There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.
Rodney Crowell
Since 'Houston Kid,' I've got a pretty good track record. Before that, I wrote some hit songs, but I didn't come into my own until I was about fifty. Before that, I had bursts of talent.
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.
Collaboration allows me to challenge myself to find a new passion for music.
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 don't think I can create anything of lasting value unless it comes from the heart.
I have declared my loyalty to Americana.
My preference for female company is based for the most part on the fact that women are more self-aware than men, in my experience.
My people came from western Tennessee and western Kentucky.
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 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.
I wouldn't go as far to say that anything that I've done is timeless.
So much of inspiration comes from collaboration with other musicians.
For me, my career has never been about what I've done. But it's been about becoming, achieving, and pushing myself further.
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.
Townes Van Zandt ranks alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. He inspired so many songwriters to shoot for something that's timeless.
Pretty much any artist that I know of that has found that mentor status, if they're generous and okay to bestow a bit of mentor-type information, it's do what you feel, not what you think.
I feel like I'm a realized artist, but hey, the good news is I can get better, and I'm going to continue to aim for that.
Underfunded, underwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.
To me, Hank Williams is the first rock-and-roll star.
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.
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.
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.
My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.
My mother met my father at a Roy Acuff concert.
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.
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.
In my 15 minutes of fame around 'Diamonds and Dirt,' it was not a healthy time for me because of my insecurity.
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.
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.'
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.
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.'
I was an only child.
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.
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.
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.
Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I'm not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's a gift that we get to do the work that we do to call ourselves artists.
'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'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.'
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.
Have I felt misunderstood by Music Row at times? Of course.
Sometimes, the better writing comes when the song speaks through me and tells me what the song wants to say.
Strangely enough, I've become a Metallica fan.
I can't make a perfect record. When I try to, I bleed all the feeling out of it.
