For Texas legend Rodney Crowell, it’s always been about writing. His ability to craft songs that beautifully tell tales of life, love, loss and the search for truth and beauty has secured his place in songwriter history.
Crowell will be performing at The Heights Theater for a special solo performance on Tuesday, October 18 where he will be taking the audience into his new book Word For Word doing what he does best, telling stories and singing his songs.
“It is word for word isn’t it? I was happy when that title came to me,” says Crowell. “That’s what this is about, it always was. When I first got up to Nashville and got into a professional songwriting community I was lucky with the people I fell in with.”
As a young man in his early twenties, Crowell left his hometown of Houston and moved to Nashville where he did indeed fall in with the perfect crowd. Crowell was taken in by giants of songwriting, now considered poets and masters. Among them: Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Mickey Newbury.
In Word For Word, Crowell handpicked from hundreds of his songs to compile not only the lyrics but the backstories behind them along with personal photographs of him and his comrades and handwritten lyrics showing the creative editing process and frequent revisits to his work providing a real sense of how the sausage is made in his songwriting process.
“It came together pretty quickly,” says Crowell. “I chose all the songs. There were about 400 plus songs to choose from and I chose strictly to please myself. I put all of the hit songs maybe two thirds of the way through it so if you want to get to those, you gotta get through what I want you to deal with first.”
Crowell has always had many strengths, but his ability to write is what has made him one of the founding designers of the Texas and Nashville Americana sound. His latest album, the 2021 release Triage really shows where Crowell is at and his immense growth as a writer. It’s almost hard to believe that he could get any better but he did.
“I was quite pleased with that record when I finished it,” says Crowell. “I worked long and hard on writing that album in particular. My thought was, I’m going to make the writing so well done and so well crafted that even if you do not agree with me about the subject matter, at least you have to recognize that it’s well written.”
He describes finding inspiration in Leonard Cohen’s final releases as a high water mark for the quality of writing and level of maturation that he desired to achieve, describing Cohen’s final compositions as “bread crumbs” that the artist left before dying.
When asked if he considers Triage to be his own form of breadcrumbs left for fans, Crowell doesn’t put it past himself. “It might be, at least subconsciously. I’m in my early 70s now. I consider myself to be pretty bouncy for my age so I expect to be around for a good long while but time is what it is and a lot more has passed then is left and I see no need to not look that square in the eye for exactly what it is and try to do it as gracefully as I can.”
“I expect to be around for a good long while but time is what it is and a lot more has passed then is left and I see no need to not look that square in the eye for exactly what it is and try to do it as gracefully as I can.”
There’s no doubt that Crowell’s own experience with a medical phenomenon known as Transient Global Amnesia, a sudden rush of confusion to an otherwise healthy person, kicked his awareness of mortality into high gear.
Crowell describes feeling his brain scrambled in such a way while he was in the hospital for testing that he requested his wife bring his notebook so he could get some ideas down on paper. After seeing a black and white photograph that his daughter sent him of a sunflower on the River Thames, the words just spilled out of him.
“It was such a stark photograph that it just triggered me. I sensed where my brain was, it was an open portal and I just filled up about 4 or 5 pages in my notebook,” he says describing how he had the song done and recorded in just a few days. “It is really particularly a godsend in a way. I heard that track a couple of days ago when I was getting ready for this tour and I thought wow, that’s really good. You don’t usually get them to happen that quickly.”
Whereas his 2019 release Texas was a reflection on his home state, Triage spills with contemplations on the broader themes of life and now that Crowell has gotten that off his chest he is ready for a new and yet untitled project which he plans to release next year.
“I felt the need to express myself and articulate what I had to say as clearly and creatively as I could and then I got that out of my system and I went off to Chicago and made a record with Jeff Tweedy producing it. It’s a carefree and sweet album. After really dealing with the fact that I’m going to be facing the end of my life, once that work is done then I’m free to go off and be whimsical and have some fun.”
Rodney Crowell will perform on Tuesday, October 18 at The Heights Theater, 339 W 19. Doors open at 7 p.m, $38. Word For Word is available for purchase now.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
