Singer songwriter Justin Townes Earle. Photo / Supplied

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 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.