On his most recent record, “Kids In the Street,” Justin Townes Earle does Piedmont blues, tear-in-your-beer country, roots rock and Southern soul, with his band sometimes sliding into shoulder-rolling New Orleans grooves and flashes of Dixieland.
Earle is the son of singer/songwriter Steve Earle, and he gets his middle name from Townes Van Zandt, so the guy has some career pressure in his pedigree. If his dad had an encyclopedic record collection of blues, country and rock, it was Nirvana’s cover of a Leadbelly tune on MTV “Unplugged” in the ’90s that gave the young Earle a sense of how dark and powerful traditional American music could be, and he’s used that foundation ever since in his original material.
It’s not all death ballads though. Earle’s latest has some funny odes to feminine charms: in one tune he extols the virtues of a woman with a short haircut who looks good in high-waisted jeans, and in another, the entertaining opener “Champagne Corolla,” Earle sings about the romantic appeal of a woman who has humble, unflashy, pragmatic taste in cars.
See Justin Townes Earle at Fairfield Theater Company’s Warehouse, 70 Sanford St., Fairfield, on Friday, Nov. 17, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $28. 203-259-1036 or fairfieldtheatre.org.
