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Tiffany Hansen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, we are grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll talk about the Penn World Voices Festival. We'll hear from two people involved with the new documentary The Ghost of Richard Harris, and soul singer Devon Gilfillian is here for a listening party for his latest album. That's the plan. Let's get started with musician Rodney Crowell.

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So we've been told. That is Somebody Loves You from the new album from singer songwriter Rodney Crowell. Crowell's career spans nearly 20 solo albums and many songs written for and covered by other artists, including Emmy Lou Harris, Willie Nelson, Keith Urban. He's a Grammy winner, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer, and recipient of the ASCAP Founders Award. His songwriting has influenced a generation of Americana and country musicians, including the producer on his new album Jeff Tweedy, who is from the band Wilco. The album is called The Chicago Sessions, and Rodney Crowell joins us for an All Of It listening party. Hi, Rodney.

Rodney: Hey there. How are you?

Tiffany Hansen: Good. How are you?

Rodney: I'm good. Thank you.

Tiffany Hansen: Good. Good. On the road.

Rodney: I'm in Denver.

Tiffany Hansen: Nice.

Rodney: Mile high.

Tiffany Hansen: Mile high. One of the things I read that you've said is that you write every day. You're on the road today in Denver. Are you writing today?

Rodney: In fact I am, but usually when I'm on the road, I'm not writing every day. It's when I'm home. I think that quote was probably prefaced, but when I'm home, I'm writing every day. It's the first thing I do every day, have a cup of coffee and get to work.

Tiffany Hansen: Can I ask what you're writing today?

Rodney: Oh, I'm working on a song with Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He and I have been collaborating of late and I'm writing lyric to a musical composition of his, and I think I may have completed it this morning.

Tiffany Hansen: An inspiration in the in the Denver air.

Rodney: No, it's work.

Tiffany Hansen: It's work.

Rodney: I'd say this when I was young man; sometimes I would capture lightning in a bottle. Those jolts of inspiration would come. I think now that I've been doing it this along, inspiration is hard one and just comes with getting back to work every day.

Tiffany Hansen: A lot of people will put a label on you, a songwriter's songwriter. I'm always struck by that phrase and I want to ask you what you think when someone says that about you.

Rodney: I think it's meant to be a compliment.

Tiffany Hansen: Is it?

Rodney: I suppose, yes, it is, but I don't allow myself to get an ego boost from it because, hey, look, for me, Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, any pick of composers, Bert Bacharach, would be songwriters' songwriters for me. It is a compliment, but I always assume, and I think it's a good way to view myself, that I'm somewhere in the middle of the pact trying to come up with the best work that I can on any given day, and that's the nature of what I do.

Tiffany Hansen: I think in that phrase, there's an implication that you have an influence on your writer artist peers. I wonder if you feel that going out from yourself and your influence spreading and/or if you feel influence from others and who that might be.

Rodney: Once a year I have a songwriting camp where people come from pretty much all over the world to listen to me. I go on about writing songs in which I say I can't teach songwriting, but I can encourage songwriting and I can share my experience, strength, and hope, and that seems to be enough. That's for me, any good song, any song that I'd just get inside of whether it was a Chris Christofferson song or a Willie Nelson song, or a Bob Dylan song, or a one of the Beatles, Paul Simon, all of the ones I've mentioned before, when I listen to a song really well written and really inspire, let me take your pick of any great song, When I Paint My Masterpiece by Bob Dylan, a song that I think is brilliant, I don't try to copy that.

What I try to do is find within myself my version of what that is or my access to the creative force in the universe that you can draw from and bring into this reality. I know I'm getting a little bit out there with this, but it is nonetheless true. Writing songs is a mystery, and it's a mystical experience, and I embrace the mysticism of it completely, but I try to make it grounded so it's useful to people who hear the songs. How was that?

Tiffany Hansen: That was good. You have a camp for songwriters. Do you lay out for them and say, here's what makes a great songwriter. You have to be poetic, you have to be X,Y, lyrical, you have to have some road under your feet. Do you say that, and if you do, how would you qualify that?

