RODNEY CROWELL’S NEW ALBUM,
For just a beat, Rodney Crowell sits silently. His eyes shrink into a knowing squint, he chuckles and then admits he’d do just about anything to write a good song.
Insights about his decades-spanning creative process lead to stories, which lead to further insights, and then stories again. He talks about “Forgive Me Annabelle,” a song from his latest record, “Close Ties,” which comes out Friday. He wrote the song about his “second ex-wife.”
Presented with a lyric Randy Newman wrote about a former spouse — “I’d sell my soul and your soul for a song” — Crowell goes quiet, as though he had been unmasked.
“Well, sure, I’m guilty of that,” he says following the pause. He sent a rough version of the song to singersongwriter Rosanne Cash, to whom he was married for 13 years.
“I told her, ‘It’s gonna ring personally at you,’ ” Crowell says. “She came right back and said she understood what I was doing. She also told me, ‘You should be easier on yourself.’ I thought, ‘No, no. The stakes have to be high in the song. I couldn’t have the perspective of hindsight to do this song earlier. I couldn’t have known the feeling: that taking yourself apart is as fair game as taking anybody else apart. It’s all on me in that song. It’s a way to examine myself in the context of an apology.”
He calls the song “a strange combination of truth and emotional fiction.”
Crowell drops in on KUHF on a bright, latewinter afternoon that falls during a two-night stand at the Main Street Crossing in Tomball. Crowell uses the time to present a few tunes from his new album.
He picks out another new song called “East Houston Blues” on a 1932 Gibson L-00 flat top guitar.
Eighteen years his elder, Crowell’s guitar bears some scuffs and scratches but remains a proud and distinctive black instrument with stylish slivers of white in its trim and pick guard. Crowell, on the other hand, has seen his salt-and-pepper hair go nearly full salt. The wolfish stare of his youth has softened into a wearier gaze, the look of a man who has outlived too many friends.
Tony Brown, the superproducer who recorded Crowell’s biggest-selling album — 1988’s “Diamonds & Dirt,” says, “He used to look like a movie star. Now he looks like an important figure, like William Faulkner. Like a guy whose face should be cast in stone.”
Considering Crowell’s company in the ’70s and ’80s — a group of fast-living singer-songwriters — he’s feeling fairly fit at 66, but for the blood-pressure medicine that forces him to guzzle glass after glass of water so he can sing. The author of “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” came out the other side of that life a little worn and a lot wiser. Since turning 50, he’s released six albums on his own and three collaborative recordings, as well as a memoir of his youth in the Third Ward and Jacinto City. Crowell didn’t dig into the dirt of his past looking for nostalgic jewels, but rather to uncover old rusted pieces of his history from which he finds meaning relevant to the present.
His excavation process continues to produce compelling music. Crowell’s not writing hits as he did in his youth, like in 1988, when half of the 10 songs on “Diamonds & Dirt” were No. 1 singles. But he’s writing better songs with perfectly chosen details, lively and flawed characters and stirring content.
“There are more things to consider and more pertinent things to consider,” Crowell says. “The considerations for the longest time, starting in junior high, was the opposite sex. And performance — whether it was writing or singing on stage — anybody who says it wasn’t designed to draw that attention is lying. You see animals in nature preening, all to get laid. But age starts to creep in, and you experience your own physical decay. Your peers experience their own physical decay. People I know who I’ve had 40-year relationships with are leaving the planet. So you have to focus on what’s meaningful.
“Those early songs, ‘Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight,’ those came from this sensibility of, ‘I need something to fix me.’ Particularly someone of the opposite sex. Or it could very well be someone of the same sex: My values on that are simple, just, ‘What do you need?’ But as you get older, you realize, ‘It would behoove me from this point on to figure out how to be graceful.’
“So the good old days are much better today, I believe.”
He cracks a crooked smile. “I do go on. I’m sorry.” Crowell’s use of character and setting projects “Close Ties” almost like frames from a movie. The cast includes his Uncle Fireball, who taught him the dubious skill of drinking and driving. He shows up in the song “East Houston Blues,” which takes Crowell back to childhood.
“Nashville 1972” specifically touches on his arrival in Music City, where he owned a dog named Banjo and hung out with other songwriters. There he became friends with Guy and Susanna Clark — songwriters and artists whose deaths in 2016 and 2012 shook Crowell. He calls the new “Life Without Susanna” “one of the emotionally true songs I’ve ever written.”
“Susanna got a backache and went to bed, and she didn’t get up,” he says. “It was a slow suicide. So that song is emotionally raw and hard and angry. It’s based on sorrow and pain.”
