Country singer Justin Townes Earle may be only 27 years old but he's a man with a past. A lot of past.
There's those names for one thing. Well, two things.
He's the son of country-rock firebrand Steve Earle. That which may not bring with it the recognition factor of
being, say a Dylan, but it still defines him.
If having that surname wasn't burden enough, Earle senior named his first son - by Carol-Ann Hunter, his third wife of eight - after his hero Townes Van Zandt, the cult figure Texas singer-songwriter who died in the late 90s after a life marred by drink, drugs and depression.
"I think that it has never once hurt me," Earle says of his monikers, down the line from Kentucky where he is on tour before heading to New Zealand and Australia.
"I have never seen it as a curse. I think the thing is I never felt any need to try to live up to either name - that is a death sentence and is probably going to be a real miserable career. And probably not a career at all because there is a million songwriters who sound like my dad and a million songwriters who sound like Townes Van Zandt every night of the week in every coffee shop across America. There is enough people trying to do that."
Nashville-raised Earle didn't see much of his father as a boy, though he went to live with him as a teenager, after his father had returned from a couple of years in the narcotic wilderness involving prison time.
The younger Earle was soon following in his father's footsteps, and not just musically.
"I'm a strong believer that addiction is genetic: you're a junkie before you start using," he told the Scotsman newspaper earlier this year. "Whether my father had been a banker or a musician, I was going to find heroin. As far as him being able to put me off, a normal teenager doesn't listen to their parents, and I grew up in an inner-city neighbourhood where nobody had anything; I grew up hustling. Add in enough cocaine to kill a horse, and you've got a mean little bastard on your hands. I wasn't a happy person at all. I just didn't know how to feel anything, and if I was high I didn't have to feel."
Now Earle has been five years clean. Must be good to have gotten that particular music career pitfall out of the way early ...
"I am glad I got it out of the way because when you are in your teenage years and your young 20s you can survive a few heroin overdoses. You get into your 30s and your chances get a little fewer and further in between.
"I'm not completely out of the weeds but life isn't anywhere as hard as it used to be. Life without hard drugs is absolutely essential for me."
Earle has released three albums in quick succession, the latest of which, this year's Midnight at the Movies, shows him to be something of a country traditionalist, a musical throwback compared to his musically free-ranging father - last here touring with a hip-hop turntablist.
Earle agrees his songwriting has similarities to his dad's but he wasn't that much of an influence and there wasn't much music around the house.
"My dad smoked crack so he sold all his records. So by the time he came around there wasn't a record collection.
"I listened to a lot of hip-hop when I was young, because I grew up in an urban setting, and a lot of hard rock."
A turning point was when he heard Nirvana's Kurt Cobain cover Leadbelly's Where Did You Sleep Last Night on their Unplugged album.
"That is what of kind of led me back. Even when Kurt did it, it had a feel that was unlike anything else out there."
Earle started playing in rock bands in Nashville. But he found he preferred playing acoustic to electric and in a town of gun musicians, he found his true calling was as a songwriter.
"You put a band together and you realise that everybody in your band is like a light-years better musician than you are. I also learned very quick that not everybody can write a song. That was my thing. I was always the songwriter in whatever group I was in."
And now he's one on the way up under his own illustrious name. He won best emerging artist at this month's Americana Music Awards. While it might be that his albums will forever sit next to his father's in record stores, soon he thinks he won't have to face as many questions about the connection. Not that it worries him.
"I never had a chance of having a life of anonymity. There wasn't like paparazzi or anything in my life, but my dad has cultish fans who know everything about him and it's something that I have grown used to.
"I have grown used to seeing my family's name praised and beaten in the press and I've learned through all of that the worst thing you can try to do is try to hide because they are going to find you.
"And I'm kind of in a business where y'all need to find me in order for me to make a living out of it.
"All kinds of stories can come out - by the time it makes it to the end of the bar it's got horns and all kinds of green shit coming out of its mouth, you know what I mean?
"So I would just rather put down all the wild stories and say, 'Yeah this is how it happened'. There is always going to be the connection - I hope the connection never dies. I'm like a big fan of the Carter Family dynasty-style thing.
"I still get asked questions about my dad. But now my dad gets asked a lot more questions about me right now than I do about him."
LOWDOWN
Who: Justin Townes Earle, country singer-songwriter
Latest album: Midnight at the Movies, out now
Playing: Bodega Wellington, Sat Oct 10; Kings Arms Auckland, Sun Oct 11.
Singer songwriter Justin Townes Earle. Photo / Supplied
Country singer Justin Townes Earle may be only 27 years old but he's a man with a past. A lot of past.
There's those names for one thing. Well, two things.
He's the son of country-rock firebrand Steve Earle. That which may not bring with it the recognition factor of
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