A biography for Rodney Crowellhasn’t been written yet.
“You know I love to spend my mornings, like sunlight dancing on your skin”
“I can't make a perfect record. When I try to, I bleed all the feeling out of it.”
“There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.”
“For me, my career has never been about what I've done. But it's been about becoming, achieving, and pushing myself further.”
“My preference for female company is based for the most part on the fact that women are more self-aware than men, in my experience.”
“With 'Fate's Right Hand,' I think I reached a level of completeness in forming and articulating ideas at around the same time I reached a place where I could match it with my singing voice. It was a kind of coming together.”
“My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.”
“My parents were sharecrop farm kids with no education - seventh, eighth grade.”
“I wrote a song a good long while ago, 'I Ain't Livin' Long Like This,' that has been around and been recorded by a lot of people, but it was basically childhood memory.”
“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'm a vulnerable guy.”
“I don't make music for the radio. And when I was being played on the radio a lot, I didn't.”
“I'm enough of a southeast Texas boy - there's enough white trash in my blood that when somebody gives me money to make a record, I feel like I have to please them instead of myself.”
“As an artist, one of the ingredients to doing good work is self-awareness, and that's something I cultivate.”
“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.”
“Underfunded, underwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.”
“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.”