If he really wanted to, songwriter and guitarist Rodney Crowell could simply stay home and pump out hits for the dozens of performers who have become his regular clients over the past 20 years. With everyone from Vince Gill and Willie Nelson to Bob Seger and REM lining up to cover Crowell staples like "Till I Gain Control Again" and "Shame on the Moon," the Texas-born tunesmith has certainly never lacked for business.

But unlike many of his Nashville songwriting brethren (who assemble the hits, then break for lunch), Crowell only writes songs he can sing himself-although they also might happen to work nicely for someone else. Though it took him until the end of the '80s to find the perfect formula, Crowell never lost sight of his main objective: to launch a successful career as a performer in his own right. He finally broke through with five consecutive chart-topping singles off his 1988 Diamonds and Dirt album-and has maintained his dual identity ever since.

Crowell's underlying belief that one cannot be a songwriter without also being a road warrior stems from an unusually early entry into the world of live music. Crowell was 11 when he first took the stage as drummer for the Rhythm Boys, a country outfit run by his guitar-playing dad, J. W. Crowell. By the time he reached his early 20s, Rodney Crowell was already a seasoned performing artist with an impressive backlog of original material.

Before the "new country" onslaught flooded Nashville with an oversupply of songwriting talent, one could still break into the market by simply getting out an acoustic guitar at a Holiday Inn lounge and hoping that the right person would walk by. That's what happened to up-and-comer Crowell (hotel chain notwithstanding), who was picking out his own tunes through a cheap P.A. when guitar hand Jerry Reed heard him, got him a publishing deal, and sent him on the first leg of his successful tour of duty.

But a subsequent trip to Southern California proved to be the most important juncture in Crowell's musical development. In 1975, he hooked up with singer Emmylou Harris-then a rising star on the contemporary country front-who tapped Crowell for the rhythm guitar slot in her touring outfit the Hot Band, one of the tightest, most powerful groups of its kind. Working alongside guitar ace Albert Lee, Crowell provided Harris with solid harmony backing and, more importantly, stellar songwriting (including "Till I Gain Control Again"). Crowell emerged from his two-year Hot Band stint with significant songwriting clout-and razor-sharp stage know-how to boot.

Crowell used both to good advantage once his own career took hold. But like any performer with an ounce of artistic integrity, he didn't see fit to continue a solo career on anything other than his own terms. When a cloud of mediocrity began to envelop country radio in the mid-'90s, Crowell was nowhere to be found. Rather than joining the rest of the headset-wearing country crowd roaming the stage a la Mick Jagger, Crowell issued one more album of flat-out pop (1997's The Cicadas) before he abandoned the road for a life of producing, writing, and parenting at home in Tennessee. When Tim McGraw took Crowell's Jewel of the South cut "Please Remember Me" all the way to no. 1 on the country charts last year, the song's title could have been construed as Crowell's farewell.

Fortunately, you can't keep a good man behind the mixing console. Earlier this year, Crowell used his newest batch of tunes as an excuse to pack up the gear and get back in front of the klieg lights once more. Though his best works have always been real-life depictions, The Houston Kid, a song cycle about growing up in a rural-and dysfunctional-Texas family, is as close to the bone as Crowell's ever gotten. In contrast to his full-band tracks, these stripped-down story-songs evoke the legacy of Johnny Cash (the Man in Black even turns up on one track), as well as the ultimate bare-bones exponent, Bob Dylan. On stage, Crowell mingles Houston Kid material with choice cuts from his vast song vault, with nothing more than his ancient Martin New Yorker acoustic backing him. Crowell's set proves that if the songs are there, you can leave the band at home next time out.

When you're performing in a large hall and there's that gulf between you and the audience, is it harder to get acclimated on stage compared with, say, playing a small Nashville club like the Bluebird? Sometimes you can pick out a few faces, and they sort of mirror where you need to go. Of course, sometimes all you can see up there is the runway lights, so in that case it's just you and the sound. But there's all kinds of things that will create the right intimacy. In a large hall, when you can't see the people and get that feedback, the sound becomes pliable, so you just key into that. To me, the key to giving a good performance is to get away from any kind of self-consciousness right from the get-go.

And does it take you a while to get to that point in a concert? Or do you fall into it immediately? It varies-because anything out there can trigger self-consciousness. There are many kinds of culprits-that voice that's distracting you, feedback, bad monitor sound . . . things like that just make it harder for you to get into the groove.

