Justin Townes Earle laid it all on the table

Justin Townes Earle didn’t shy away from even the most incriminating personal topics during a soul-baring solo performance Wednesday at a sold-out Space. Introducing songs by relaying stories about smoking crack, sharing outspoken opinions of other musicians and connecting how his past shaped the present, the Nashville singer-songwriter invested the same unforced honesty and stark authenticity in his understated roots music.

While Earle sang about tumultuous issues common to the folk, country and blues traditions from which he draws, he conveyed hurt, guilt, desertion and loss with the kind of deep-seated emotion only wrung from someone who has experienced it all firsthand. Given his destructive background, there’s no room — or need — for make-believe fiction or depression-era revivalism. All the sordid details are true.

Abandoned at age two by his father, folk-rock maverick Steve Earle, the younger Earle began battling chemical addiction and broken homes since he was in grade school. Multiple rehabilitation stints, frequent bouts with drugs, a crippling drinking habit and countless ruined friendships later, the 32-year-old is finally clean and sober. Fortunate to be alive, he’s also recently married, and about to release his second new album within the span of four months.

Onstage, Earle looked focused and confident, his deadpan humor and slender frame masking a quiet intensity that emerged when he paced between verses. Telltale physical tics — closed eyes, twitching mouth, stern smiles — indicated untamed restlessness and unsettled bitterness lurking in his mind, particularly on autobiographical fare concerning his lineage (the tender “Mama’s Eyes,” the heartbreaking “Single Mothers”) and universally themed work relating to fraying relationships (“Worried Bout the Weather”).

As he sorted out crises of faith, Earle brightened moods via elastic, jazz-inspired phrasing that suggested hope could win out over loneliness. Moaning, sighing and singing in gentle tones, he elongated syllables and rolled vowels, shaping words on the fly and emphasizing certain passages with disarming Southern drawl. His spare, blues-based arrangements owed to similar subtleties. Earle picked and strummed basic chords in alternating keys on a lone acoustic guitar throughout an 80-minute set in which struggle slowly yielded to something resembling inner peace.

“It takes a lot to grow up,” Earle acknowledged before playing “Am I That Lonely Tonight,” negotiating the rhythms of his surroundings in the song and coming to terms with his feelings by discerning right from wrong.

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