Quotes from Rodney Crowell

My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, 'Put your foot here, and you kick there, and you play this, and this is the high hat.' And Friday night, I was playing in a honky-tonk.

Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I'm not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

I have a history, and I am proud of my legacy as a songwriter, all of the songs that I've brought forth into our culture. I'm proud of that.

I've often said to young songwriters when they want to write with me, 'Let's take a stab at ten songs, and we might get one really good one.'

Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.

As a creative individual, I really go out of my way to avoid the corporate scene in terms of songwriting. If the first question is how much money is it going to make, I'm going to be in trouble anyway.

Have I felt misunderstood by Music Row at times? Of course.

To be earning a living as an artist at any time, any place is kinda the ultimate gift that you can receive from the universe, and I'm very much aware of that. I get to do exactly what I want to do.

God gave me wisdom, but the devil's got style.

I've had a nice career. I'm no David Bowie or Bruce Springsteen out there. I'm not an icon. I'm just a working artist.

Pretty much any artist that I know of that has found that mentor status, if they're generous and okay to bestow a bit of mentor-type information, it's do what you feel, not what you think.

When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.

Violence was very much a part of my mother's upbringing - a little less so with my father's, but my father was an angry man when he was young. He was angry and frustrated and had no idea how to channel anger.

I can stitch a song together in about an hour anytime you want, but it won't have the depth.

My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.

Strangely enough, I've become a Metallica fan.

My family was very poor. Strangely, though, my father was an enigma in that he was always working. He was not a ne'er-do-well. He wasn't lazy. He just couldn't hold on to money. It just, it was an enigma for him. He just, his pockets were always empty.

I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.

You learn how to do good work by being honest with yourself.

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.

The chances of getting Townes to like it were very remote. When I wrote 'Til I Gain Control Again,' Townes Van Zandt sort of nodded. And I thought, 'Yes!'

I knew Townes Van Zandt a little bit.