Rodney Crowell Quotes

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Rodney Crowell

Profession : Musician

Birth : August 7, 1950

Singing duets is instinctive, intuitive.

Rodney Crowell

Sometimes, the better writing comes when the song speaks through me and tells me what the song wants to say.

Rodney Crowell

I concern myself with timelessness all the time. If you're not swinging for museum quality, your mind is not in the right place. It doesn't mean you get there, but at least it's the intent.

Rodney Crowell

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

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

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.

Rodney Crowell

I've always said that Guy Clark is a regional songwriter without being regional. He's global. His craft is like, well, Larry McMurtry would be an example. I kind of see Guy Clark and Larry McMurtry in the same wave.

Rodney Crowell

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!'

Rodney Crowell

Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.

Rodney Crowell

My mother was apt to fall out on the floor and start speaking in tongues. Actually, it was a great performance... It was great theater. As a 5-year-old, I understood that, although it scared me and there was a little part of me going, 'I don't know about this. This seems over-the-top to me,' at the same time, I did understand that this was passion.

Rodney Crowell

I never allowed writer's block to be a reality. I framed it up for myself early on. I said, 'OK, if I'm not writing, the well is just filling up. I'm going to be patient with this.'

Rodney Crowell

The way I made 'Diamonds and Dirt,' which had all those hits in a row, was that I was just making a record. It was just the one that rolled up in my natural process, and it happened to be commercial.

Rodney Crowell

My father took me to see Hank Williams on December 14th, 1952. I was two years and four months of age. And I remember a little cool eddy of hair hitting my cheek, and I remember the smell of his hair oil, and I remember the mingling tonality of the small talk before the show started. Those are my memories.

Rodney Crowell

You start creating art through the people that are looking at you, trying to route it through their sensibilities or their eyes, and then it's not you anymore.

Rodney Crowell

I admired Mary's work very much. From the time someone gave me 'The Liars' Club,' I immediately went into a world where I grew up. And I remember, when I finished the book, I actually thought, 'You know what, I need to write songs with her.'

Rodney Crowell

There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.

Rodney Crowell

My family was very poor. Strangely, though, my father was an enigma in that he was always working. He was not a ne'er-do-well. He wasn't lazy. He just couldn't hold on to money. It just, it was an enigma for him. He just, his pockets were always empty.

Rodney Crowell

In the 74 years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called this crooked old Earth, my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn't fair for this awkwardly glib, yet deeply religious woman, would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival.

Rodney Crowell

My mother's a very spiritual woman, and I think Pentecostal religion, Bible religion, was very important to her because it gave her a context for a very spiritual approach to life.

Rodney Crowell

My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, 'Put your foot here, and you kick there, and you play this, and this is the high hat.' And Friday night, I was playing in a honky-tonk.

Rodney Crowell