Geographic locale seems to be a moving target with Rodney Crowell. His 2023 album was titled The Chicago Sessions, though the Houston-born singer-songwriter is in the lineage of the great Texas singer-songwriters. He lives in Nashville, but on this latest effort, the aptly titled Airline Highway, he reminisces about his youthful days across the Texas border in Louisiana. The opening track is “Rainy Days in California,” and the songs are filled with such lines as “Taking flight, going nowhere ‘til we get there.” In many of these songs, Crowell seems to be on the move, yet in the rave-up rocker “Don’t Give Up On Me,” the last line is “I’m coming home to stay.” Throughout the many locales and memories that he cites, the album’s theme lies in these two lines from “Simple (You Wouldn’t Call It Simple)” – “I don’t want to be young again, it goes by so fast/I live more in the moment now and less in the past.”
Importantly, Crowell seems to be enjoying himself. He’s teamed up with the guitarist and producer Tyler Bryant to deliver a rocking, somewhat casual, not overthought musical accompaniment. Keyboardist Catherine Marx returns from the prior effort, but beyond that, the musicians recording at Louisiana’s famed Dockside Studios (owned by Trina Shoemaker) carry a local flavor. They are roots master Dirk Powell (accordion), Rachel Loy (bass, background vocals), and Conrad Choucroun on drums and percussion. Texas great David Grissom plays guitars. The album features multiple guests, including Ashley McBryde, Charlie Starr from Blackberry Smoke, Lukas Nelson, and Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell from Larkin Poe, who play throughout.
Whether singing about love and mortality or the current administration in Washington, just as he did with his predecessor, Crowell never minces words. He has the distinctive gift of forming rhyming couplets that are witty, evocative, and occasionally provocative. “Rainy Days in California” opens as a rocker with co-writer Lukas Nelson joining Crowell on the choruses. The album title appears in one line, but the last line references the gist of several songs as he is heading south to the land of sugar cane. Appropriately, he follows with “Louisiana Sunshine Feeling Okay,” a tune that basks in the nostalgia of his visits to the neighboring state.
The album highlight is the blues shuffle “The Twenty-One Song Salute (Owed to G.G. Shinn and Cleoma Falcon),” which draws on lines from 21 songs. Crowell first recorded in a studio in Louisiana, as did Cleoma Falcon, the first woman to record Cajun/Zydeco music. Crowell used to listen to The Boogie Kings led by Shinn, thereby the reference. So, this is his ode to swamp-pop-soul. Here’s just one of many creative verses – “Woke up this mornin’ singing I feel fine/Your Only daddy that will walk the line/All liberated from the lovesick blues/Walking Spanish in my blue suede shoes.”
Another standout is the duet and co-write with Ashley McBryde, “Taking Flight,” a bitter account about the distance between two former lovers – “Next time Hell freezes over we’ll be sure to give a call.” Three other songs are character portraits of women from the steadfast, defiant “Sometime Thang” to the overly effusive love in “Some Kind of Woman” to the album closer, the string imbued (courtesy of Eleanor Denig) “Maybe Somewhere Down the Road.” It’s a rather curious way to end what is mostly a fun-filled record, as he ponders a woman who died alone. The regret is summed up well in this couplet – “But “should have been” are wasted words/They hug the ground like wounded birds.”
Crowell lets us know that not only the past or former flames are on his mind as he takes a dead center take on those in power in “Heaven Can You Help.” Assisted by Charlie Starr, he assaults the propaganda of cable news, and the gullibility of so many, summed up succinctly in these lines, “Heaven can you help us, we’re not really all that bad/We just let ourselves be had, truth be told.”
Crowell confesses to his current mindset of living in the moment and having fun. That attitude comes across on Airline Highway, yet there are also those serious moments where he reminds us of why he is among the best singer-songwriters of our time.
