Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell

OUTSIDER ART

Rodney Crowell Crafts a Thought-Provoking Masterpiece
Rodney Crowell has been on a breathtaking roll, beginning with 2001's raw gem, The Houston Kid, continuing in 2003 with Fate's Right Hand, and reaching full flower on The Outsider, a marvel of songcraft, stellar musicianship, and gripping performance. It's also the most political album of his career, as the Lone Star son turns his eye on a world gone mad with greed, narcissism, and the lust for power. At the same time, though, The Outsider has a Texas-sized heart, and in tender moments such as "Glasgow Girl" and "Beautiful Despair," Crowell sculpts works of enduring beauty. It's an album for the ages, even if the age he's singing about has, shall we say, issues. Prior to embarking on a national tour, Crowell took time out during a stopover in New York talk with Barnes & Noble.com's David McGee about the process that brought The Outsider home.

Barnes & Noble.com: Where did The Outsider begin for you?

Rodney Crowell: Actually it began with "Ignorance Is the Enemy." That's the first song I wrote. I had that one laying in the bushes for a long time, trying to figure out what I [could] do with something like that. I even tried it for Fate's Right Hand, before the evolution of it found John Prine and Emmylou [Harris] becoming the father-mother Voice of God. That's what I had; then it really started to kick in when I was in Europe last year, election year. I put myself into these little romanticized situations, like, Oh, here I am, an expatriate in an election year, Edinburgh, in a hotel with a great floor-to-ceiling window, watching pedestrian traffic. Reading the news and watching TV. Somehow out of that romanticized insinuation of myself as this expatriate artist abroad, songs started coming. It's almost like, this is the feeling, so send out an invitation to inspiration and see if it has anything for me.

B&N.com: This is a very political album. Was that an accident of the songwriting process?

RC: I don't think it was an accident of the songwriting process, because it was [my] intent. Your creative process follows the intent you have for...the tone or the narrative.... I was mindful that I wanted my narration in it, but sometimes I was adopting a first-person narrative that wasn't even my character, like in "The Obscenity Prayer," which is an irony really. I thought I was addressing the human condition more than politics.... It just so happened that in the course of creating the songs that I thought were speaking to the human condition, or about the human condition, it sort of politicized itself. I don't wait for those songs to tell me what they want to be; I don't try to tell them what I want them to be. That's sort of how "The Outsider" itself came to be. I kept looking at this notion about the media really selling this polarization -- left, right, conservative, liberal. It creates a tension and an antagonism, which is the backbone of any script for a film or television. So news is not about the news, it's not about journalistic integrity anymore; it's entertainment, at the expense of the integrity of journalism.

B&N.com: Epictetus figures in the song "Dancin' Circles Round the Sun (Epictetus Speaks)." He believed in a living a life of rigorous self-examination. What we have left of him, handed down from about A.D. 500, are mostly aphorisms. Several of the songs on The Outsider seem written in a style that would meet Epictetus' approval.

RC: Because the song "Epictetus Speaks" is aphorism after aphorism. My favorite one -- and I don't know if this is Epictetus -- but it's "What people think of me is none of my business." You hear that a lot around recovery circles and in [the realms of] mental recovery and self-help. It always really resonated with me.... So I projected onto Picasso and Miles Davis that they were the embodiment of that, as artists unencumbered by anything. Which I admire. Maybe their children or their life partners have paid a price for it, but from a distance it looks pretty romantic to me.

B&N.com: One thing that struck me about "We Can't Turn Back" is the Irish strain in the melody. There's a long history of the Irish influence on Texas music. At least one historian is sure there were Irish fiddlers playing at the Alamo when Santa Anna laid siege to it.

RC: My family is Scots-Irish blood, so I resonate strongly with both.

B&N.com: Did you hear the song that way as you were writing it?

RC: I heard the melody, and that's real Irish jig; that's the Irishness of it. That's the song I spent the most time writing.... I'm really talking about the spirituality of the human spirit -- "it's in the water / it's in the wind" -- and how it's really indestructible. When we shed these bodies I think that's timeless and goes on. That song to me is articulating the spirit, and sometimes articulating the spirit...it's like doing card tricks on the radio.

B&N.com: As you were sequencing, did you purposely did you put your cover of Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" second-to-last because it sets up the final song so well?

RC: To me those go together.... I'm following a Bob Dylan song with my own song and thinking it serves nicely. How's that? So you'll know who you're dealing with! [laughs] The Dylan track was in the can. It's something Emmylou and I did for a television show, Crossing Jordan. They wanted us singing together and each of us singing, so they could use my voice, her voice, and then us singing together. That's why we arranged it the way we did -- her key, my key, changing keys. Which I thought was jarring at first, but enough people around me craved it, and I thought, You're a fool if you don't put that on the record. So it was actually the first thing I had finished.

B&N.com: Do you see this as an optimistic album, ultimately?

RC: Yeah, I think purposely at the end, the line in "We Can't Turn Back" -- "May God forgive us our insanity and we'll keep pressing on / We can't turn back now" -- I took that to be a very positive statement and purposely ended the record with it. And that is another self-examination. You know what, man? I live the examined life. Sometimes I wish I could give it up.

August 2005