Top 60 Rodney Crowell Quotes

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.

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.

The chances of getting Townes to like it were very remote. When I wrote ‘Til I Gain Control Again,’ Townes Van Zandt sort of nodded. And I thought, ‘Yes!’

I’m a vulnerable guy.

Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I’m not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.

To me, Hank Williams is the first rock-and-roll star.

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.

The ’90s weren’t my finest years artistically. I wrote some good songs in there, but in terms of my vision of getting the paint on the canvas, that was not my best time. I didn’t like the fact that I had fallen into mediocrity.

When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that anything that I’ve done is timeless.

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’m a pretty successful songwriter and known in some circles, but I didn’t think the story of my career was of any real entertainment value.

I concern myself with timelessness all the time. If you’re not swinging for museum quality, your mind is not in the right place. It doesn’t mean you get there, but at least it’s the intent.

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.

Collaboration allows me to challenge myself to find a new passion for music.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren’t produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.

Singing duets is instinctive, intuitive.

When I was doing something on someone else’s dime, I was inclined to try to anticipate what they wanted. I knew that wasn’t what an artist was supposed to do. In funding my own music, I found my voice.

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.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that writing ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’ was an exercise in combined musical influence, mostly that of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan – artists no one has ever heard of.

Underfunded, underwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.

My people came from western Tennessee and western Kentucky.

There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.

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.

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.

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.’

I will say this: I’ve always sort of had maybe an inflated sense of my ability to sequence songs in a narrative flow.

Sometimes, the better writing comes when the song speaks through me and tells me what the song wants to say.

I made this record in the late ’80s called ‘Diamonds and Dirt,’ and it was a big hit. It had five No. 1’s, and it was my commercial peak, really.

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.

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.

I have declared my loyalty to Americana.

‘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?

Conversation is a really good way to get things done.

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.

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.

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.

As an artist, one of the ingredients to doing good work is self-awareness, and that’s something I cultivate.

That young man that I was in 1988 – I was insecure. Besides making good music, I wanted to be cool; I wanted to be accepted and stuff.

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’m very grateful that I was given the ability to create.

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.

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.

I don’t think I can create anything of lasting value unless it comes from the heart.

As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style.

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.

For me, my career has never been about what I’ve done. But it’s been about becoming, achieving, and pushing myself further.

I can stitch a song together in about an hour anytime you want, but it won’t have the depth.

It’s a gift that we get to do the work that we do to call ourselves artists.

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.

Whether they are actual poets or their music exemplifies a poetic sensibility, generally speaking, the Americana artist shuns commercial compromise in favor of a singular vision. Which resonates with me.

As a young man, I craved fame. I was trying to fix holes in my soul that were there from childhood.

When I write a song with somebody else in mind, it’s putting the cart before the horse. The way I write best is when I allow the song to tell me what it wants to be.

Have I felt misunderstood by Music Row at times? Of course.

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.

I’ve said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

Favorite country singer of all time… Hank Williams… Well, then there’s Willie Nelson. Can I have three? I can’t do one. Then if I have three, I’ll need five. Hank Williams for sure. Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

My mother met my father at a Roy Acuff concert.

As a creative individual, I really go out of my way to avoid the corporate scene in terms of songwriting. If the first question is how much money is it going to make, I’m going to be in trouble anyway.