Jazz Articles about Rodney Crowell

About Rodney Crowell

Album Review

Rodney Crowell's creative output in recent years has been the work of a man coming to terms with the circumstances of life in such a way acceptance takes precedence over resignation. Thus, it only makes sense that, in the wake of Triage (New West, 2021), The Chicago Sessions (New West, 2023) and Airline Highway (New West, 2025), the former bandleader for Emmylou Harris would deign to exhume a previously-recorded but unreleased album and give it the light of ...

Album Review

Rodney Crowell: Airline Highway

Read "Airline Highway" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
August 30, 2025

The best entries in Rodney Crowell's twenty-plus entry discography emphasize simplicity in material, musicianship and production. As such, Airline Highway has much in common with But What Will the Neighbors Think (Warner Bros., 1980) and The Chicago Sessions (New West, 2023). Unlike (too) many contemporary country artists, Crowell does not affect a pose. Instead, he proffers himself as an intelligent and discerning soul who has learned much from living life to the fullest (without belaboring the specifics).Layered arrangements ...

Album Review

Rodney Crowell: Triage

by Doug Collette
August 29, 2021

Even if the listener isn't aware of Rodney Crowell's personal history in recent years, the veteran songwriter and recording artist may still sound a bit defensive during his metaphysical rumination that closes Triage. In the end, however, “This Body Isn't All There Is To Who I Am" is a logical, perhaps even inevitable, culmination of the reflections and observations that precede it. As such, it is a perfectly fitting conclusion to an album with a title that refers to the ...

Album Review

Rodney Crowell: Tarpaper Sky

Read "Tarpaper Sky" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
June 7, 2014

Tarpaper Sky reaffirms Rodney Crowell's position as one of the most literate of contemporary songwriters. At the same time, it exhibits his unusual savvy as a musician and bandleader as he collects a core quintet to skillfully elicit both the intelligence and emotion of his original material. In its prolonged gestation before and after other projects- Kin (Vanguard, 2012) his collaboration with novelist Mary Karr and his reunion with Emmylou Harris Old Yellow Moon (Nonesuch, 2013)--Crowell's fourteenth album ...