Some songwriters spend their entire lives searching for a hit. Rodney Crowell has spent most of his life writing them. Not long after his arrival in Nashville in the early Seventies, the young Crowell was indulging in all-night song-swapping sessions with fellow Texans Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, honing a craft that would soon land him a gig not only playing guitar with Emmylou Harris' Hot Band, but penning songs for her as well. Soon artists as varied as Bob Seger , Waylon Jennings, Foghat, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and both Johnny and Rosanne Cash would be covering Crowell songs, many of them hits, and Crowell himself would rack up a record five Number One country singles with his recently reissued 1988 album, Diamonds & Dirt. If Crowell never wrote another song again in his life, his legacy as a hit songwriter -- and we're talking Harlan Howard quality hit songwriter here, not the conveyor-belt variety -- would not only be assured, it'd keep growing on its own, as evidenced by Lee Ann Womack's current country hit with Crowell's twenty-five-year-old "Ashes By Now."

But Crowell, who began playing drums in his father's Houston honky-tonk band at age eleven, has never known a life other than one devoted to music. Stopping is not an option. As he began work on what would become his ninth album, The Houston Kid, however, it became clear to him that the songs he wanted to write -- needed to write -- demanded a higher prize than acceptance at mainstream country radio. After years of gamely jumping through the hoops of the record and radio industry -- jumping with style, maybe, but still jumping -- his muse had had enough. It was time, he knew, to walk away from the system and his major-label deal and follow his own path, however treacherous.

"I started it for Warner Bros.," says the fifty year-old songwriter of the album. "But I figured out early on I was just doing the same thing, and I didn't want to do that. I went in and said, 'My heart's not in this, and at the end of the day you probably won't get this, and then I'll be left holding something that doesn't define me as an artist. Down in Nashville there's one way to market, and that's to get on the radio." His label boss understood where he was coming from, agreed to wash Warner's hands of the matter, and wished Crowell good luck.

So with no one to answer to anymore but himself, Crowell began anew, recording the album on his own dime and subsequently bleeding his checking account dry. It was worth the sacrifice. The Houston Kid has already been hailed as the most vital album of Crowell's three-decade career. More importantly, it's an album Crowell knows he made without once compromising his artistic integrity. "I wish I had done it sooner," he says matter of factly.

A concept album of sorts, The Houston Kid grew out of a memoir Crowell was writing about his parents and growing up on "the wrong side of the tracks" in Houston, Texas.

"I grew up on the poorer side of town," he recalls. "There was petty crime and violence, but at the same time, it was idyllic -- being a barefoot kid, running around. If you're from Texas, you know what it's like . . ." He explains that the neighborhood hoodlums left him alone because he played music and was thus considered cool.

As much as it was mined from and inspired by his roots, it's important to note that The Houston Kid is not, strictly speaking, autobiographical. Although he wrote every song in the first person, he took several liberties. Unlike the protagonist in "Highway 17," Crowell never served time for armed robbery. The twins he sings about in "Wandering Boy" and "I Wish It Would Rain" were family friends long ago, but the story of one becoming a male gigolo and getting AIDS and having to be cared for by the other -- a homophobe -- came from a mix of second-hand news and Crowell's own imagination years. And though domestic abuse was a fact of life for him growing up, it never escalated to the harrowing climax depicted in "Rock of My Soul."

"My parents were uneducated, the son and a daughter of sharecrop farmers, seeking out some form of life for themselves on the east side of Houston," he says. "They came from domestically violent farms, and they carried into their lives, so I grew up with a certain amount of insanity. But these were people being insane who had really good hearts, though; these weren't bad people. It was just some bad behavior."

For all the fiction Crowell weaved into The Houston Kid, it's a testament to his masterful songwriting that the album still sounds so personal, with each song crafted with an sense of loving care befitting treasured first-hand memories, however bittersweet. Indeed, many of the details are genuine, from the paternal affection implied between the harsher lines of "Rock of My Soul" and in the reflective "I Know Love Is All I Need" to the unflinching portrayal of his parents' rocky marriage in "Topsy Turvy." But the memory that resonates the loudest is the one Crowell sings of in "I Walk the Line (Revisited)," in which he recalls the first time he heard Johnny Cash sing the song over the car radio in his father's '49 Ford. "I still can see the headlights and the dashboard in my mind," Crowell sings, "All these long years later, it's still music to my ear." The only artistic liberty taken in the song is that when the Man in Black himself steps in to sing the chorus to his own famous song, he sings it to a new melody penned by Crowell.

"It was pretty surreal when he looked at me and said, 'Hey, you've got a lot of nerve to go changing my melody,'" Crowell says, laughing. "That was true -- it was a pinprick in my balloon. But he had a great sense of humor. Then I played it for Bonnie Raitt, and she said, 'It sounds like you guys were taking Viagra when you recorded it.' So I called John and told him that, and he had a laugh."

RICHARD SKANSE
(April 4, 2001)