A biography for Rodney Crowellhasn’t been written yet.
“My mother met my father at a Roy Acuff concert.”
“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 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.”
“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 can stitch a song together in about an hour anytime you want, but it won't have the depth.”
“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.”
“I'm very grateful that I was given the ability to create.”
“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.”
“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'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.”
“To be earning a living as an artist at any time, any place is kinda the ultimate gift that you can receive from the universe, and I'm very much aware of that. I get to do exactly what I want to do.”
“In my 15 minutes of fame around 'Diamonds and Dirt,' it was not a healthy time for me because of my insecurity.”
“Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I'm not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.”
“I'm under-appreciated, of course.”
“I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.”
“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.”
“People ask me, 'What is the mystique of the Texas songwriter?' Well, we ran barefoot from March until November. I think there's something about being a barefoot kid that gets you closer to the place - you take root.”
“I will say this: I've always sort of had maybe an inflated sense of my ability to sequence songs in a narrative flow.”
“'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?”
“Collaboration is a vital part of my creative life. I've had success with Guy Clark and Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.”