Rodney: I try to impart to them that intentionality is a big part. I intend to write songs. Now, some may have more of a penchant for writing songs or a talent for it than others, but that doesn't mean you can't write songs up to your own level. I try to make the people who attend the songwriting camps understand you don't have to come up to my level or Bernie Taupin's level who's been on couple of my songwriting retreats. How do we find your level?

Tiffany Hansen: Bernie writes for Elton John.

Rodney: Yes, he does. A long time ago, when I got to Nashville in the early 1970s, I lucked into a songwriting circle that consisted of Guy Clark and Mickey Newbury and Townes Van Zandt and others of that, what would be called Americana music now, folk music then, folk country, whatever. I was blessed with the opportunity to sit in on the sessions as these really great songwriters would swap songs. I kept my mouth shut for a long time and just listened and learned. I think through osmosis, I started to develop as a songwriter. It's my job and I take it very seriously.

Away from the road, I lead a pretty much of a contemplative life that I contemplate writing songs. I've written a memoir and I spent 10 years writing that book. There's not a paragraph in the book that wasn't written in the last three years that I struggle with that, but I learned so much about writing and about the dedication of getting back to work every day. It's the only way you can produce really, continually.

Tiffany Hansen: You have to do the thing.

Rodney: Do the do as they say.

Tiffany Hansen: I want to ask you about this notion of osmosis, and particularly as it relates to this new album The Chicago Sessions. Obviously you have your roots in, as you described it, Americana, what used to be called folk. You were in Chicago for this though. That's a city that has its own musical personality in the Blues and I'm wondering, not necessarily on this album, but maybe while you were there recording it, was it just impossible to escape a little of that Chicagoness seeping into you?

Rodney: Well, I'll back up a little bit. The blues as I understood it early in my life growing up in east Houston, Texas, Hank Williams was the first musical influence on me. There was a form of country blues that Hank Williams picked up from perhaps old blues singers around Alabama. I took that as the blues for a long time. I was born in 1950. The Beatles and Dylan hit in my early to middle adolescence so the sound of that music compelled me forward because the sound of that music was like, oh, this is how you meet girls. If I can play music like this, chances are I'm going to meet a girl because I'm not a star athlete.

As time went on, I became really interested in the blues, the Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker version of it. I thought about guys like Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones and said, "Oh, these guys were on to these." They were on to the Muddy Waters the way I was on to Hank Williams when I was a teenager. I need to dive into this blues thing.

Of course, I love Chuck Berry. I started to realize that Chuck Berry and Howlin' Wolf and Steve Goodman and John Prine all came down from Chicago and I developed a fantasy about recording in Chicago because I've recorded in LA and New York and Nashville and London and Austin, Texas. I covered a lot of ground, but never Chicago so it was a fantasy of mine. As luck would have it, I ran across Jeff Tweedy on a songwriter festival out on a ship at sea and I was able to tell him how much I love his work, in particular this solo album he made called Warmth. In a good neighborly way, he said, "Why won't you to come up and record in my studio sometime." I took it he was just being nice.

Tiffany Hanssen: Friendly.

Rodney: Friendly. "Thanks a lot, man. That sounds good."

Tiffany Hanssen: Right.

Rodney: When I let my daughter Chelsea know about this she got on me, she said, "If Jeff Tweedy invited you to come up and record you need to get on this right away." I said, "No, he was just being nice." She said, "Get on it right away. Get your management on that right away." As it were, he was actually true to his word. "Come on up and let's make a record."

Tiffany Hanssen: Nice.

Rodney: I got to work with somebody I really admire and respect and at the same time fulfill the fantasy of recording in Chicago.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, let's listen to this first track of The Chicago Sessions.

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First, we might have to describe for the young kids what a pay phone booth is. I remember. [unintelligible 00:14:45]

[laughter]

Rodney: There used to be a lot of them in New York City.

Tiffany Hanssen: That song is Lucky. We're talking about the album The Chicago Sessions with Rodney Crowell talking about Jeff Tweedy. His son was on that track, right?

