Rodney Crowell

In my 15 minutes of fame around 'Diamonds and Dirt,' it was not a healthy time for me because of my insecurity.

When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.

When I write a song with somebody else in mind, it's putting the cart before the horse. The way I write best is when I allow the song to tell me what it wants to be.

Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.

Conversation is a really good way to get things done.

I've finally figured out how to make a Rodney Crowell record, and that's let it be, leave the mistakes.

I can't make a perfect record. When I try to, I bleed all the feeling out of it.

Strangely enough, I've become a Metallica fan.

Have I felt misunderstood by Music Row at times? Of course.

I've often said to young songwriters when they want to write with me, 'Let's take a stab at ten songs, and we might get one really good one.'

'The Outsider' is a culmination of a lot of things I've been working diligently toward as a recording artist. Hopefully it will render my past pigeonholing obsolete while positioning me more solidly as a socially conscious American singer/songwriter. Wouldn't that be entertaining?

It's a gift that we get to do the work that we do to call ourselves artists.

Townes Van Zandt ranks alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. He inspired so many songwriters to shoot for something that's timeless.

The more I'm dedicated to this work, the more I'm able to satisfy my deep need to create. And that's a pretty good thing. If you take half-decent care of yourself, that can propel you on into productive later years.

I wouldn't go as far to say that anything that I've done is timeless.

I don't know if I owned a toothbrush until I was 19, maybe. I didn't come from stock that placed any importance on the toothbrush. But a couple of girls I met changed that. And I would do anything to get a girl to pay attention to me long enough that I could feel good about myself.

Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.

Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I'm not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.

I was an only child.

There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.