Jason Isbell, Justin Townes Earle Fallout Explained in New Book

In January, Rolling Stone music reporter Jonathan Bernstein released a book on the life of second generation singer/songwriter Justin Townes Earle called What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle.

Beyond anything else, it’s worth praising this book as one of the best-written, best-researched, and best-presented biographies you will ever read on any musical performer. And don’t allow the “authorized” tag make you believe this book isn’t brutally honest and forthright about the life of Justin Townes Earle and those around him. It just happens to come with the stamp of approval from Earle’s immediate family.

A full book report/review for What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome is forthcoming. But it felt important to zoom in on one of the many insightful moments the book includes since it dovetails with an important topic that has stirred some discussion in the past.

When Jason Isbell released the song “When We Were Close” on his 2023 Grammy-winning album Weathervanes, it created some interest, and stirred some controversy since the song is about the friendship of the two singer/songwriters—a friendship that eventually fell apart.

Justin Townes Earle’s widow and mother to his daughter, Jenn Marie Earle, took exception to the song, especially how she hadn’t received prior notice to it, and how unbeknownst to the somewhat graphic nature of it, she played it for her daughter.

But how did the friendship between Justin Townes Earle and Jason Isbell fall apart? Early on, they were “close” as the song says, touring together, and becoming close confidants as they both worked through issues with addiction. When they started out, Justin was opening for Isbell. Then for a spell, Isbell was opening for Justin, and performed on guitar for Justin when he was invited to play The Late Show with David Letterman. Then the chairs switched again after Isbell released his landmark album Southeastern in 2013.

But it wasn’t a professional rivalry that caused friction between the two. Around 2010, a younger woman named Lauren Spratlin was brought on as Justin Townes Earle’s tour manager. She was hired onto Justin’s team by Earle’s then overall manager Traci Thomas, who also happened to be managing Jason Isbell. By 2011, Earle and Lauren Spratlin were in a serious romantic relationship.

By 2012, Amanda Shires had replaced Joshua Hedley as the fiddle player for Justin Townes Earle. Isbell and Shires married in 2013, and Earle purchased a 3-piece Billy Reid suit for Isbell for the occasion. So to say the business and personal affairs of Jason Isbell and Justin Townes Earle were deeply intertwined is an understatement if anything.

In January of 2013—a month before Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires were to be married—Justin Townes Earle proposed to Lauren Spratlin by throwing an engagement ring in her lap as they were driving to the airport. Spratlin was confused at first, and eventually said “no,” having experienced Earle’s uglier side and emotional outbursts. Then they had to go on tour with each other in Australia right after.

Justin Townes Earle and Lauren Spratlin officially broke up in the spring of 2013, and Spratlin obviously stopped being Earle’s tour manager too. Shortly thereafter, Jason Isbell then hired Spratlin to be his tour manager. “You’re not a loyal friend,” was Earle’s assessment of the situation. “He just got really mad about it … He’ll get over it,” was Isbell’s assessment on the Marc Maron podcast at the time. But Justin Townes Earle never did get over it.

“He viewed Isbell’s hiring of Spratlin, and his seeming siding with her after their ugly breakup, as the ultimate betrayal,” says Jonathan Bernstein in the biography. “There were certainly other complicating factors that ultimately impacted their abrupt split; the difficulty of maintaining a relationship between two friends with histories of addiction when one person (Isbell) gets completely sober; the competition between two headstrong entertainers as Isbell, whose breakthrough, ‘Southeastern,’ was released during this exact period, became far more successful than Justin…”

There was an effort at reconciliation. As explained in Chapter 19 of the biography, “In September 2014, they both appeared at a festival in Cincinnati. With their buses parked next to one another, Justin’s bandmates, who were friends with both Justin and Isbell, spent the day going from one bus to the other trying to negotiate a truce, or at least persuade the former friends to talk. Their effort failed.”

When Justin Townes Earle died on August 20th, 2020, he had never made peace with Jason Isbell. Though Isbell’s efforts with his song “When We Were Close” seemed to be in good faith, the ill will that still persisted between the two came back into focus.

There were many tragedies that presented themselves when Justin Townes Earle passed away in 2020 due to accidental fentanyl overdose. The lack of a reconciliation in the friendship between Isbell and Earle is one of them. Both these men helped raise Americana out of the shadows of popular music.

Jason Isbell has received plenty of credit for this accomplishment, and rightfully so. Justin Townes Earle rarely does, even though he was very much the one who seeded the appeal, and opened the doors for artists like Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, and others. The biography What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome underscores this, and hopefully, helps establish this truth in the greater musical consciousness.

Purchase: What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome