ON GOD, LOVE & DEATH

By Jim Patterson

Like many, Rodney Crowell is indecisive about the right thing to do when he encounters a homeless person.

On “The Girl on the Street,” a song on his profound new album, Triage, he describes an encounter he had with a young woman who asked him for money in San Francisco.

“So with the loose change in my pocket, I let myself off light / When I could have helped her find some food and shelter for the night,” Crowell lacerates himself, accompanied by some sonic textures a bit alien to the Texas honky-tonk music he grew up hearing and performing.

“I went back to try to find (the homeless woman),” Crowell said in an interview with The Contributor. “And I couldn't. She had disappeared into the night, and I really regretted it.”

"Triage" is a medical term for the process of deciding which patients get treated first when there’s a backlog. Similarly, Crowell, 70, has been asking himself about what’s really important at this stage in his life.

“Universal love is, from my perspective, a real healing agent that we don't put to use very much,” Crowell said. “And it seems like religion has fallen off the map as a healing, unifying mindset or belief system. So, here we are.”

The result is an album about the big questions. The nature of love, how we treat each other and the regrets and priorities that crop up as the prospect of death starts to hover. It walks the line between the earthy and ethereal, much like the work of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, especially the last album released during his life, You Want it Darker (2016).

“There are a finite number of days left,” Crowell said. “I'm a man with no religion, but I have some sort of magical faith in one God. I knew I wanted to write about that.”

The challenge, he thinks, is “to make sure my language is grounded in some sort of realist point of view.”

Triage balances the spiritual with immediate physical threats. In the trippy “Transient Global Amnesia Blues," written when Crowell had a brief scare with memory loss, he tackles climate change alongside more personal demons.

“Though a red dawn in an angry sky portends blue rue and ruin / It's that wanna be a rich guy who pretends there's nothing doing,” he sings.

“Climate change … is the real existential threat that we do face in the not too distant future and should be an apolitical consideration,” he said. “How do we prioritize the things that we need to work together on?”

Preaching won’t work, he believes, so Crowell reveals himself in songs like “The Girl on the Street” in hopes others going through the same things might relate.

Triage co-producer Dan Knobler, believes Crowell has pulled off something special. Crowell wrote nine of the selections alone with one, “Hymn #43,” co-written with John Leventhal.

“I think it's exceptionally difficult to write ‘big picture’ songs,” Knobler said. “It's really hard to write broad horizon songs that still feel poetic and meaningful and personal… I think he managed to do that.”

Knobler, who has earned notice for his production work with artists including Allison Russell, the band Front Country and jazz duo Vilray & Rachael, said nepotism played a small role in his getting the opportunity to work with Crowell. He is married to Crowell’s youngest daughter Carrie Crowell.

“We'd come down (from New York) to visit my wife's family and stay with Rodney,” he recalled. “I would sort of putz around his studio and help him out with stuff.” The couple has since relocated to the Nashville area.

When Crowell was hired to work with actor Tom Hiddleston on the soundtrack of the Hank Williams Sr. biopic I Saw the Light he needed help from someone who knew their way around Pro Tools, a popular software for music recording.

“I'm quick with Pro Tools, and we needed to be able to be really organized about capturing a whole bunch of takes of Tom and editing them together and getting the best possible performances,” Knobler said. “So we spent about six weeks doing that together, which really solidified our working relationship.”

Knobler went on to produce or engineer several Crowell projects, including Crowell’s 2014 album Tarpaper Sky and a Christmas album of original songs penned by Crowell.

“If I were working with somebody of Rodney's age and caliber [who] wasn't my father-in-law, I think in the beginnings of our relationship I would be more hesitant to speak my mind,” Knobler said. “Being family made it easier to get a close working relationship.”

For a time in the 1980s, Crowell was a mainstream juggernaut, scoring five No. 1 hits from his 1988 album Diamonds & Dirt. His own hits include the ballad “After All This Time” and “She’s Crazy for Leaving,” and he has written hits for many other artists including Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, George Strait, Tim McGraw and Keith Urban.

Crowell has won two Grammys and is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He’s also the author of a memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks.

“During my commercial peak, I wrote broad-stroke love songs, because I wanted broad-stroke recognition,” said Crowell, who has written 15 No. 1 songs. “It was probably a subconscious yearning.”

He knew his time as a chart-topping artist wouldn’t last, and has no regrets. Crowell said he wasn’t interested in recreating what had worked in the past as he went forward, which is de rigueur for singers defending their turf on the hit parade.

“He did have record-shattering commercial success,” Knobler said. “His reaction was, ‘I'd rather have a long and meaningful career than a short and prosperous one.’ “I think that's amazing.” Crowell said he considers Knobler “a worthy adversary,” in a good sense of the term.

“You need a worthy adversary to bring out the best in you,” said Crowell, who co-produced Triage with Knobler. “Somebody who's not afraid to tell you you're full of (crap).”

Crowell sings a lot about love on Triage. But instead of offering it as a panacea to the world’s problems like The Beatles, Crowell delves into the nitty-gritty of exploring what the term means, beyond the context of romance. On Triage, he ponders definitions for love like “forgiveness” and “a chance to do the right thing when there's no one keeping tabs.”

He says he loves Vladimir Putin, Benedict Arnold and he “even loves Donald,” because we need to make “room for those you love to hate somewhere inside your heart.”

The influence of Cohen weighs heavy on Triage, Crowell said.

“I do believe that as we get older, our psyches start to prepare us for transition out of the body,” Crowell said. “That was very much what I was drawn to from Leonard Cohen, and I thought he just articulated it beautifully. And, and I want to articulate it myself.”

On album closer “This Body Isn’t All There is to Who I Am,” Crowell sings “What you see is the least of what you get / When my time runs its course, I’ll return to the source.”

Another reflective number on the album, “Here Goes Nothing,” is also directly inspired by Cohen.

“The thing is, I don't really know what I have to offer, if anything, but here goes nothing,” Crowell said. “I'm going to dive in and try. … It's less about regret than willingness. Willingness to dive in to try to do something good when you have no idea what that is.”

Now that COVID-19 seems to have ebbed, Crowell plans to return to live shows this month. He will tour throughout the summer and fall, and is set to perform Oct. 27 and 28 at the Franklin Theater in Franklin, Tennessee.

“I have an audience,” Crowell said. “It's not a large audience, but it's a loyal and seemingly dedicated audience… I trust that.”

Jim Patterson is a freelance writer in Nashville.