Rodney Crowell spent years out of his mind on drugs. But he has come out of the dark, the singer-songwriter tells Tony Clayton-Lea
There's a rule of thumb in meaningful country music that goes something like this: where there is disruption, complication, heartache and mess there is a great song. Rodney Crowell, the Houston-born singer, songwriter and producer, knows this. His face alone bears the hallmarks of a life lived in the shadows of reflective melancholy: crow's feet around the eyes, a furrowed brow, a pause-driven, almost regretful manner of speaking. Crowell readily admits to times of virtually crippling uncertainty, but he has rolled with the punches and learned more than he ever thought he would. Songwriting has helped, he says, put things in perspective.
The sun is shining, and Crowell is squinting in the glare. He says he is not interested in being described as country music's Renaissance man, yet the evidence is clear: songwriter, singer, producer, memoirist, soon-to-be-novelist. Add to this list former stay-at-home father - during a break that directed him towards his latest purple patches of The Houston Kid and his new album, Fate's Right Hand - and you've got a person who realises that accessing inspiration is the most important thing for him.
"Success?" he says, sipping a glass of water. "You know, here's the thing: I feel more successful now as an artist than ever before, because to me success as an artist is about realisation, and I feel more fully realised as an artist now than when people and record companies were throwing money at me and slapping me on the back. I felt I was a fully realised songwriter back then, but what was missing was the full palette as a recording artist. I think - and I can't be talked out of this, irrespective of how many people are attached to some record I made years ago - I have a much broader palette now. For the first 15 years I was doing music I was out of my mind on drugs. I don't think cocaine added one whit to what I was doing. If anything it made me have to claw my way through what I was trying to get to."
The turnabout arrived in the shape of prose writing, which is when Crowell began to create word pictures. The process helped him become a better self-editor. There was a time, he recalls, when he would go into a studio and record a dozen songs. "Some would be obviously good, and they'd be put on an album. Others would be half there, but I'd say they were good enough: that's not good self-editing. Now I would elbow the weak stuff out of the way and start on something else." Gradually, his facility with words saved him and his career. "Editing and revision naturally spilled over into what I was doing," he explains. "I began to welcome those long passages, and my aim was to make them flow, to be seamless with the music." Such ambitions were far removed from Crowell's beginnings. His introduction to music came via his father's bar band, in which he played drums from the age of 11.
He left Houston in the early 1970s, dropping a college education along the way. Next stop Nashville and a thriving singer-songwriter scene at a venue called Bishop's Pub. "When I arrived in Nashville, Bishop's Pub was a hub centre and Guy Clark was the mayor and curator of good writing. . . When the likes of myself, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams stumbled into that scene the discussions centred around not who was signed to this or that record label or who was making money; it was how do you write songs the way you do? How do you get the inspiration out there? It was a great time to be impressionable and young."
Success came in the shape of hits for him and Rosanne Cash, his former wife, along with production work for, among others, Clark and Sissy Spacek; his songs, too, have been covered by many, including Johnny Cash, Crystal Gayle, George Jones, Waylon Jennings and Patty Loveless. Between these and touring, Crowell was on the high end of the payroll. But duties of another kind interrupted his schedule: back in the late 1980s and early 1990s Crowell was a single father of four young girls. He found touring and recording put too much of a strain on his family. From 1994 to 2001 he put the brakes on his career, keeping live performances to a minimum and close to home.
Come 2001 and the urge to create got the better of Crowell. The release of the more confessional than usual Houston Kid proved a creative and critical turning point. "I was at home," he says, "and was generally feeling my way around making a record after some years, but it just didn't have anything new to it: it was a half-assed attempt at getting some songs on the radio. So one of my daughters said to me one day, when are you just going to be you? She explained that I should be writing songs based on the person I am around the house; who I really am and not who I think I should be. Also, I didn't realise how much respect there was for me, and \ I didn't trust myself."
Crowell's new album sees him consolidate his position as a veteran confessional songwriter. But it's come at a cost: lost years, lost love and the realisation that purity can come from the most unlikely dirty surfaces. He relates the story behind The Man In Me, a song on Fate's Right Hand. "I wrote that thinking about myself at my absolute bottom," he says. "It was a time when I was in the middle of a street, out of my mind on drugs and alcohol. I was waiting for a car to run over me, thinking that this would be good: let's get it over with."
There was a lot of self-hate back then, he says with a slight shrug, but it enabled him eventually to feel equal self-love. "Doubt, loathing, darkness: they're gifts, very valuable, extremely so for an artist - although I don't subscribe to the theory that you have to suffer needlessly. Usually, when you suffer it's a by-product of yearning for a higher form of yourself. As long as I've been an artist, from the beginning to now, I've yearned to see realised a higher version of the original gift I was given. Otherwise, why do it?"
Does he like the Rodney Crowell he is now? "Yes, very much so." He looks up at the sky, which is dotted with threatening clouds. "And that's knowing that, like the weather, my sunshine could be out but then as quickly there could be rain. But hey, it's weather and it'll pass."
• Fate's Right Hand is on DMZ/Epic. Rodney Crowell is at Whelan's, Dublin, on May 4th