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. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do ‘Things Have Changed,’ or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo’s ‘The David’ or that movie ‘Lost in Translation’ – it inspires me to try and find my own version of that. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
The old handbook on writing is ‘Write what you know.’ I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I’m not using fiction to extend the narrative. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
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. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
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. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
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. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
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. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
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. Rodney Crowell Read Quote