Rodney: Yes, Spencer Tweedy, played drums on that track. Lovely lad and he has so much of that Levon Helm feel to his playing that we just all fell over. Musicians I brought with me fell in love with everybody in Chicago. It was a great thing. I will say about that song Lucky. I'm married above my station in life. I'm an overachiever on the marriage front. Typically, it was Claudia's birthday and I hadn't thought ahead to get a present or anything so I cheated and wrote her a song. That's a song that I wrote to make up for not having a birthday present for Claudia.

Tiffany Hanssen: I bet it was all right in the end, right?

Rodney: It was all right.

Tiffany Hanssen: It was all right in the end. On this album, I'm going to just ask you this and then we're going to go out on a little bit more music while we take a break, but tell me how Jeff Tweedy was involved if at all in the songwriting on this album with you and how did that go?

Rodney: Oh, well, Jeff and I wrote one song together for the album. During pandemic I wrote most of the album. There's a couple of older songs included. I sent these homemade demos to Jeff and he mostly picked the songs that we recorded. Then at one point, getting close to recording I called Jeff up and I said, "You know what, you're a songwriter, I'm a songwriter, we should write something together for this." I'll cobble something together and I send him a little piece of something. Then we started texting back and forth.

We wrote a song called Everything at Once, mostly via text. Then when we got in the studio, we fine-tuned it and recorded it very quickly. It was one song that we wrote together. By design, I must say because you get a chance to make a record with Jeff it behooves you to write a song with him.

Tiffany Hanssen: We're going to listen to that song when we come back from the break. Right now we're just going to pause for a brief few minutes. We're talking with Rodney Crowell, his new album The Chicago Sessions and I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Alison Stewart. This is All Of It.

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Tiffany Hanssen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Alison Stewart. We're talking with Rodney Crowell about his new album The Chicago Sessions. Let's take a listen to Everything at Once.

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That's Everything at Once of Rodney Crowell's new album The Chicago Sessions. Jeff is on that track with you, Rodney. You talked a little bit about your process of writing that over text, which I just can't even imagine. We do everything on text now.

Rodney: Sadly.

Tiffany Hanssen: Sadly. What do you admire about Jeff's songwriting and having gone through that process with him and appreciated as you said, most specifically some of his work?

Rodney: Oh, there's so much to admire about Jeff's work. There's a quirky element to his writing that's so original. He has a knack for yanking the rug out from under your preconceived notions about where he's going to go. In writing Everything At Once the things that I would get back from him were not things that I fully expected. I think, "I think I'll know where he'll go with this," and it will come back entirely different. If you take a Wilco song like Impossible Germany, Unlikely Japan, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful piece of work, and just so unexpected, seemingly at every turn. That's something I loved about his work as an artist, but as a producer, he's a steady head.

He's a gentle soul, but very firm in what he believes is the right way to go without really trying to steamroll me at all. It was a collaboration between us. I understood very early. I'll shut up and sing these songs that I've written. Whenever Jeff would step out onto the floor with us musicians or be sitting there playing with us, whenever he would make a suggestion, it would be succinct. It would be the exact thing that needed to be said at exactly the right time. Good producers do that. Really, he excels on that level. It's very comfortable when someone gives you direction and you feel it. You mentioned the word osmosis. It's like you absorbed Jeff's direction through osmosis.

Tiffany Hanssen: It's nice to be surprised by someone's songwriting, don't you think?

Rodney: Yes, I wish I was more surprising sometimes, but that from my perspective, is I can't seem to get out of my own way. I suppose, some people can hear what I have to say and certain rhymes that I may come up with and go, "That's unexpected." I'm always happy to hear that. As I do the work from day to day, I think we all deal with our own limitations of like, "Why didn't I come up with something more original than that?" As long as it's work, we just keep going.

Tiffany Hanssen: Do the thing like we said. Just do the thing. I want to listen to another track here. This is one of two older songs that you have on the track. This one's called You're Supposed to Be Feeling Good.

