Rodney Crowell – Fate’s Right Hand

Listen up, kids. You know what awaits in middle age: resignation, complacency, compromise, numbing nostalgia, a life sentenced to domestic drudgery. Hope I die before I get old, right?

Well, at the ancient age of 53, Rodney Crowell has not only stared into the abyss of wrinkles and gray hair, he has made a flying leap into it. And he’s here to testify that not only does growing older beat the alternative, it brings a greater sense of challenge, adventure and possibility than a younger man could have ever suspected.

Where Crowell’s previous album, The Houston Kid, saw the artist revisiting his formative years, the family struggles and rites of passage through which the boy became a man, Fate’s Right Hand shows the singer taking stock of where he’s been and where he’s going. Against all odds, he finds the prospects ahead more compelling than what he sees in the rearview mirror. At a time when so many of his generation have opted for cruise control, he has shifted into overdrive.

Taken together, the two albums represent the sort of second act that F. Scott Fitzgerald declared missing from American lives, as an artist heralded as one of country’s finest songwriters through the 1980s — when he and his former wife Rosanne Cash were the king and queen of Nashville progressivism — invests more of himself in his artistry than he did at his hitmaking peak. When you’re too old to get played on the radio, there’s no reason not to make the music that’s most important to you.

These days, Crowell’s playing as if he’s going for broke, upping the ante each time out. And for an artist who seemed to fritter away much of the 1990s with music that ranged from uncommercial to inconsequential, his renewal has an inspirational dimension.

He accepts spiritual wisdom wherever he finds it (“Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Minnie Pearl knew/To do unto others the things you want done unto you”, on “Time To Go Inward”) and seeks kindred spirits across the cultural landscape (“Tom Waits, Aretha Franklin, Mary Karr, Walter Cronkite, Seamus Heaney, Ringo Starr, Dalai Lama, Charlie Brown,” he catalogues some of those who make life worth living on “Earthbound”). He presents himself as an artist of considerable ego (nobody will accuse the self-mythologizing “Houston Kid” of false humility), boundless humor, and an insatiable appetite for experience.

“I’ve got a past like a broken wing, but you ain’t seen anything,” he pledges in “Still Learning How To Fly”, one of the most exhilarating album-opening anthems since Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands”. Muscular, confident, impeccably crafted, the cut can’t help but strike a responsive chord in listeners of a certain age, as the guitar propulsion of a Rolling Stones riff, the ascending bass line, the sweeter George Harrison-style strains of Jerry Douglas’ dobro, and the bedrock soulfulness of John Hobbs’ organ build to a majestic affirmation.

Not that middle age is all sweetness and light. As a ballad of bitter resignation, “It’s A Different World Now” could well be the most emotionally powerful track on the album, with Crowell’s voice on the verge of breaking as he links environmental waste, military imperialism and moral pollution, envisioning an apocalypse that arrives not with a bang, but a whimper.

Much of the rest of the album finds Crowell extending his craft, pushing for something deeper and truer, stretching in all sorts of directions, as if daring himself to go beyond his comfort level. The title cut’s stream of sexually-charged consciousness has the propulsion of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in heat (or, as Crowell so delicately puts it, “with a pole in my pants”), its spurts of free association hitting everything from Clinton-Lewinsky to cybertechnology.

Then there’s the psychological dialogue of “The Man In Me”, in which the singer delivers a series of self-lacerating accusations, as the vocal response of Marcia Ramirez invites him to cut himself some slack. Driven by the guitar of Steuart Smith (and it’s great to hear that his work with the Eagles hasn’t ruined him for Crowell), the song turns inner conflict into pure rock ‘n’ roll.

Not all of the chances Crowell takes pay such dividends — yet it’s indicative of the project’s risks and reach that the weakest cut here provides the thematic key that unlocks the most ambitious album of Crowell’s career. “It’s time to go inward, take a look at myself,” he intones on the largely spoken-word “Time To Go Inward”. “Time to make the most of the time that I’ve got left.” Yeah yeah yeah, the listener wants to respond. Don’t tell us what you’re going to do. Just do it. And then tell us what you’ve found.

But as Crowell addresses the necessity of stripping away decades of protective bark from his psyche and wonders whether he’s up to the task, it’s his willingness to leave himself open that ultimately excuses such self-important psychobabble as “my mind is like a chatterbox whose noise pollutes the pathway to my soul.”

Over the course of the album, the music benefits from the stellar support of Bela Fleck’s banjo driving the buoyant “Earthbound”; Kim Richey providing the harmony on “Riding Out The Storm” (where the folkier strains evoke the spirit of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer”); and David Rawlings and Gillian Welch lightening the vocal load of “Time To Go Inward”.

I suspect that some of the album’s impact depends on where listeners find themselves on the midlife cycle. When I was previewing it on a long weekend drive with my wife, Maria, the perennial spring chicken could hardly keep from laughing at how pathetic it was to hear this old guy so obsessed with how he was feeling, thinking, living. “Come On Funny Feelin'” sent her over the top, in its pop buoyancy (like the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”) and message of emotional rapture. Hearing Crowell sing, “Get this freakin’ anvil off my chest, come on funny feelin,'” she lost it.

Yet it’s Crowell’s willingness to risk awkwardness, even occasional mawkishness, rather than settling for glibness, that gives this music its heart. As someone who’s three months older than the decrepit Rodney, I may not know exactly what he means in “Come On Funny Feelin'”. But I know just how he feels.