Graham Reid | | 3 min read
Simple (You Wouldn't Call It Simple)
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which now comes with an insert lyric sheet and is available in an autographed edition (see end of the review).
Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . .
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Those of us old enough to remember Texas' Rodney Crowell as the hot young country artist whose songwriting was spoken of in the same breath as Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark – who played with Emmylou Harris and was Johnny Cash's son-in-law when he married Rosanne Cash – might be surprised to learn that he recently turned 75.
But on the cover of this crisply produced new album he still looks in fine shape although his countenance is more weatherbeaten, which actually suits this senior statesmen of an alternative to the mainstream country he grew up with.
Crowell has managed to stay relevant and open-minded – his 2023 Chicago Sessions found him being produced by Jeff Tweedy, the same year his song I'll Love You Til the Day Die with Chris Stapleton was nominated as best country song at the Grammys -- and he can still write lines that make you stop in your tracks.
Here on the semi-autobiographical narrative of Taking Flight (a duet with Ashley McBride) he slips this in, “We were twenty feet from stardom, now your staring down post-partum, an unwed mother soon to be that small voice on the phone”.
And just when you think he's going the whole cowgirl-in-a-pickup-truck Nashville cliché he follows “she's a wildwood flower in a red Corvette” with a neat sidestep into “Tanya Tucker meets Cate Blanchett" (on Sometime Thang).
The clever Twenty One Song Salute works in a whole history of songs which have written themselves in to his, and our, autobiographies: “Woke up this mornin' singing I Feel Fine, your only daddy that will walk the line, all liberated from the lovesick blues, walking Spanish in my blue suede shoes”.
It's the kind of song you could use as a drinking game, first one to shout out the artist gets to take a hit of Kentucky bourbon.
Ready? Go: “I know your papa was a rolling stone, and you don't need another man done gone, until you're ready for some wop bam boom and when you wake up in my brass bed . . .”
Crowell here offers good times and fun, but there are also hard observations, as on the gently rockin' Rainy Days in California with Lukas Nelson: “Days fly by like dragons, oil well fires and car tyre smoke. Helicopter searchlights through my window, those mean streets ain't no joke, listening to the siren wail . . .”
He may be a country boy but he's also an urban observer trapped in the dysfunctional 21stcentury.
On Simple (You Wouldn't Call It Simple) he offers: “It's an unusual morning, grey clouds rolling in. A red-letter warning, there's menace in the wind. Can't change the weather, can't change your luck, can't live forever, can't pass the buck. To lead with an open mind and love with an open heart in the best and the worst of times . . . like as not you'll come up short”.
That sting in the tale when you might reasonably expect optimism is Crowell's gift.
He can spot when he's running headlong into the obvious and so avoids it, offering realism and a poetic twist.
There are women in many of these songs as prompts for memory or creating a character. Maybe Somewhere Down the Road opens with “Georgia farm girl, full of grace, more than just a pretty face . . . did I love her? I don't know, it was such a long time ago”.
With a band that you could only find in country music – sharp, focused, not a wasted note or anything superfluous from guitarist David Grissom, Megan Lovell on lap steel among them – Crowell brings this home with understated, undemonstrative class
Crowell is the country philosopher too in his own homespun way as on Heaven Can Help you (“beware the ones who speak with forked tongues that reek of hatred”) and he knows where he sits in the grand scheme, as on the laidback Louisiana Sunshine Feeling Okay with Larkin Poe.
“I'm gonna live it just as long as I can, forget about tomorrow 'til we need another day, there's a good time comin', we don't let it get away.”
Rodney Crowell doesn't break any new ground here but where he's been standing for this long is a place of sure footing.
And on Simple (You Wouldn't Call It Simple) he speak-sings, "I don't want to be young again, it goes by so fast. I live more in the moment now and less in the past".
That sounds a reasonable position at 75.
And “forget about tomorrow 'til we need another day” seems an escapist but affirming idea in these disturbing times.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here but it is also available on limited edition signed vinyl (and CD) from Southbound Records, Auckland here.
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