June 2017

From struggling songwriter to country superstar to veteran outsider, Rodney Crowell has followed his muse on a 45 year journey that has finally led him to a place where he feels like he’s doing his best work. Of the 700,000 people living in Nashville in 1972, probably a good 7,000 were songwriters, most of them looking for a break. So, when a 22-year old kid from Crosby, Texas, named Rodney Crowell made it 7,001, no one took much notice. Crowell believed that he was hitting Music City with his ticket already stamped. “I came to town thinking I had a record deal and the opening slot on a Kenny Rogers and First Edition tour,” he tells Country Music. “None of which turned out to be true. That’s a long story. So, in the beginning, I was sleepwalking. As I started to wake up to the songwriting thing inside myself, the ambition wasn’t anything but to write a song good enough that Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt would think was okay. They were already there, close to the street. I had access to a gathering of songwriters at a house on Acklen Avenue that I shared with Richard Dobbs and a guy named Skinny Dennis. So I was getting educated.” Eight months later, Crowell caught his first break, courtesy of guitar picker extraordinaire and country star Jerry Reed. “Jerry and his manager heard a song I wrote and played at a happy hour at the Jolly Ox, and they recorded it the next morning,” Crowell recalls with a smile. “Jerry paid me 100 dollars a week to write songs in 1973. That’s all I needed. I could keep a roof over my head, and have something to eat, and spend all my time writing. He had a studio and an office where I would go to hang around. I would just watch him and Chet Atkins show each other guitar licks. Chet was there all the time, along with the likes of Paul Yandell, Buddy Spicher and Vassar Clements. I was a kid and I’d just sit quietly and observe all these incredible musicians. That was a gift. “I remember when I went to the studio to teach the first song to Jerry and the musicians,” Crowell continues, “I walk in and there was nobody there but Chet Atkins. I sat with Chet for 20 minutes while he explained the console to me. He said, ‘Did you write this song we’re recording?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ What I wanted to do was sneak out and find a pay phone and call everybody I knew!” Drink Your Fill & Blow U All Away A lot of the romance and wonder of Crowell’s early days is lovingly documented on the walls of his home studio in Franklin, Tennessee, where we meet for our conversation on an unseasonably warm February day. There’s one photo of Rodney’s daughter Caitlin at 11 months, sitting on the lap of her grandfather Johnny Cash, and a wedding day snap with Rosanne Cash. Another photograph shows Rodney in 1977 with Hot Band drummer John Ware, at the Rembrandt Museum, and there is also a beautiful vintage poster of the Ryman Auditorium. His storied history also finds its way into many of the songs on his latest album Close Ties, especially Nashville 1972, I Don’t Care Anymore and the poignant Life Without Susanna. The latter is about Susanna Clark, one of the most important women in Crowell’s creative life. He says: “Susanna was a muse – a poet, and a really great songwriter and painter. She embodied the goddess as artist. So, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clarke, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Richard Leigh, Dick Feller and myself all, in one way or another, played to Susanna as an audience of one. Townes probably came closer than any of us to dreaming those songs the way that Susanna would receive them. Your songs had to be really poetic for her to receive them. She really saw it as poetry. Whenever she received a song that I had written kindly, there had to be some truth to it and it had to resonate as poetry.” Emmy the Great By the mid-’70s, Crowell was making more connections.He was invited to join Emmylou Harris’ famous Hot Band, playing rhythm guitar alongside Albert Lee, Glen D. Hardin and John Ware. He also became one of Harris’ favourite songwriters, with her cutting definitive versions of early Crowell classics like Bluebird Wine and Till I Gain Control Again. “Emmylou started recording my songs and shortly thereafter, a lot of other people did, too,” says Crowell. “People were listening to Emmy’s records and then saying, ‘Well, who’s this guy writing this stuff?’ – Emmy changed my life.” A hidden gem that Crowell wrote for Harris in 1979 was Here We Are, a duet she recorded with George Jones. With its spare, direct language and elegant melody, it seems a world away from the more dense lyrical songs he’s writing today. But it illustrates his influences and the depth of his songwriting toolbox. Crowell says: “I cut my teeth on Hank Williams, and that kind of very simple language. That was back in the day when all of these things were new. Hank was writing ‘Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you…’ which is still a great line, no matter what time in the existence of mankind. “It was so very simple, and those very simple, almost Hallmark card sentiments were so new then that it was a primer for how to do it. Then The Beatles came along and scrambled it up. Then Bob Dylan introduced Rimbaud to songwriting. Suddenly the paradigm had shifted into this broader verbiage. To write with that kind of simplicity became harder because it had been done so well. “I wrote Here We Are with a purpose. I was having an extra-marital affair during my first marriage and it was kind of about that. It was easy to write,