Justin
Townes Earle's debut EP, last year's Yuma,
was a thrown-together affair, but it was a conscious component of his
development.
"The whole point of Yuma was for me to go back to what I felt was the roots of being a singer/songwriter, which was back to Woody Guthrie ... an acoustic guitar and the song," Earle said in a phone interview last week. "That's something I felt like I needed to do to make the musical progression work properly. I'm very deliberate about what I do musically.