Justin Townes Earle + Dawn Landes - Mississippi Studios (Portland, OR; Feb. 20, 2011)

Sunday night’s billing at Mississippi Studios was precisely the kind the venue was built for. Featuring a pair of New York-based troubadours, the lineup showcased the continuing vitality of folk and country—what Gram Parson’s called “Cosmic American Music”—in an era of exploding diversity and experimentation in the pop culture arena.

Brooklyn’s Dawn Landes opened the set, sort of wandering on to the stage and asking if it was okay to play yet. “Nobody told me when to go,” she shrugged. Appropriately, she opened her set with “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” a song that immediately recalls the classic Byrds album of the same name that spawned the genre currently on display. Whether dipping into the blues, country, or folk, Landes has a soulful presence. Alone on stage, she let her powerful voice carry the music, delivering a delightfully lively and fleshed-out performance. And though it seemed few in the audience were familiar with her, an easy command of classic country motifs—“It’s hard to breathe in the city. It’s easier to drink.”—made it decidedly easy to climb on board. Accidentally slipping into some Big Star as she tried to find the chords for one of her own songs didn’t hurt either, demonstrating a diverse range of influences that was one of the hallmarks of the night. Landes finished her set with “Young Girls,” a knock-out single that does as much as any song in her repertoire to demonstrate her old soul, a seeming necessity to play this kind of music convincingly. Departing the stage, she received an enthusiastic round of applause, lasting evidence of how effortlessly she had won over her audience.

The headliner, Justin Townes Earle, came on next. The sold-out room was absolutely packed at this point, and the crowded balcony nestled up low along the perimeter of the room gave the visual impression that people were literally hanging from the walls. Earle opened with “Move Over Mama,” a song that, like much of his work, references with bitter irony his much-publicized issues with relationships, addiction, and law enforcement. Indeed, Earle often bears these crosses as if they were badges, well versed in a country music tradition that has historically treated them as such. Holding true to that form, he followed with a slow rendition of “John Henry,” dedicating it to his grandfather. “He was a great man, put up with both mine and my father’s shit. Which makes him a tough man.” Earle’s father, of course, is Steve Earle, who was once hailed as the next Springsteen. And like Springsteen, the younger Earle is able to take advantage of his audience’s broad familiarity with his personal history to tell stories though his songs that carry all the more poignancy for their autobiographical detail. Not long after, he dedicated to his mother the song “Mama’s Eyes,” in which he half-laments that he is his father’s son while striking a sense of optimism in noting that he has something of his mother in him as well. Of course, in his dedication he pointed that his mother was 6’1” and challenged the audience to imagine being hit by a woman with a reach like that. Allegedly there was enough power in that swing to have detached a retina for the elder Earle, but even taking the story as apocryphal, the anecdote shines some light on the psyche behind the music.

Apart from the cautionary tale that is his biography, Earle is also noted for the wit that frequently provokes hilarious banter with the audience. In rapid-fire speech, Earle related witty aphorisms about country music, country life, country folk, and of course, gravy, delivered with such precision that they must be rehearsed, though in the three shows of his that I’ve attended, I’ve yet to hear him repeat himself. On this night, he stepped to the mic and declared, “Ladies and gentleman, I am a weak man. Two of my weaknesses are…” “Hairspray!” The interruption from the audience broke Earle’s composure, and though he had to struggle to regain control of the discourse, he was clearly entertained by the dig at his unhip hair styling. Women and chicken, it turns out, were what he was going for. “No, no,” he protested amidst laughs of ridicule. “Chicken has caused me very few problems in life.” By contrast, women and drugs have been more problematic for him, and he spoke and sang frankly of both. “I do have a constant problem with incarceration and chemical dependency,” he stated at one point, “but I’ve learned to live with it, so everybody can quit making a big deal out of it.” Out of deference to the man and the artist, one would like to, but the fact is so thoroughly tangled up in his music that it’s often impossible. Introducing “Midnight at the Movies,” Earle confessed that the song is rooted in his hardcore addiction days, when paying $2 admission to the porn theater gave one a few precious hours to disappear in between the rows of seats and get some sleep. He finished his set with “Harlem River Blues,” the gospelish and even optimistic title track from his most recent album. After a raucous encore break, Earle returned to the stage, seeming to gaze in wonder at the throngs of people gathered in the little room. He would perform a substantial encore, including a rendition of the lonesome tune “Rogers Park” that put extra emphasis on the haunting refrain of “shadows on the wall,” but it was unquestionably the last two songs that were the highlights. “We’re going to do a song by the great Bruce Springsteen,” Earle announced, and the crowd erupted into cheers and deep, resonant calls of “Bruuuuuce!” The song, which has become a regular part of Earle’s live repertoire, was “Racing in the Street,” one of the most heart wrenching songs ever written by a guy who wrote a lot of them. It also happens to fit seamlessly with Earle’s own catalogue, underscoring his artistic debt to the Boss. As the song moved to its disillusioned conclusion, the crowd was absolutely hushed, easily more quiet than it had been all night. It was a beautiful moment, but too melancholy a note on which to close a great night. Switching gears entirely, Earle finished with a honky-tonked cover of the Replacement’s “Can’t Hardly Wait.” That Earle can perform the two songs back to back without sounding forced is a testament not only to his own musical capacities, but to the spiritual growth country music is enjoying in the hands of a younger generation operating outside of the narrow scope of Nashville’s mainstream. Both Earle and Landes, in fact, possess an air of authenticity that hearkens to an earlier era of country music, an era that walked the line between the sacred, evidenced in the massive influence gospel music had on the genre, and the profane, the demons of alcoholism, drug abuse, and broken lives. It’s no way to live, of course, but for song-writing material, you could do an awful lot worse.

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