A Conversation with Rodney Crowell – HuffPost 4.15.14

Mike Ragogna: Rodney, can you give a tour of your new album, Tarpaper Sky?

Rodney Crowell: It started with conversations with Steuart Smith who is a guitar player who normally plays with the Eagles. They actually bought him away from me some years ago. But we’re really good friends, and he’s a great conversation, very smart, very well-read. He’s my friend that reads Proust. So we started talking about landscape painting and comparing Van Gogh and Cezanne–a pretty high and mighty conversation–and I said, “You know, we should collaborate on a record and we should think of songs as landscape paintings,” not necessarily trying to go pastoral with that, but trying to find a way to get that study of a subject matter into song. That was the beginning, so I called a team of musicians together that I recorded with in the late eighties and I discussed with them and said, “I don’t want to go back and do what we did in the late eighties, but let’s find out what we can do together now and let’s start by unplugging the headphones and recording a record all live. Let’s not produce a record, let’s perform a record.” That first day was a train wreck because those musicians play on about a thousand records a year and were a little disoriented, but by the second day they understood it and had found the way to listen to each other in the studio and not try to kill the instruments–to play the instruments subtly. You’d be surprised at how big the recording gear will make a soft sound come out of the speakers. Once we caught on to the sounds we were making, from there on we were rolling. Pretty much everything you hear with the exception of a fiddle here or there and a couple of background voices was what we produced on the floor.

MR: You of course have major production chops, and you’ve produced so many people. You’ve had an eye on making this type of sound for a while now. KIN has that, and the record you did with Emmylou Harris, Old Yellow Moon has that. This new record seems like a continuation of that thought.

RC: Well it actually started with a record I made called Sex And Gasoline. That was the first record where I threw away the production role. Joe Henry produced it and I sat in the studio and sang my songs and played my guitar with some really fine musicians and I got up and left and said, “Hey, mail me this record when it’s done.” Now for a producer who’s sweated bullets over every note for twenty years plus, I got the record in the mail and I said, “Good God, this sounds great.” It’s because I didn’t hate it by the time I got it done. I had bowed out at the right moment. I started following that procedure and for me it was about a performance, not a production. 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. That’s been my mantra since. I kind of fell on that a little bit–most of the record I made called The Houston Kid I was operating from that mindset, but I sort of fell back into production somewhat and enjoyed it. But it’s my intention to continue on this path because I’ve produced music and now I’m most interested in performing music.

MR: It seems to me with the album KIN, you focused so much on the literary approach while collaborating with Mary Karr, that you had become so conscious of performance and nuance–something that falls by the wayside when you have a larger, less personal production.

RC: I like the word “nuance,” and I think you’re right. Taking something away and replacing it with a better–question mark–version of that track when it first went down, you’re starting to clone music. And the process of working with Mary where we very consciously worked from songwriter/poet–I said, “Mary, don’t try to understand the songwriting aspect of this, bring the poet and then let’s make the poet work in these songs and when I need to push the songwriter choices forward, I will. But for the most part, let’s try and make the poetry work.” Now, the poetry doesn’t work all the time in song because the phrasing that you get on the page doesn’t have to match a beat, but I do think that performance is more about nuance.

MR: Tarpaper Sky, what a great title. But it also includes fantastic titles such as “Jesus Talk To Mama” and “The Flyboy & The Kid,” and I’m curious about what inspired the former. Better yet, can you take us on a tour of the album?

RC: Well, you were asking about “Jesus Talk To Mama,” though I live something of a spiritual life, it’s not a Christian-based belief system that I thrive behind. However, my mother was a get-down speaking-in-tongues Pentacostal church of God, god-fearing goodwoman. When she was alive she was constantly goading me, “Son, you have this gift for writing songs, why don’t you write a sacred song?” A sacred song, or a gospel song–I like the word “Sacred.” But I was down in Australia kind of lonely and alone out south of Melbourne and I had a day and I started pondering and I said, “You know what, I’m going to write that song.” I had written a couple other sthat would qualify but I wanted to write one specifically to her. Really kind of a love song to my mother. I kind of suppressed my true beliefs and feelings to offer to her what she needed from me. That set the narrative for me, that I had nothing to prove about any grounds that I stand on spiritually, but to write a love song, like a Hallmark page from the bible for my mother.

