebratory than somber, a love letter to Justin’s music that only a father could write.

10 of the 11 songs on J.T. are cover songs spanning Justin’s nine-album career. There are subtle differences between the covers and the originals; Steve adds a muted, driving snare to “Turn Out My Lights,” while Justin’s version devastates with somber sparsity. But mostly, Steve and the band treat these covers with careful accuracy, like restorationists preserving a masterpiece. In the song “I Don’t Care,” Steve captures the youthful urgency and upbeat tempo of Justin’s first E.P., Yuma: “I don’t know where I’m going / I don’t know / I don’t care,” Steve sings in his gravelly-rasp, downtrodden yet optimistic. 

Steve could’ve chosen to only record his son’s more buoyant tracks. But in Justin’s albums, comedy and tragedy commingle, sometimes from one track to another and other times within the same song. J.T. is no different. “Champagne Corolla,” a bluesy, middle-class love song transitions into “The Saint of Lost Cause,” a heavy rumination on America’s class-divide. Like his father, one of Justin’s signature talents was his ability to disarm hopelessness with a single joke. When Steve sings the line “I'm a bad dream / not a nightmare / I'm too pretty for that,” it’s a nod to his son’s wit.

The record ends on “Last Words,” the only song Steve wrote for the album. Over a bare acoustic guitar and delicate strings, he struggles to process the depression and alcoholism that led to his son’s passing: “I don’t know why you hurt so bad / just know you did and it makes me sad.”  The song and the album end with Steve chronicling the last conversation he had with Justin: “Last thing he said was I love you / his last words to me were I love you too.”

Listen to J.T. below on Bandcamp: