Rodney Crowell – Preachin’ to the choirs
“I delivered my didactic ideas in a scenario that is basically a barroom argument,” he points out. “And I, the narrator, even go so far as to say I’m a drag when I’ve had a few drinks. That was conscious on my part, to have a little valve to deflate some of the self-importance of what I’m saying.”
Even die-hard fans may require a few listens before they warm to “Ignorance Is The Enemy”, as daring a high-wire act as Crowell has executed in his career. A chorus including Crowell and Buddy & Julie Miller offers up a prayer to God asking for wisdom and forgiveness, and a flux of angels to fill the helpless with faith and power. In between, Harris and Prine, speaking from the POV of the Almighty (“The mother/father principle is my part of understanding of what God is,” says Crowell of the dual casting), warns mortals that “Ignorance is the enemy/And it fills your heart with lies.”
“To me, it was an exercise in high-minded theater,” Crowell says. The song was originally slated for inclusion on Fate’s Right Hand, but he shelved an early, stripped-down version because it was too straightforward. “It didn’t capture that slight ring of global community,” he explains, “which I felt was what I should try to achieve with that song. That’s what I tried to chase down with it.”
“I don’t mind addressing where I may have succeeded or not succeeded in this case,” he confesses. People with opinions he holds in the highest regard have told him they feel the song goes too far, but others have weighed in with nothing but awe and wonder. “That’s all continuing our conversation about getting too didactic,” he suggests. “It’s a fine line, and sometimes you can lose it.”
Whether or not listeners identify with the unconventional track, Crowell sounds content with the experiment’s outcome. “Something I started doing before I made The Houston Kid, and that I still follow, is pursuing things I’m afraid of. Am I afraid to try and create a piece of music where I have Emmylou and John Prine as the voice of God, with this prayer going on? You bet I’m afraid of that…so I’m going to try and do it.”
Last year, the contemporary Rodney Crowell had to spend some time getting reacquainted with his younger incarnation, when Sony called upon him to help assemble a sixteen-track career retrospective as part of its Essential series. “The compromises that I ultimately made weren’t that daunting,” he says, though admitting that “the true collection that I would have put together wouldn’t have very many identifiable songs from the commercial period. My taste in my own music would be too eclectic to be useful to the record company.”
The anthology was bookended by new versions of two songs — “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” and “‘Til I Gain Control Again” — that date from Crowell’s ’70s stint as a member of Harris’s backing ensemble, the Hot Band. The songs had previously appeared on her albums as well as his own early solo outings for Warner Bros. The motivation to redo them was primarily economic — “It turned out to be less expensive to make new recordings of the old songs, rather than pay an override to use the original versions,” Crowell reveals — although aesthetics also came into play.
Although he still likes his 1978 rendition of “I Ain’t Living Long Like This”, he was happy to take another crack at “‘Til I Gain Control Again”. “I didn’t like my vocal performance” on the 1981 original, he says. “I recorded it at one of those times when I wasn’t singing very much, so that I had no elasticity, and no tonal quality in my voice that I ever wanted to listen to again. The thing about my voice is, it’s the most pleasing to me — and I’ve got to listen to it more than anybody else — when it’s at the point where it’s been used and is tired.”
Back in those days, Crowell admits he often let input from others color his decision-making, such as releasing a vocal take he didn’t love. “Before, when The Man was paying for the records, I felt indebted to The Man, and I tried to think through his eyes and ears, wondering, ‘What can I do to help him make his money back?’ That’s not a good way for me to work. It’s too close to the sharecrop mentality.”
That’s hardly the case today, as Crowell celebrates on the new track “Dancin’ Circles Round The Sun (Epictetus Speaks)”, wherein he praises visionaries like Picasso and Miles Davis, who doggedly followed their own muses regardless of what outsiders thought. What prompted the shift in attitudes? Well, for one thing, The Houston Kid and Fate’s Right Hand were completely self-financed. Even The Outsider was made out of his own pocket, before his current label (Columbia, again) reimbursed him. “It’s funny how quickly other people’s opinions don’t matter when you’re the one writing all the checks,” he says.
“There is something that resonates with me, more and more, as I see a new audience developing for what I’m doing,” observes Crowell as the interview winds down. “I have this one-word mantra that keeps repeating inside me, and that word is ‘relevancy.’ What do I do to be relevant? The only way I can break it down is to be as open and true as I can to my own vision. If I maybe get close to bringing it to life, then with that, perhaps there is some relevancy.”
Having clocked in more than 30 years as a professional musician and songwriter, Crowell continues to offer a fascinating study in contradictions. He is “the lapsed Buddhist son of a Pentecostal, tongue-speaking mother” who often has to explain to his own children that his railings against the far right are not meant as a dismissal of “the beauty of the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
And then there’s this irony: Though Crowell is of the opinion that deregulation, and the blurring of lines between big business and the government, is of far greater concern than separation of church and state, his new album is being released by a big corporation that embodies many of the practices he decries in his lyrics.
“I don’t know how to square that one up,” he admits. “Hell, I’m just making records and trying to communicate with people.”
ND contributing editor Kurt B. Reighley is a Seattle-based writer, DJ and entertainer who recently waited in line for more than half an hour to congratulate Dierks Bentley on having the good taste to open a concert with Rodney Crowell’s “I Ain’t Living Long Like This”.