Doing an all-acoustic set is a far different animal from playing with a backing band. What bearing does that have on the structure of your set? Well, especially in a shorter set, the tendency is to go for the representative picture of your song catalog-meaning that ordinarily I might not put something like "After All This Time" near the top of the set, which I did on this tour.

That's a very challenging song to lead off with-you really hit the ground running there. Some live performers might shy away from opening the set with a vocally demanding song. Putting a song like that in that place in the set just seems to be a way to create someplace to go, actually. It gets you working right away.

Speaking of performing in an acoustic context-are there any electric songs you prefer not to adapt? Or is that not a consideration? No, that's really not an issue with me-mostly because anything I've written that's become an electric song started on the acoustic anyway. Like "When Losers Rule the World" [from The Cicadas]: Ben Vaughn and I wrote that just sitting there with a couple acoustic guitars and playing at each other. Only later, when we were recording, did it go to a place where the guitar became much more featured, and it got transformed into a band song. But the thing is, you can still fingerpick that song. It's versatile enough to take along on a guitar-and-voice tour-which I think is an important thing to remember when you're actually writing the song.

Your newest batch of songs from The Houston Kid is about as solo as you've gotten in recent times. Were you thinking in terms of their presentation when you wrote them? Well, there's no doubt that these songs really lend themselves to live solo performance-on the record, they're very dry and immediate. And the storytelling aspect is definitely something you want to present as stripped-down and austere-like Springsteen's Nebraska.

When you've been off the road for a while-as you were prior to your current tour-do you find that it takes an extra long time to get into the groove again? Sure. In fact, on a short tour, you're just getting warmed up . . . and then it's over. One positive aspect of touring infrequently is that it tends to stay fresh-there's still a lot of discovery to be done with the songs in the set. You're not pretending. I just joined this tour coming right out of the studio, where I'd been working on Hal [Ketchum]'s record, and I'd been doing very little playing or singing up until that point. And it's an adjustment at first. You're thinking: "Aw, man, I know I'm sounding pretty rusty up here. I sure wish I had a little more edge right now." Once you get past that, the next trick is to find a way to not become a parody of yourself. To be the performance-rather than just manufacture it.

So how do you go about doing this? Do you have any particular techniques? Well, for one thing, I haven't really toured extensively by myself, but I can see how that can offer its own benefits. Like when you're with a band, you've got the set list and you're tied to it. But when you're on your own, you can do some song you wrote 25 years ago, then one you just came up with the other night. It offers you a way to find something new. Just introducing one completely different song into what you're doing can shake away that manufactured self-consciousness.

I suppose it doesn't even have to be a song you wrote-for those who aren't prolific songwriters, some offbeat cover sometimes interjects the same freshness. Of course you have this tremendous backlog to draw from. And that itself can become the performance. Just having the repertoire on hand and knowing what songs you're going to pick out on that particular night.

How does the mood of the crowd affect your performance? The crowd can have a lot to do with it, obviously. Because many times they're more in tune with my repertoire than I am. I can remember most of the songs, but then you have some people who have their own favorites, some of which I haven't even thought about. That's when having visual contact with the audience is real important. In clubs, it's really helpful because you can just turn it into this personal kind of performance.

It takes more than a deep catalog for a songwriter to get out there and pull off a convincing set with just acoustic guitar for backup. There are very few songwriters who can do that. To me, it's those people who can just get all the crap out of the way and distill it right down to the plop! [Laughs.] I always felt that about Dylan, or Townes Van Zandt, and I feel that way about Bruce Springsteen, too. Those are the kind of writers whose work holds up under any conditions. Those songs just speak for themselves.

A lot of Nashville songwriters tailor their material to a specific individual-and with the exception of writers nights, seldom perform the song in front of a live audience. I could work like that if I had to-but I really don't write that way. A lot of people write from the point of view of another person-their mind-set is to provide material for a recording artist, and they don't really view themselves as performers. Whereas I view writing as performance-because everything I write is meant to be performed. I don't think of myself as being outside of the song. I've found that when I successfully write a song for myself to perform, it works for anybody.

You've been playing out ever since you were a kid touring clubs with your dad. Did having an early start make it easier to adapt to stage life as you got older? It's weird, but I actually became more self-conscious the older I got. I wasn't that way in my teen years; it was later on, from my mid-20s until just about ten years ago. It was something I really had to work at, because I became aware that self-consciousness is the enemy of really good art. And if you don't find a way to neutralize it, you become a parody of yourself on stage. And believe me, that can be a real scary feeling.

