Justin Townes Earle has a pretty humble outlook on his first performance at Tipitina’s.

“I haven’t ever played there yet, but there’s something in the idea of that place,” he says. “It’s very New Orleans in the sense that New Orleans says ‘we don’t need y’all, we’ve got the best musicians in the world down here.’ So whenever I play New Orleans, if I can draw anybody, I’m proud of that. Because why come see my ass when you can go see the Preservation Hall Band?”

Earle, the son of musician (and Treme actor) Steve Earle, will bring his melancholy brand of alternative country to Tipitina’s this Sunday, October 18. If all goes well, he might even draw a crowd too.

With six full albums and an Americana Music Association Song of the Year Award under his belt, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter has graduated from his father’s shadow and taken a place among the most accomplished troubadours of his generation. He might not be roughing it out as a street busker like the early days, but the devil-may-care attitude hasn’t gone anywhere. Justin Townes Earle doesn’t give a damn what you think about him, and we wouldn’t want him any other way.

You’ve played a few shows with Warren Haynes on this tour. I know he likes to bring collaborators out during his shows. Have been joining him on stage at all?

Yeah, I have. He doesn’t offer much of a choice on the matter. He’s got the song ideas that he wants to do and he likes to do something different every night. He prefers if the band’s one he’s never played with. That’s what he wants to do. It’s that jam spirit coming out of him. So we’ve done “Willin’” by Little Feat, we did “Georgia On A Fast Train” and we actually did one of my dad’s songs, “My Old Friend The Blues.”

Speaking of your father, you have a famously contentious relationship with your dad, Steve Earle. You’re going to be playing Tipitina’s this Sunday, and he’ll be playing the same venue about a month later. Does that motivate you to sort top him?

Oh no. Of course, my dad and I will always have a strange tit-for-tat kind of relationship. We love each other and we get along good, but we’re like brothers in the sense that, when we do decide to go after each other, we know all the right buttons to push. I think we’ll always have some form of petty dick-shit waving contest. We’ve always liked to let the other know what we’re doing and things like that.

Are you excited to be making it down to New Orleans? Does this city have a special place in your history?

I have a lot of family from around Baton Rouge and around Lake Charles and places like that. I think people don’t understand me because I don’t say “New Or-leans” where I come from. I say “Nawlins” the way all my coonass relatives did.

I had one of the worst acid trips of my life during Mardi Gras there, which was still amazing in a strange kind of way. I also came down and played on the streets down there when I was in my mid to late teens. I was interested in getting the full experience, and playing on the street in New Orleans is not for the faint of heart. You’ll get in just as many fights as anybody down there.

Can we go back to that horrible acid trip? Because Mardi Gras is usually a great setting for that sort of thing.

I was young, it probably was not the best substance. It probably wasn’t made too well, but I took it. I ended up getting separated from my friends and I kind of just stood with my back to a door in a doorway for about two hours on, unfortunately, Bourbon Street. I had no intention of being there, I just kind of wandered there while wandering aimlessly.

You’re still on the road in support of your last two albums Single Mothers and Absent Fathers. Just looking at the titles of these records, let alone listening to the songs, it seems like there’s a theme here. Is that the case?

Yeah, they were written at two different periods. I’d written Single Mothers already and, through complications with the record label, I ended up with a good amount of time between that record being finished and when it came out. That record should’ve been out a year before it was. I had the extra time and I wrote a companion piece because my place in life had changed. I wasn’t going to put out Single Mothers for a while, but I was convinced to do it. It wasn’t something that I had planned.

What life changes affected your decision to release that album?

I got married. And my life changed drastically, as it should when you get married. That’s just the way it is. Now everything ain’t all fucking good, and it never is in life. But I think the first record was a bit darker, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Then the second record says that you can see the light, but it’s about the size of a pinhole way off in the distance.

That’s how marriage changed your outlook?

Well, yeah. You’re not going to get married and have all your problems dissolve, that’s sure as shit. Ain’t everything going to be beautiful. There’s still going to be struggle in life. The difference is that you have somebody to do it with, and hopefully you have the same ideas of how to go about that.

Are you still living in Nashville these days?

No, I’m actually living in a tiny tiny village in Northern California. My wife and I aren’t telling people where it is. But I’m a quick trip to the Oregon border.

Even though you’re not in Nashville I wanted to get your thoughts on the current state of country music. On the one hand you have these pop stars that are churning out disposable music, and on the other hand you have guys like yourself, guys like Sturgill Simpson, who are putting out a different flavor.

It’s a dead art. What’s happening now with pop country, I don’t have any hope for any of that whatsoever. It’s just written off in my world. It’s written completely off. But we have a tight group of people who know and understand the music. They know how to write songs, they understand melody. The thing that I’m worried about now with the ones that are coming up that are younger than me is that we have to find a way to convince them that country music didn’t start with Gram fucking Parsons. He’s not the end all be all of country. I love those Gram Parsons records, but Gram Parsons was Gram Parsons because he understood Merle Haggard, not because he understood Gram Parsons. I think that there’s something that has to be said for making sure that the history is part of the music. I do see that slipping further and further away every year.

So not optimistic on the country music thing?

No, I’m not optimistic. It’s kind of like a radical movement that is being forced underground by a bunch of old fucking men that have been in power way too fucking long.

Sounds like every movement in all of history.

Yeah! It’s always the same bullshit. That’s the whole thing with the music business. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to make records. I don’t feel like you can stand for what I believe and still feel good about what you’re doing in the music industry to make a living. It’s like we’re all sitting around–you’re not making any money unless you get syncs–so we’re all sitting around waiting for fucking dish soap companies to call us. And I don’t want to sell fucking dish soap.

When you say you might to stop making records, does that mean you’re going to stop making music or you’re just going to stop trying to put things out through the recording industry?

Well, I’m definitely done with the music industry as it exists. Without question. The way that I feel about it is, since I make zero money off of record sales, why even package these records? Most people don’t. They don’t see a dime off their record sales. Why pay for these records to be packaged and waste all this fucking material that people are basically using for fucking wall-hangings these days? That’s a lot of money coming out of your life to have that record pressed. That’s part of your recoup. Don’t press the fucking records and give them away free on the god damned internet.

If the money comes out of shows anyway, that all makes perfect sense.

That’s how most everybody makes their money these days. Live shows or syncs. I’m not saying that if somebody wanted to use my song as a sync that I’m not going to allow it. But I don’t want to feel like sitting around waiting for that shit to happen.

When you say syncs, you mean commercials?

Yeah, if somebody wants to use your music in a commercial or something like that. I do have certain things I won’t do, tobacco, alcohol or military stuff. Governmental stuff of any kind. But that’s what we have these days. You have artists that you’ve barely heard of that make a quarter of a million dollars a year on syncs. That’s just not why we make music. At least I hope not.