MR: Wonderful. By the way, what a cool approach “Fever On The Bayou” takes in that last verse. So you have some pretty vulnerable moments on this record, like in “God I’m Missing You.”

RC: I’m a vulnerable guy. It might be an interesting for you that the song “Fever On The Bayou” was something the great Will Jennings and I started twenty-five years ago. We had that melody and we were keenly aware that we were borrowing all of the Cajun cliches that had been hanging in the culture for eons and we were assembling them. We kind of got two verses that we could stand behind but we could never come up with a third verse. We were on it for years. Will just said, “You know, maybe we can’t squeeze out three verses of that kind of language.” Eventually, I gave up on it, and it sat until 2012 when I was in an airport with a musician friend and we were talking about a movie I’d seen called Spanglish. He said, “That’s like Franglais.” I said, “Franglais?” and he said, “It’s French and English.” I said, “Oh, that’s Cajun!” That’s really what the Cajuns have done, they’ve taken both languages, merged them together and killed the language. The lightbulb went off in my head and I said, “Ah, that’s what the last verse can be.” I worked on construction crews with Cajun guys who spoke that patois all the time, and none of it really made sense. I’d ask them, “What are you saying?” and they’d tell me and would be part English and part Cajun French. I sat down and did a little research and found some French words that I knew and some French words that I could rhyme and I put themtogether and kind of had a continuation of cliché, really, but it completely worked. I said, “Ah, now I’m in Picasso territory.”

MR: Nice, bringing it back to the artistic references. I also wanted to ask you about some of the guests you recorded, such as Vince Gill, John Cowan, Ronnie McCoury, Shannon McNally, and you also have intense players including Jerry Douglas. But this is your musical crew, right? You’re very tight with these people.

RC: Yeah, well people ask me why I live in Nashville, especially my Texas friends who have a thing about Nashville. I don’t live here because of the corporate music industry, although I respect it because it’s put a lot of children through college. But it is a highly creative community and I can pick up the phone and get a hold of Béla Fleck or John Jorgenson or Jerrry Douglas or Stewart Duncan. To me, they define genius and they’re generous and love a good collaboration, so I live in Nashville because of the collaboration.

MR: You mentioning that brought Goat Rodeo to mind, where even Yo-Yo Ma joined in for the fun. Rodney, what advice do you have for new artists?

RC: Follow your heart. 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. It’s like putting on a suit of clothes and standing in front of the mirror and saying, “Do I look good?” You know those best days are when you get up and throw on your favorite pair of Keds and a good shirt and a jacket that’ll keep you warm and maybe drag a comb through your hair. That’s, generally speaking, what we love, and I think that’s the approach of the artist. And I would say work at it daily, day-in and day-out. Start your morning working on your craft.

MR: You’ve been successful, you’ve had many hits as Rodney Crowell and with others covering your originals. But even with all this success, do you ever feel you’re still, in some respects, a new artist?

RC: Well, my wife was out of town a couple days ago and we were talking on the phone and she said, “How’s it going?” and I said, “You know, I think I can get better at this.” And I really do! It was sort of a mild epiphany. I wouldn’t call it a knock your head off epiphany, but I said, “I can get better at this,” and I know I’ve been getting better at it for twelve or fifteen years and I feel confident that my competence has grown a lot over that time period. 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. When I listen to Ray Charles’ “You Don’t Know Me” or “Hit The Road, Jack,” or if I listen to “Into The Mystic” by Van Morrison or “Smoke Stack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf–or anything by Lightning Hopkins–I’m not saying I want to do that, but I’d say I want to find that in myself. That’s what I want to bring forward.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne