Weighing on his mind
Rodney Crowell documents brush with transient global amnesia
Country great Rodney Crowell has seldom seen a life experience that he couldn’t turn into a song. And that includes a truly unsettling experience that he had a year ago this week.
Crowell was having a normal day when his memory suddenly went missing for four hours, a condition known as transient global amnesia. Within days of his recovery he’d recorded “Transient Global Amnesia Blues” — a poetic, almost psychedelic song that was the first single from his current album, “Triage.” He’ll draw from the new album as well as his long back catalog when he plays City Winery for an afternoon show on Sunday.
“It was a psychedelic experience,” he said in a Zoom call this week. “I remember that it was October 9th, John Lennon’s birthday. I have no memory of those four and a half hours, but one thing I recognized was, ‘Ooh man, my brain is so scrambled that I’d better put this to good use.’ I asked my wife if she could bring my notebook to the hospital, because I needed it. I was thinking, ‘I don’t know this brain that’s in my head right now.’
“Normally I edit everything I write, but in this case the song was telling me, ‘Get out of my way, I’m coming in.’ Two days later I recorded it, and that feeling of disappearing from the face of the earth, and then coming back and still being me — that feeling was still with me. I hope I never have another episode of transient global amnesia, but if I knew I could come back and get another song, I might even volunteer.”
This is of course a long way from the songs that put Crowell on the charts in the ’80s. His biggest hit, the 1988 album “Diamonds & Dirt,” produced five No. 1 country singles, the most on any album to that time. He and country radio have long since separated, but he’s got no regrets.
“When I was younger, my natural instinct was to write the broad stroke love song that’s more boy-and-girl relatable. ‘After All This Time,’ ‘Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried,’ all those hit songs were more commercially viable. As I’ve aged, my sensibilities have become more singular, and I think I wisely chose not to go against that. So the songs became more about my spiritual process, or trying to tell stories about love and acceptance, rather than that really easy to identify ‘I love you, you don’t love me.’
“I ask a lot more of the audience that follows me now than I did then,” he said. “What I ask is, ‘Come and follow me down this singular path, I’m going to do my best to report back to you how I feel, and I hope that resonates.’ But if they need some broad strokes on relationships, I won’t be there. I’m on my third marriage now, and it’s the successful one. So I could make something up, but I don’t think that would be a very good use of my time.”
It’s no surprise that Crowell feels the need to reach deeper at age 71. “People might hear this album and think ‘Well, Rodney’s gotten a little bit philosophical.’ But from where I stand, time is more compressed than it was 20 years ago, I don’t have that much left. So that requires an assessment of who I am, where I’m going, and whether anything I do means anything. And my job was to make the language so grounded that even if you didn’t agree with me philosophically, at least you couldn’t fault me for not writing it well.”
The last song on the album, “This Body Isn’t All There is to Who I Am,” is explicitly about mortality. But it also ends with the words “Not yet,” which seems a way of closing on an upbeat. “Actually,” he said, “That was just my way of saying, ‘Get real.’ ”