Quotes from Rodney Crowell

The '90s weren't my finest years artistically. I wrote some good songs in there, but in terms of my vision of getting the paint on the canvas, that was not my best time. I didn't like the fact that I had fallen into mediocrity.

Collaboration is a vital part of my creative life. I've had success with Guy Clark and Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.

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.

I made this record in the late '80s called 'Diamonds and Dirt,' and it was a big hit. It had five No. 1's, and it was my commercial peak, really.

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.

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

I can't make a perfect record. When I try to, I bleed all the feeling out of it.

Time to go inward would you believe that I'm afraid to stare down the barrel of choices I have made.

The poetry of country music will survive.

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.

As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style.

At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.

I cannot say I'm a poet. That's for someone when they take in consideration where they can bestow 'poet' on. I can't do it. But I would be disingenuous if I didn't say that my intention is poetry.

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.

Collaboration allows me to challenge myself to find a new passion for music.

My mother met my father at a Roy Acuff concert.

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.

Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.

My preference for female company is based for the most part on the fact that women are more self-aware than men, in my experience.

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

In life's rich beauty pageant we put children on a stage, said flash your soft white belly child, but just don't act your age.

The more I'm dedicated to this work, the more I'm able to satisfy my deep need to create. And that's a pretty good thing. If you take half-decent care of yourself, that can propel you on into productive later years.

I've finally figured out how to make a Rodney Crowell record, and that's let it be, leave the mistakes.

I think, in the middle of the '90s, I made a couple of records where I tried to figure out what I thought the radio wanted from me. They weren't my best records by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't take me too long to figure out, 'Whoa, back up, dude. Just go back to following your heart, and it will all be OK.'