So you're saying this onstage uneasiness was happening during the Diamonds and Dirt period-while you were nailing five straight no. 1 hits? Seems like that would have been the height of your confidence. It really wasn't-not even close. I'm infinitely more confident now. During that Diamonds and Dirt period, I was less the master of what I was doing than I was the slave. That kind of commercial success just wasn't my nature. And it tended to show up in my performances.

Your entrance into the big leagues was predicated by your stint as a sideman of sorts with Emmylou and the Hot Band during the mid-'70s. Looking back, it must have been a great way to get acclimated, musically speaking. Yeah, it was like the entree . . . Emmy provided me with a letter of introduction, so to speak. It was educational on a lot of levels-when I got out there and got into that band, I ended up learning things I still use today as a producer, like how to arrange, even how to conduct a recording session.

Nowadays it's difficult to find anyone who still mics up an acoustic guitar on stage, rather than using a pickup, or even a combination of the two. Which is too bad-because a Martin D-45 that's been outfitted with a transducer usually sounds less like a D-45 and more like a cheap guitar. I, for one, have a problem with pickups, mostly because I find it so difficult to hold on to the sound you get at sound check once the hall's filled up a few hours later. That nice round tone you had that afternoon suddenly sounds totally thin because all those overtones that were bouncing around the building are gone. But the other thing is, I'd rather hear the real instrument anyway. I don't like sampled piano; I'd rather hear a real piano, miked. I'd probably like to experiment with a pickup and mic combination. Of course the problem then is that you can't move around a whole lot on stage once you get that mic in there.

But for so many years that was the way. Like at the Grand Ole Opry-one big mic, that's all. True. I mean, when you watch Dylan in [the concert film] Don't Look Back, and you realize he's singing through the house public-address system, with no monitors, and he's just hearing the house . . . but he's playing his guitar and he's creating that sound all right there in his realm, and the miking just picks it up. And it's all very nuanced. I think that as a result of where we've gone technically-with everything being plugged in, going direct to the board and so forth-that nuanced, ear-on-the-sound-hole thing you get when you're sitting on the edge of your bed at home isn't always there anymore. There are different versions of it, but it's not really the same.

Is your songwriting guitar the same one you use in concert? Yeah, but it's nothing I've ever been too worried about-it's an old mid-'50s slotted-head New Yorker that had been tacked up on the wall in a shop in Lexington, Kentucky, way back when. It was just collecting dust at the time. I took it down off the wall, tightened the strings, and it's been my main guitar ever since. For the first 20 years I never even put it into a case-which is great when you're getting to the airport. That way, you have to carry it on! [Laughs.] Even now, I only use a soft gig bag when I'm traveling with it.

So obviously you have no trepidation about what might happen to your muse if anything should happen to that guitar while you're out on the road. On the contrary-it's actually come in quite handy on occasion. This one particular time I was coming into L.A. from the airport, and I was in the back of a cab on the freeway heading into the city, just me and the guitar. At one point this car bolts right by and cuts off our cab. And the cabbie, who's pretty irate, just looks at the guy and blurts out, "Man, you give me the blues in the daytime!" And I'm like, "Um, you wouldn't happen to have a pen on you?" [Laughs.] There I am on this highway, and I start scribbling down these words to "Blues in the Daytime"-right onto the back of that guitar! I practically had the song finished by the time I got to the studio. When I get out, the cab driver looks over at me, smiles, and says, "You will send me the check now, won't you?"

David Simons, a New England-based writer and editor, actually think he can put two kids through college and pay for his mother-in-law's heated apartment as a single-income, freelance music journalist.

The Rodney Crowell Web Site it.stlawu.edu/%7Emdoyle/rodney/rodney.html A good site for articles, photos, lyrics, and more.

All Music Guide www.allmusic.com Search here under Rodney Crowell for a complete discography, CD reviews, and album credits.

Index of /cowpie/cowpie-songs/c/crowell_rodney www.roughstock.com/cowpie/cowpie-songs/c/crowell_rodney Part of the larger Cowpie site (it stands for Country and Western Pickers of the Internet), this page offers lyrics and chord changes to a passel of Crowell's songs.