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Working with producer / son-in-law Dan Knobler, Crowell was almost done Sorting when a health crisis inspired “Transient Global Amnesia Blues”, the last song they recorded for the album. He is currently on tour to perform this and other songs from the new collection.
Crowell shares with Billboard how he overcame the pandemic, what happened the morning he ended up in the emergency room and how his writing evolved.
Why did you name the album Sorting?
I researched the definition to make sure I got it right, but triage requires prioritizing if you are to medically save lives. When a head-on collision occurs and help is on the way, the yard prioritizes what to do first. I feel like the song “Triage” [says] that the first thing we need to do is remember how to love. [Even people] that I don’t like, can I remember how to love them as human beings with the right to be on earth? How do I remember how to love and how can I fit it into these songs without being manipulative and without being boring?
What inspired “Transient Global Amnesia”?
It was October 9, 2020, a typical morning. I walk in the hills around my house. It’s really good exercise for me. … But then I asked [my wife] Claudia nine times if I had walked. The ninth time she thought “stroke”. So she loaded me up, and we went to the ER. Three hours later, I wake up. I came to my senses in the ER and slowly began to pick up the pieces. Claudia went to get some food for me and I said, “I feel really weird. Bring my notebook. I need to write something. I had to spend the night in the hospital and the next morning my daughter sent me a photo of a sunflower growing on a piece of driftwood on the River Thames in the 1950s. I don’t even know why she sent it, but it started it all. One glance at that and I said, “Oh, I get it!” I had my notebook there and just started writing. I went out around noon. I had a few verses going, got home and finished it that afternoon.
Have you had other episodes of transient global amnesia?
There are words that I forget these days, but I’m not sure. The medical staff involved said, “Listen, 98% of the time this won’t happen again, just go on and live your life. And that’s exactly what I’m doing. … that was a great way to get a song. The other song that I was going to record was out of the elbow and there was this brand new recording that I slipped right into third place in the streak and I said, “Oh, now I have my album! ” I actually wrote a better song.
The “Transient Global Amnesia Blues” video, directed by Haroula Rose, shares powerful footage, including the one where you spread the ashes of your friend Guy Clark’s widow, Susanna Clark. How did it happen?
Claudia has bold writing which is really beautiful, so I said, “Can we film Claudia writing these [lyrics]? “We got a big piece of parchment and the cameraman filmed Claudia writing all the words. It was my idea and Haroula built it from there. … Susanna died in 2012. She was a very close friend. Guy gave me half of his ashes and said, “Whatever you want to do, do anything.” Strangely, I wanted to release his ashes in a particular part of it. ‘a river where I spend a lot of time alone, the Little Harpeth River I wanted to have all the really close friends like Bonnie Garner, Emmylou [Harris], Vincent [Gill] and me and Verlon [Thompson] all together. Because we were all working, it had never happened together, and on March 11, Susanna’s birthday, [because of] COVID, we were all there. I had his ashes in my closet for almost nine years. It was just the day we were shooting and I said, “I’m going to release my friend’s ashes, you can film it, Haroula, if you want.” This is how it happened.
Do you feel like you came out of the pandemic differently from before?
Yes we all have. I joked at the start about social distancing, I’m a songwriter. I have been practicing social distancing for 45 years. I’m mostly an introvert, but I go on stage and play for people and try to entertain them with how funny and witty I can be, so there’s an extroversion there, but I know for a long time that without a song, this is not going to happen. It all starts with a song, and my writing comes from that introverted part of myself. In that sense, the fact that I wasn’t out there on the road to show myself in front of people, I had a long period of time where I was able to really engage in the satisfaction that comes from being there. introversion for me. It’s a healing thing for me. Now, at the same time, the pandemic brought some people closer to me, so while I was enjoying this period of soul searching and my phone not ringing a lot, at the same time I was really in mourning that there was many people who were suffering, were suffering in the worst possible way. And although I wanted to revel in my loneliness, I was aware that there were a lot of people who were in pain.
Sorting addresses important themes from environmentalism to forgiveness to mortality. As a songwriter, do you feel more deeply responsible for addressing these topics in today’s world?
I don’t feel the responsibility more intensely, I feel the experience more intensely. As a young man, I worked from the inside out trying to express myself in a meaningful way to draw attention to myself: “Hey bang, bang, bang… Here I am! Look at me! Notice me! I write these songs. I sing like that. With age, we naturally tend to fall back on introspection. Definitely I do. It is the nature to stay alive for a while. No one comes out alive and it is a wise decision to truly consider your inner spiritual life as you come closer and closer to its end. So I can’t take the responsibility that I have to face with all these things thinking that I alone will change the world. It’s not going to happen. It would be a bloated ego and that just wouldn’t be cool.
Your songs are personal, but they strike a universal chord.
I discovered this while writing songs a long time ago, when I understand it correctly, it seems to work for others. Maybe not everyone, but when the songs I’ve written really hit the mark, when people hear them, the best thing that can happen is the song becomes theirs. It’s not my song anymore. It becomes their song at that point and then I did my job. My only responsibility is to be true to myself and if I am true to myself, everything will be fine.
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