As Guy’s health began to fail, Crowell worked on “It Ain’t Over Yet.”
“Back when down on my luck kept me up for days,” Crowell sings, “You were there with the right word to help me crawl out of the maze. And when I almost convinced myself I was hipper than thou, you stepped up with a warning shot fired sweet and low across the bow.”
“Nashville 1972” covers Crowell’s beginnings as an artist. Soon after arriving in Nashville, his creative wheels got some traction. He caught the attention of rising star Emmylou Harris, who in 1975 recorded Crowell’s “Bluebird Wine” and, more notably, “Til I Gain Control Again,” which would become his best-known song. Harris at the time helped define a progressive strand of country: Those early albums also included Beatles covers. Crowell was a kindred spirit, interested in more than honky tonk, and Harris hired him to play in her Hot Band.
Some Hot Band alumni formed the Notorious Cherry Bombs, which included Vince Gill and Tony Brown, who, like Crowell, would go on to bigger things. Then in 1978, Crowell released his own debut, “Ain’t Living Long Like This,” which yielded the hit “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.”
After that strong start, he struggled briefly in the ’80s, refining a sound that was part country, part R&B, part rock ’n’ roll. Then he released “Diamonds & Dirt,” a masterpiece of red-eyed soul that made Crowell a star.
“My boss asked me, ‘Why do you want to work with him?’ ” Brown says. “Everybody failed to get a hit record on him. But I knew he was a cool dude who wrote great songs. That album took off like a rocket.”
Because of that record’s success, Crowell today finds himself in a curious place. He says he could sense the crowd at Main Street Crossing perk up when he dug deeper into that era for songs such as “She’s Crazy for Leaving” (co-written with Clark), “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried” and “Til I Gain Control Again,” which Brown calls “an all-time Top 10 country-music song up there with ‘Behind Closed Doors’ and ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night.’ ”
“I’ve got to remember that fine balance because I’m so focused on what I’m doing now,” Crowell says. “It was a good eye-opener. I cannot discount the first time I heard Jerry Lee Lewis singing ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’ I’m still there. And maybe the first time somebody heard me was ‘I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried.’ They beamed in then, and maybe they’re still there.”
Crowell continued to be successful into the ’90s, including with the roughedged “Life Is Messy,” the title an understatement in summarizing songs chronicling his divorce from Cash. From the split, Cash found the sound that would sustain her second act: a lyrics-first adult contemporary singer-songwriter. Crowell took a little longer to get there, taking a six-year break from recording before he released “The Houston Kid” in 2001 and putting his career back on the rails.
He’s been on a smooth run since, with five taut and thoughtful albums of his own and a pair with Harris. He’s grown comfortable looking back, not for nostalgia’s sake but to use his past to comment on his present.
“I equate nostalgia with sentimentality. And that’s not something I try to do when dealing with myself,” he says. “You can cringe when you see your younger self, even though it’s a process of burning away the insecurities in your life. But it’s easy to drift off into this constrictive persona, where you forget the person people are looking at has nothing to do with who you really are. So poking holes in that is healthy.”
Other times the stories came more easily, like those about his uncle Fireball. “I’ve used him twice in a song now. But it came from a natural logical place. I think if I try to squeeze him in a third time, you can throw a flag on me. So that’s done.”
Knowing what to leave in and what to leave out: That has been Crowell’s life’s work, more than making hits or building a song book. He credited writing “Chinaberry Sidewalks,” his 2011 memoir, with changing his approach to writing songs.
“The reason it took me so long to write that was it came at a point in my life where I went from broad strokes to essentials,” he says. “When I first started writing songs, I was drunk on verbiage. I could write ‘Moby Dick,’ with those sentences that go on for a page. But the process of learning self-editing has informed my work.”
Brown says Crowell now has generations of writers looking up to him.
“He’s a pure poet,” Brown says. “So he’s respected and revered by people like Garth Brooks and George Strait, as well as people who came after them. He’s in a class with the real greats like Hank Williams and Harlan Howard.”
Crowell says he’s willing to pass along his process, the same way some of his mentors tried to teach him, though he doesn’t always find committed takers.
“Occasionally, some artist will want to write with me,” Crowell said. “And I say OK, but I tell them, ‘Nowadays, I can spend two years or 20 years writing a song. And I’m not going to let it go until I’ve distilled it down to what it is.’ You’d be surprised how daunting that is to a young writer. You tell them it could take two years, and you get a ‘No, thanks.’ And there’s no guarantee at the end of two years you’ll get it. I’ve learned there’s real gratitude in being able to write one good line in a day. That’s my job. Keep doing that, and eventually you’ll crack the code.”