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That's a song called You're Supposed to Be Feeling Good. I hear, and I suppose some other people might hear Emmylou Harris in their head when they hear that song. Two completely different versions. Why did you pick this song? Did that version have any influence on you?

Rodney: I wrote the song in 1976 and I made a demo of it. Emmylou and I were working together constantly at that time, and she heard it and she said, "I'm going to record it." I certainly wasn't going to stop her from recording it. Even back then, I wasn't entirely happy with the lyric. At the time, being 25 years old, the concept of soulmate singing those words felt right to me. I was early in my development as a grown man and other parts of the lyrical composition of the song I was not quite happy with, but Emmylou was happy with it and she recorded it. She did it in her own way. The way that I recorded it on the Chicago Sessions is pretty much the melody, the way it was written, but I have rewritten the lyrics since then. Oh, God, how many years ago? It was 45 years in the making.

Tiffany Hanssen: We don't need to do the math. People can do the math in their heads.

Rodney: That's true. It dazes me for sure. Just a couple of years ago, I finally landed on exactly what I wanted to do with the song, strangely. I kept it in the back of my mind for a long time. I played it for Jeff and he was on it immediately and it made the list of songs. There it is. I'm happy we did it. I'm happy I waited as long as I did to record it. I'm not sure I would've gotten it right before, but I think I got it right on this record. Thanks to Jeff and the musicians who played on it. Emmylou's version is beautiful. It's hers. I'm grateful that she did it way back when. I haven't talked to her about the new version. I'm not sure she's heard it yet, but eventually, I will and I'll see what she thinks.

Tiffany Hanssen: Report back.

Rodney: Yes.

Tiffany Hanssen: One more song before we let you go. This is a cover of a Townes Van Zandt's song. Let's hear No Place to Fall.

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Time, she's a fast, old train. How come you decided on this song for this album at this time?

Rodney: Long time ago, early on in the early '70s, I was at Guy Clark and Susanna's house one morning and Townes' was there. We were sitting there talking and I played him some irky song. It's a childish song that I had written at the time. He picked up the guitar and he said, "Let me play you something I just wrote," and he played that. It opened me up, in a way that I had not yet been opened up where I went, "Oh, my, now I see. Now I understand. I got to open myself up to where I can access this kind of thing."

I always wanted to record the song, and that's exactly the way I remember Townes singing it to me way back there. Right before we started recording, the last thing that Jeff and I discussed, I said, "Hey, Jeff, what do you think about me doing this Townes Van Zandt's song?" He knew the song Corson. He said, "We can't go wrong here. Let's do it." We threw it in at the last minute and it was a first take and just the way I remembered Townes singing it to me. I'm glad we did it.

Tiffany Hanssen: It calls to mind what you said at the beginning of our chat about not comparing yourself as a songwriter to someone else, but just being able to be in their presence when you're talking with other songwriters. The importance of being in the presence of other songwriters. It seems like that's what happened to you in that moment.

Rodney: It certainly is. I would say, it was a pinnacle moment for me as a songwriter. Had I not had that experience with Townes, being three feet away singing that song, I'm not sure I would've ever written Till I Gain Control Again, or a lot of the songs that I've written. It was an in-person illustration of possibility. Now, Townes' just a consummate poet, the possibilities of what he could create, I don't know if I can reach that level, but I can find my level of this particular thing. Probably since that time, I've been chasing the muse in that particular way. It's like, "How do I access where these things come from to try to make them as beautiful as a piece like if I had No Place To Fall?"

Tiffany Hanssen: The power of possibility seems like a great place to stop. Rodney, thank you so much for your time today.

Rodney: Thank you.

Tiffany Hanssen: Gosh, we appreciate it.

Rodney: My pleasure.

Tiffany Hanssen: The new album is--

Rodney: Thank you for giving me the time.

Tiffany Hanssen: Absolutely. The new album is called The Chicago Sessions. Maybe we can go out on Ready to Move. No, we can't. I'll just talk about what's coming up next. Rodney, thank you so much.

 

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