As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.
— Rodney Crowell
I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.
In my 15 minutes of fame around 'Diamonds and Dirt,' it was not a healthy time for me because of my insecurity.
The chances of getting Townes to like it were very remote. When I wrote 'Til I Gain Control Again,' Townes Van Zandt sort of nodded. And I thought, 'Yes!'
I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.
I grew up poor in East Houston. I used to be ashamed of it, but I'm not anymore. It's kind of a badge of courage now.
I can't make a perfect record. When I try to, I bleed all the feeling out of it.
Have I felt misunderstood by Music Row at times? Of course.
Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.
Townes Van Zandt ranks alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. He inspired so many songwriters to shoot for something that's timeless.
When I go back to seek inspiration - whether it be from Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, the Beatles, Hank Williams, Ray Charles or Bob Dylan - it's from the performance. Those artists are in the studio playing their instrument and singing. There's no going back and redoing the vocals.
I don't know if I owned a toothbrush until I was 19, maybe. I didn't come from stock that placed any importance on the toothbrush. But a couple of girls I met changed that. And I would do anything to get a girl to pay attention to me long enough that I could feel good about myself.
Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I'm not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.
In the 74 years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called this crooked old Earth, my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn't fair for this awkwardly glib, yet deeply religious woman, would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival.
There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.
My father took me to see Hank Williams on December 14th, 1952. I was two years and four months of age. And I remember a little cool eddy of hair hitting my cheek, and I remember the smell of his hair oil, and I remember the mingling tonality of the small talk before the show started. Those are my memories.
My mother was apt to fall out on the floor and start speaking in tongues. Actually, it was a great performance... It was great theater. As a 5-year-old, I understood that, although it scared me and there was a little part of me going, 'I don't know about this. This seems over-the-top to me,' at the same time, I did understand that this was passion.
Underfunded, underwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.
Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.
I made this record in the late '80s called 'Diamonds and Dirt,' and it was a big hit. It had five No. 1's, and it was my commercial peak, really.
When I write a song with somebody else in mind, it's putting the cart before the horse. The way I write best is when I allow the song to tell me what it wants to be.
Favorite country singer of all time... Hank Williams... Well, then there's Willie Nelson. Can I have three? I can't do one. Then if I have three, I'll need five. Hank Williams for sure. Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
Conversation is a really good way to get things done.
Strangely enough, I've become a Metallica fan.
For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.
'The Outsider' is a culmination of a lot of things I've been working diligently toward as a recording artist. Hopefully it will render my past pigeonholing obsolete while positioning me more solidly as a socially conscious American singer/songwriter. Wouldn't that be entertaining?
I don't think that 'The Weight of the World' is all about politics. It's like, how the environment and how the natural topography of this planet would ever fall into a political division, debate, just leaves me confused.
The more I'm dedicated to this work, the more I'm able to satisfy my deep need to create. And that's a pretty good thing. If you take half-decent care of yourself, that can propel you on into productive later years.
Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.
My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, 'Put your foot here, and you kick there, and you play this, and this is the high hat.' And Friday night, I was playing in a honky-tonk.
My family was very poor. Strangely, though, my father was an enigma in that he was always working. He was not a ne'er-do-well. He wasn't lazy. He just couldn't hold on to money. It just, it was an enigma for him. He just, his pockets were always empty.
I admired Mary's work very much. From the time someone gave me 'The Liars' Club,' I immediately went into a world where I grew up. And I remember, when I finished the book, I actually thought, 'You know what, I need to write songs with her.'
The way I made 'Diamonds and Dirt,' which had all those hits in a row, was that I was just making a record. It was just the one that rolled up in my natural process, and it happened to be commercial.
Violence was very much a part of my mother's upbringing - a little less so with my father's, but my father was an angry man when he was young. He was angry and frustrated and had no idea how to channel anger.
With 'Fate's Right Hand,' I think I reached a level of completeness in forming and articulating ideas at around the same time I reached a place where I could match it with my singing voice. It was a kind of coming together.
Life can be either of two things: What it makes of you or what you make of it.
When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.
I think, in the middle of the '90s, I made a couple of records where I tried to figure out what I thought the radio wanted from me. They weren't my best records by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't take me too long to figure out, 'Whoa, back up, dude. Just go back to following your heart, and it will all be OK.'
Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.
I've finally figured out how to make a Rodney Crowell record, and that's let it be, leave the mistakes.
Sometimes, the better writing comes when the song speaks through me and tells me what the song wants to say.
I've often said to young songwriters when they want to write with me, 'Let's take a stab at ten songs, and we might get one really good one.'
It's a gift that we get to do the work that we do to call ourselves artists.
When you're younger, love is this magic thing where the heavens open up. You live 40 years past that, you realize sometimes the heavens close down.
I wouldn't go as far to say that anything that I've done is timeless.
I cannot say I'm a poet. That's for someone when they take in consideration where they can bestow 'poet' on. I can't do it. But I would be disingenuous if I didn't say that my intention is poetry.
My mother's a very spiritual woman, and I think Pentecostal religion, Bible religion, was very important to her because it gave her a context for a very spiritual approach to life.
I was an only child.
You start creating art through the people that are looking at you, trying to route it through their sensibilities or their eyes, and then it's not you anymore.
I never allowed writer's block to be a reality. I framed it up for myself early on. I said, 'OK, if I'm not writing, the well is just filling up. I'm going to be patient with this.'
