Quality Americana

A roaring crowd opens the video for Rodney Crowell’s nostalgic new single “Lucky.” A barrelhouse piano starts grooving and the band is called in. “How many times now have I heard myself say ‘If I hadn’t got lucky, if I hadn’t had you on my side’ I wouldn’t be standing here today,” Crowell sings.

The setting could be described as an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, though a cosmic-Southwest version, and we can’t say it includes hip-hop but the verses are as close to rapping as we may ever see from Crowell.

John Lennon’s suit from “A Hard Day’s Night”

“For the past thirty-odd-years I’ve owned the suit John Lennon wore in the opening scene of A Hard Day’s Night, a birthday gift from Rosanne Cash courtesy of a Sotheby’s auction of Fab Four memorabilia,” Crowell said in a Youtube comment on the release. “I’ve worn it in public a few times, once on the David Letterman show and before that on a Country Music Award telecast. Only Roger Miller ever took notice. Smiling, he made the keen-eyed comment, ‘I like your teddy boy suit, Rodney.’ For the ‘Lucky’ video, we hit on the idea of paying tribute to sixties black and white, rock and roll TV shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig. For me, the wardrobe choice was simple: Saville Row gaberdine.”

Giant dice, striped suits and vintage stage equipment transport us back in time and the chorus is a sing-a-long that’s perfect for a block party, festival or nightclub. We watch Crowell and his lead guitarist carry out a vintage Fender amplifier as the credits roll and the modern surroundings pull us out of the daydream.

Rodney Crowell meets Jeff Tweedy

At 73, the Houston-raised Crowell hasn’t showed any signs of slowing down. He released “Lucky” in the summer for his new album The Chicago Sessions on New West Records. The album was produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and mostly recorded live. Pop Matters described the album as a “renaissance in the singer-songwriter’s career.”

Now based in Nashville, Crowell said that he met Tweedy at the Cayamo festival and after encouragement from his daughter, followed up with the artist and quickly made plans for an album. 

“I had an instant trust with Jeff,” Crowell told Pop Matters. “Our sensibilities are different enough but the same in a way. He likes what I like, and I like what he likes. In the places where his sensibility about a certain thing might be different than mine, I was happy to go with it because it gave a different perspective. In a few cases, he was happy to go where I wanted to go because it was a new thing for him. I think we had a mutual connection that way.”

Crowell said that working with Tweedy gave him the freedom to focus on his playing and singing, and a fresh approach to his work. Crowell has self-produced many of his own albums. Crowell is a creator first and foremost, and said he wants to produce meaningful art as long as he can. 

“I think of Renoir,” Crowell said. “The day he died, he did a little still life in the morning. He got up and went to work the day he died. I saw a van Gogh exhibit about the last 144 days of his life. He did 156 paintings, and they were all at the Metropolitan in New York, all laid out in succession. It was one of the most moving things that I ever experienced. The day before he shot himself, he had done a really lovely painting, not ambitious, not broad stroke like The Starry Night or any of that. It was just a quiet painting. That’s how I want to spend my life, what’s left of it: Doing work for the sake of the work.”

Rodney Crowell on Music Row

Crowell started working as a songwriter in Nashville in the early 70s and quickly became friends with Guy Clark. He later joined Emmylou Harris’ band after she recorded one of his songs, and in 1978 Crowell signed his own deal to Warner Brothers and released Ain’t Living Long Like This.

Crowell had songs recorded by Johnny Cash, Jerry Reed and Waylon Jennings and broke into the Billboard top 40 in 1980 with “Ashes by Now.” Crowell’s latest release “Lucky” has reached the top 30 of the Americana Music Association singles chart.

More information on Rodney Crowell can be found here. 

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Press photo courtesy of Rodney Crowell .com and New West Records Press.