Perhaps Rodney Crowell won�t become the next Dylan, but, as Pete Seeger has said, �All songwriters are a link in the chain.� And close to Rodney�s link in the chain are writers such as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury and Steve Earle, all of which Crowell shared many open mic nights and guitar pulls around Nashville in the early-Seventies.
�I think I beamed in as a pretty realized songwriter. There�s songs I wrote at the age of 21 or 22 that Willie Nelson still sings,� Crowell says.
Two of his earliest songs, �Bluebird Wine� and ��Til I Gain Control Again� were recorded by Emmylou Harris for her first album in 1974. They also led to Crowell joining Harris� Hot Band in 1975 as her duet partner and rhythm guitarist. �Thanks to the association with Emmylou, my reputation as a songwriter grew rather quickly,� he says.
Over the years his songwriting has continued to mature taking on a more autobiographical tone as well as touching on the political and spiritual, which he attributes to �Just staying alive.�
�My experience is the longer I live, the more vivid it becomes,� Crowell told me via phone from his Nashville home. �I think I used to write by accident, I still write by accident, but when it happens it seems to, I seem � I don�t know, the more you do it, the older you get, the more resource you have.�
�I try to lift the conversation up beyond Country, �cause, I certainly come from the country, but I don�t think there�s � there�s no real pathway in Country music for my sensibility,� he explains �And that�s ok, I understand that, you know. That�s a brand of entertainment.�
While Crowell�s music is marketed predominately to the Country market, he himself sees little relation between what he is doing and the current world of Country music. �I have edited Country out of my conscious. It is just not part of my sensibility and how I work because what is Country to me is Johnny Cash, it�s Hank Williams. In the sensibilities of our culture it�s become something else. So I don�t know that Country music as I know it exists. Maybe Willie Nelson is still out there doing it.�
Even so, he has not lost faith in all Country music. �I am producing a record with this singer and songwriter named Elizabeth Cook and she�s been a healing balm for me because it�s really Country music and it�s authentic and it�s true Country music and I�ve just been going �Thank Heavens for this girl� because she is reviving my faith that it still exists.�
Besides Cook, Crowell sees authenticity in �Bluegrass and certain Folk aspects where it still exists in its original form.� And authenticity is one of the things that make up Country music.
�It�s what�s at its heart. It�s the heart of it. It�s the language and it�s the sound and the sensibility.�
�Beautiful despair is why you lean into this world without restraint/
Cause somewhere out before you lies the masterpiece you�d sell your soul to paint/
Oh Brother�
Although signed to Warner Bros. in 1977, commercial success came several years later with the 1988 release of Diamonds to Dirt. Even with five number one singles, an unprecedented feat in Country music, Crowell didn�t rest on his laurels.
But attempts to recreate that success proved less than fruitful. He admits to laboring over songs rather than allowing them to come to him as he had in the past. �It�s always been my method for writing, although I think I had a spike of success for a while, commercially, that, just being a human being, I just tried to repeat it. But then I realized pretty quickly that I didn�t get there by design, I got there as a byproduct of the work that I did. Once I caught myself trying to recreate something that was a natural event, I realized, no, this is not how I write songs, this is not how it works for me,� he says.
That process of allowing himself to be guided by the songs has been evidenced to be successful by the body of work Crowell amassed over the years. It is this process that he believes he must strive to continue.
�That�s the process I always use. If I�m patient and I keep my skills pretty sharp and if I have the faith, these songs will tell me what they want to be. I can never tell them what I want them to be, because when I do, it becomes a Pop song as opposed to a real song,� Crowell says.
�Beautiful despair is slouching forward toward a past you might regret/
All to suck the marrow out of every magic moment you get/
Beautiful despair is playing safe when you were once a rebel child/
Knowing that tomorrow comes and all you�ve done is last another mile�
But it wasn�t until 2001, 23 years after his debut album and 13 years after his largest selling album, when he released the autobiographical The Houston Kid that Crowell felt he had achieved what he had been striving for as a recording artist.
�Even though I made a pretty big commercial record in the late Eighties with Diamonds and Dirt, it doesn�t satisfy my longing to create, that record didn�t satisfy my longing to create some kind of cohesive body of work that it took me until Houston Kid to get going with," he says. "And now I think, to varying degrees, I�ve been able to maintain what is the hallmark of that work.�
He followed that up in 2004 with the introspective Fates Right Hand to much critical acclaim. With The Outsider, released in 2005, Crowell continued his trilogy taking a look at the world around him. While not ruling out a return to the charts, he prefers to satisfy his own sense of songwriting rather than trying to fit into the current Country music world. �I am capable, and will probably again, write commercial songs for that market, it just seems to happen to me by accident and by design," he says. "But expressing my own sensibility is, I think, outside of what is considered entertainment in that world�
Even though not expressly writing for that market, he has seen success as popular artists such as Lee Ann Womack, Keith Urban and Tim McGraw pick up his songs and release them to the mass audience. This trend of big name mainstream artists cutting his songs extends back to the �70�s and �80�s where artists as diverse as Dolly Parton, the Oak Ridge Boys, Steve Lukather have had success with Crowell penned songs.
This allows Crowell to focus on the type of lyrics contained on The Outsider. With themes of love on the aptly titled �Say You Love Me� or �Glasgow Girl� to the more social themes of �The Obscenity Prayer� and �The Outsider.�
In recent songs such as �Don�t Get Me Started� and �We Can�t Back Down Now� Crowell comments on the current world situation. Although he has been met by some resistance, he feels he is not alone in his beliefs while others in the Country music world might not admit it publicly: �I think � that might be changing a little bit, you know, it�s like, what is it, the Emperor has no clothes? I think some things are getting stripped away.�
�It takes a certain sensibility and mindset for people to enjoy political observation, either way, in their entertainment sphere.� It was with that knowledge that he came to the songs of the album. �When I made the decision, well I don�t get to make decisions about what I write, what I write tells me what it wants to be. But I didn�t expect to be congratulated across the board,� he says.
Which is also why he feels more of an attraction to the Americana movement, he says, �It�s not a[n] as commercialized brand of entertainment, but it happens to be a brand of entertainment that allows, is a lot more friendly to, sensibilities like mine and might veer into political commentary.�
Crowell is currently finishing the writing process for his next album, which he will begin recording in May which will expand upon the vision of the existing trilogy.
�I think I should be able to deliver on it again and I think I will. It looks like to me that the writing has remained at a level that should be satisfying," he says. "But it doesn�t do any good to talk about anything other than the process of writing which is just a process of discovery and then revision. I�m in the writing� I�m going to start recording it in May, so I�m at the tail end of the actual language portion of the show.�
Lyrics from �Beautiful Despair�
