Author talk with Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Bernstein and Lauren Daley

Author talk with Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Bernstein and Lauren Daley

When: Thursday, July 23rd from 2:00 to 3:00 PM

We are excited to welcome Rolling Stone journalist and author, Jonathan Bernstein, to discuss his latest books "What To Do When You're Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle." An acclaimed and powerful portrait of Justin Townes Earle for Rolling Stone, and built on the extensive contacts and sources he made while researching and writing.

Jonathan will be in conversation with freelance journalist for the Boston Globe and contributing arts writer to Boston.com, Lauren Daley, where she aims to bring an old-school Rolling Stone vibe to the New England arts scene.

We kindly ask you to RSVP for this event and share with your friends.

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When Justin Townes Earle died of an overdose alone in his Nashville apartment, his death sent waves of grief through the country-Americana music community. The son of alt-country hellraiser Steve Earle had long struggled with mental illness and various addictions. There had been encouraging periods of long-term sobriety and active recovery in his adult life, including the years that led up to his career peak when he released the 2010 masterpiece Harlem River Blues, a career-making album of rambling folk blues set to Southern Gospel.

He sang of cramped Brooklyn apartments and crippling hangovers, about emotional displacement, economic anxiety, and the wandering that characterized his feral, formative years as a rootless kid rambling around Nashville, developing his own unique guitar style and absorbing the musical influences that surrounded him. He was anointed by critics as the next coming of the authentic troubadour. By the time of his death, he’d recorded and released eight albums, creating a striking and original body of work.

Jonathan Bernstein, with the full cooperation of the Justin Townes Earle estate, unravels in these pages a short but incredibly creative life, and reveals the backstories behind Justin’s greatest songs (“Mama’s Eyes,” “White Gardenias”) and what happened when it all fell apart while also capturing a shadow world of the neglected children of Nashville legends who wrestle with the legacies of their hard-living, road-weary, often absent parents.

Justin’s journey to near-stardom is a harrowing story shot through with moments of clarity and promise, including his marriage to his wife Jenn Marie Earle and the birth of their daughter. But what Earle called “the myth”—the idea that one must suffer for one’s art—proved to be too powerful.

This heartbreaking, deeply researched tale is an exemplary music biography.

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Jonathan Bernstein is a senior research editor and writer at Rolling Stone, and before that was a freelancer for Oxford American, The Guardian, GQ, Vulture, Pitchfork, The Village Voice, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, and American Songwriter. He lives in Brooklyn.

Lauren Daley is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, Paste Magazine, The Village Voice, The Providence Journal, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., The Cape Cod Times and weekly in The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass., among many other publications. She writes a Sunday book column, BookLovers and a weekly music column, Spotlight for The Standard-Times. Daley’s photography has appeared in The Boston Globe, Huffington Post and The Standard-Times. She was a staff news reporter and staff living arts writer at The Standard-Times before pursuing a freelance career.