Rodney Crowell – Triage
RC1/Thirty Tigers – 23 July 2021
When you think of Rodney Crowell, whether as singer or songwriter, you naturally think of the pop-inflected country and Americana music embodied in hits like Ain’t Living Long Like This and Til I Gain Control Again, and, of course, his longtime work with Emmylou Harris. Well, it’s time to adjust your perspective because this, his nineteenth solo album, is a significant departure, both musically and in terms of the thematic content.
Triage was written amidst the social, economic, environmental and political upheavals of recent years, the title referring to the medical term for prioritising patients in order of urgency. The album is couched in a theme of spirituality and healing through universal love and was recorded, reworked, rewritten and re-recorded during the pandemic to precisely hone every detail.
It opens with the song of contrition Don’t Leave Me Now, a simple intro of fingerpicked guitar and David Henry’s cello suddenly erupting into an urgent walking beat with strident drums and Steuart Smith’s electric guitar. The shuffling drum scuff of the title track follows, a simple affirmation of the universal power of love (“an endless stream of consciousness obtained in drips and drabs/And a chance to do the right thing when there’s no one keeping tabs”) inspired by his faith in a single source of creation and a call to find “room for those you love to hate somewhere inside your heart” featuring another dynamic Smith solo.
Taken at a slow, measured pace, with Crowell primarily speaking the lyrics in hushed tones, the desert-hazed Transient Global Amnesia Blues is named for the benign form of amnesia with which he was diagnosed, requiring overnight treatment in hospital and, inspired by a photograph his daughter texted of a sunflower growing on a piece of driftwood on the Thames, mostly written before he left. It’s a complex number that speaks of opening our eyes and hearts to the mysteries of nature (“let us stop and marvel for as long as we can spare/Seems you have no need for heaven when your hearts already there”), of man’s blindness to climate change and the potential for ecological disaster (“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/But if that ticking time bomb neath the Yellowstone should blow/It’s adios amigo see you somewhere down below”). Taking in references to the crucifixion, Thomas Hardy’s poem about the Titanic disaster, and Bob Dylan’s Mississippi from the album Love and Theft. It concludes with the wisdom of “Would that we should e’er forget, things that haven’t happened yet/That someday we might regret, would that we should er’r forget”.
Opening with harmonica and featuring Dan Knobler on twangy electric guitar, Eamon McLaughlin on fiddle and viola alongside Henry’s cello and scampering drums, the lively Guthrie-tinged folksy One Little Bird, inspired by a small colony of Carolina Wrens returning to nest around his house, again touches on ecological themes. Crowell, soaring into falsetto notes as the bird asks, “why can’t you see it’s almost over”. Amusingly, it also offers a lesson on how to pronounce his surname, rhyming with “no harm no foul” with no stress on the ‘e’.
Midway in, taking in Wurlitzer, trombone and congas, things get bluesy with Something Has To Change, a fairly self-explanatory sentiment also expressed by Sam Cooke, Hank Williams and Dylan (on whose All Along The Watchtower musical mood it draws) that notes “It’s greed it’s not money through which evil works/The haves and the have nots, just one of the perks/Where life has a purpose, faith has a voice/We can’t live in fear like this, and in trembling rejoice”, again touching on his faith as he sings “There’s a power much greater than those/That would darken the world”.
Reining back in, the reflective, self-examining (“if only I could see myself through your eyes for a day”) Here Goes Nothing is a simple fingerpicked faith and hope-based number about seeking a clearer self-vision (“I’m a man in search of meaning/Use me any way you choose”) laced with strings and piano with a wordless chorus. Still, then it kicks back into a rolling, loping bluesy groove for I’m All About Love, which returns to the universal love theme with lyrics that manage to work in namechecks for Greta Thunberg, Jessica Biel, Allah, Malala Yousafza, Jesus and Putin alongside talk of honky tonk women and Saturday night fights.
Another-semi-spoken number with brooding Dylanish blues-folk undertones, the six-minute The Girl on The Street taps into social commentary to detail a chance encounter with a young woman on the streets of San Francisco looking for a handout from an easy mark, Crowell assuming she wanted to him “to cough up something green” to score drugs and being told she was three months clean, expanding on her backstory (“once somebody’s daughter…once somebody’s friend”) that brought her there, concluding with the biting observation of society’s indifference that “I might have made a difference, if I only had the heart”.
With his ambiguity concerning his faith a through-line on the album, it feels only right to have a track entitled Hymn #43, Crowell’s lyric (“I don’t know if I’ll ever find Jesus/But I can’t say I won’t someday”) set to a simple guitar tune by John Leventhal whose wife and son sing on the humanist chorus (“praise be the life in me, praise be the life in you”), a plaintive musing on the control and dogma of organised religion with its inherent moral hypocrisy (“to righteously judge my brother seems such a needless use of prayer”), the final stretch turning his eye inward (“as for love I was all in a hurry to drink the taverns dry and the walls I built around me to keep my hopes up high”) and of being granted a reassuring vision “of faces yet unknown and a place somewhere in the great unknown where I don’t have to die alone”.
On a similar note, John Paul White on backing vocals, the album ends appropriately enough with the hope-infused This Body Isn’t All There Is To Who I Am, a strident, piano-based walking beat alt-country rock track (hints perhaps of Jackson Browne) and anthemic chorus about how it’s never too late to make peace with who we are, the doors we opened and closed and where we will inevitably end when time runs its course, the track ebbing away on Rory Hoffman’s harmonica. A mingling of outer light and inner dark, of self-recrimination, repentance and hope for salvation on both a personal and a universal level, played to perfection by Crowell and his assembled contributors, as the title suggests it asks us to consider the priorities in a world that desperately needs healing.
Photo Credit: Claudia Church