For nearly a quarter-century, Rodney Crowell has been hailed as a songwriter's songwriter whose finely detailed, character-rich songs have been recorded by such respected country, pop and rock artists as Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Linda Ronstadt and the Grateful Dead.
He's even had chart-topping success of his own over the course of 11 albums, peaking in 1988 when his breakthrough Diamonds & Dirt collection spawned a record five straight Number 1 country singles.
Through it all, however, the Texas native was haunted by the feeling that he still hadn't delivered the kind of landmark album that would deserve a place on a shelf with the best works of his personal heroes, including Cash and Bob Dylan.
He's had the germ of an idea for such an album in mind for almost half his life - a work that would draw on his childhood years as "poor white trash" in east Houston, the only child of an alcoholic musician father and a loving, abused mother. But lack of major-label support, coupled with his own trepidation about embarking on such a project, kept Crowell from ever truly swinging for the fences. Until now.
His new album, The Houston Kid, tells his story through largely autobiographical songs that unearth the heartache and humour he finds in his life, looking back through the prism of three or four decades' distance.
The Houston Kid, which came out earlier this year, is by far the most consistent and deeply personal album Crowell has recorded, rife with penetrating yet often non-critical observations about his parents and people like them, whose inadequacies often wreak havoc on those they love.
Crowell feels so strongly about the album, which he financed himself, that he is frequently re-routing his travel plans to talk to interviewers about it face-to-face rather than over the phone. It's part of the extra mile he's willing to go to demonstrate that The Houston Kid is far more than just the latest Rodney Crowell album. (In addition, there's a companion film documentary he's assembling, as well as a memoir he has started writing.)
What took so long? "Man, when somebody started writing cheques for me to make records, I was like, 'Yessuh ... I'll do everything I can to make you happy'," he says.
"The problem with that is that it took having nothing left to lose for me to finally have the scenario where I could do what I'd always wanted to do: to make a record where I could sit down with (anyone) and say, 'This is me'. I'm proud of this, and this is what I'm capable of doing'." He tells the story as a story, not as a shameful or boastful confession from his life. It's the perceptive artist, not a long-ago wounded child, who speaks easily, compassionately, even humorously about his parents' shortcomings, recalling them lovingly, if wistfully, three years after his mother's death and 13 years after his father's. "My parents were really good people, but they were crazy," Crowell (50), said after settling in at a corner table at a restaurant in nearby Santa Monica, barely two hours off a plane from Nashville.
"It was lack of education, insecurity and the fact that both were sons and daughters of sharecroppers. Wife-beaters. It's domestic violence now, but where they came from it was wife-beaters. Old drunk wife-beaters," he says. "My grandfather was a deacon in the church, led the singing, and he was a drop-dead alcoholic and a wife-beater."
He hasn't eaten all day, but still orders light food so he won't spoil his dinner with his wife of two-and-a-half years, singer-actress-painter Claudia Church, who's in Los Angeles studying acting. They're looking for a place to live, which will make Los Angeles home to Crowell for the first time since the late 1970s and early 1980s, after he left Emmylou Harris's Hot Band to launch a solo career.
The oldest song on The Houston Kid is The Banks of the Old Bandera, which he wrote in 1976, but the seed for the project was planted about 20 years earlier. Crowell, just five-and-a-half, was on a fishing trip with his father and grandfather when Johnny Cash's Walk the Line came on the radio of his dad's 1949 Ford and hit him so hard that it put him on the path for a life in music. He gigged for years in Texas honky-tonks in his father's band and left Texas for Nashville in the 1970s, chasing what turned out to be a false promise of a recording contract.
Stranded, he met maverick singer-song writer Guy Clark, who introduced him to the music of such country music outsiders as Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury and Billy Joe Shaver. He also found his way into Harris's acclaimed group, where she tapped his talents as a guitarist and a songwriter.
Others quickly followed her lead, from the likes of Waylon Jennings and George Jones on up through recent hits by Tim McGraw and Lee Ann Womack, whose recording of Ashes by Now is a Top 10 country single.
Signed by Warner Brothers to a solo contract in 1978, he left Harris's band and formed his own, the Cherry Bombs, whose membership included Vince Gill and Tony Brown, now president of MCA Nashville. This was also when he joined country's royal family by marrying Johnny Cash's daughter, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash. They divorced in 1992.
"I have a legacy of really fine songs, and I don't hesitate to say so," says Crowell. "But at the same time, as a recording artist, I thought I was spotty. I think the reason is that I always wrote with my heart, but often when I was making records, my brain got involved and derailed the whole thing. And I would be frustrated with (the results) too." Much of that frustration came from albums that tried unsuccessfully to repeat the success of Diamonds & Dirt. "The two he made with us at MCA, I must admit, were attempts to try to make him fit into the mainstream," says Brown. "There were pieces of magic on several cuts, but they weren't like this (new) one. This is Rodney back in true form." It is not, however, totally Rodney Crowell.
"I've been asked, 'Is this autobiographical?'," says Crowell. "I have evolved into this understanding that yes, this is autobiographical, and the autobiography is about the environment that The Houston Kid comes up in ... It's just not necessarily all (about) me." It's also not, he says emphatically, country music.
Still, he confesses that since he's been writing consistently from memory for The Houston Kid, rather than inventing scenarios that seem to make good song fodder, he's now firmly committed to the first method.
"These songs are out there, and when you do a good job, when you've got your craft working, when you've studied it, and you get it all, they're poignant and they live a long time. And I've found that the ones you just make up, they don't last. You've gotta go hunting for those that already exist."
--(Los Angeles Times)
Rodney Crowell plays The Shelter, Dublin tonight; The Lobby, Cork tomorrow night; and R≤is∅n D·bh, Galway on Monday night