Keith Urban, Rodney Crowell Are "Making Memories"

[DeactiveCarib]

Rodney Crowell said he wrote "Making Memories of Us" for his wife, singer Claudia Church, after his daughter phoned him one day to remind him that it was Valentine's Day. "Claudia's a great woman," Crowell recalled thinking. "She deserves more than Hallmark quality."

The song went on, of course, to become one of Keith Urban's biggest hits. ASCAP, the performance rights organization, toasted this achievement Monday (July 11) with a party that filled its capacious Music Row reception hall. Crowell and Urban met with reporters just before the party started to reflect on what the song means to each of them. Church accompanied her husband to both events.

After Crowell wrote the first version of "Making Memories," Tracy Byrd recorded it on his 2003 album, The Truth About Men. Then Crowell revised the song and cut it himself on The Notorious Cherry Bombs album a year later. Finally, Urban took his turn. "I think Keith's version is gorgeous," Crowell said. "I think he added a certain amount of romantic come-hither."

In response to a question about the song's distinctive guitar lick, Crowell gave the credit to Chris Leuzinger, who played on the original demo.

Crowell also talked about his own upcoming album, The Outsider, which he explained will be "the third in a series of records" that includes The Houston Kid (2001) and Fate's Right Hand (2003). Downplaying the success of his most commercial album, Diamonds & Dirt (1988), which yielded him five No. 1 singles and a gold record, Crowell asserted, "The remaining records I make in my career are going to be records I want as my legacy."

Remarking that he has never heard Urban's version of his song on the radio, Crowell said he's listening these days to records by Led Zeppelin, John Prine, John Hiatt, Gillian Welch and Radiohead. "Strangely enough," he added, "I've become a Metallica fan."

Turning to questions about Urban's achievements compared to his own, Crowell said, "I see Keith as being smarter than me. ... I could match his work ethic now, but I wasn't as focused in the '80s." He characterized his current point-of-view as a songwriter as "slightly spiritual, slightly political. ... But let's face it, a love song is what people want."

At this point, Urban came into the conference room where the press briefing was taking place. Asked first what he liked about Crowell as a songwriter, Urban responded, "Rodney says what I'd like to say. ... I also gravitate toward his humility."

Acknowledging the "simplicity" in his recording of "Making Memories," Urban added, "I can't believe how complex achieving the simplicity was." He said it took "multiple recordings" to get the exact take he wanted on the song.

Urban explained that he had chosen newcomer Miranda Lambert to open his impending tour dates because "I just like the rootsiness of her."

Several notables showed up for the party, among them Sex in the City's John Corbett, who had dropped by to sign with ASCAP in preparation for recording his own album; singer Hal Ketchum; songwriter and producer Bobby Braddock; Country Music Association executive director Ed Benson; and Country Radio Broadcasters executive director Ed Salamon.

ASCAP's Connie Bradley introduced Crowell and Urban to the crowd, along with Urban's producer, Dann Huff, and representatives from the song's publisher, Sony/ATV Music Publishing. She also singled out for praise Lisa Malone, the independent songplugger and reflexologist who took the song from Crowell and brought it to Capitol Records, Urban's label.

"This is my first big success," Malone told CMT.com later. "I was over at Rodney's house, doing reflexology on him, working on his feet and talking about pitching songs. He told me about this song that he had. I told him I would pitch it for him and asked if he had a copy of it. He said he was still working on it, rewriting it and had to demo it. I kind of stayed on him for a while. Then he called me from the studio one day and said, 'I got that song finished, Lisa.' ... He wanted me to pitch it to Alan Jackson, which I did. They passed on it. But I thought it was much more of a Keith Urban song. ... So I took it over to Capitol."

Bradley pointed out that "Making Memories of Us" had stayed at No. 1 in Billboard for five weeks and on the Radio & Records chart for four weeks. She also noted that this was Crowell's sixth No. 1 party. "There's a movie in his life story," she said, "or at least a miniseries."

Salamon used the occasion to introduce a new "appreciation award" from Country Radio Broadcasters for "those who are instrumental in growing the country audience." Crowell and Urban were the first recipients.

As Urban struggled to hold onto his armful of awards, Bradley quipped, "Where's your road manager?"

Fletcher Foster, Capitol's senior vice president of marketing, used the occasion for a bit of politicking by noting that the label has nominated "Making Memories" for both the CMA's song and single of the year.

"I know how much work Keith and Dann put into this," Crowell told the crowd. "You're truly an artist when you put that kind of vision into it." Added Huff, "I've never seen such a commitment and preoccupation to getting a song right."

After all the awards were handed out, remarks made and pictures taken, Crowell and Urban wrapped up the party by performing the song.

Marilu White contributed to this story.

[a1aara]

Cool article!

[Jahfin]

From the Ottawa Citizen:

July 14, 2005 Thursday

He's still an outsider after all this time: But Rodney Crowell stands
among Nashville's finest

BY Patrick Langston

Fear may be Rodney Crowell's strongest ally.

Without it, Crowell -- widely regarded as one of Nashville's finest
songwriters as well as a topnotch performer and record producer --
wouldn't have pulled off his current hat trick: three outstanding
back-to-back albums, including ``The Outsider," to be released early
next month.

"I started following this rule of thumb that I was going to give a
singular voice to what I was afraid of," says Crowell, referring to
2001's ``The Houston Kid," the first of his three new-millennium
albums.

"I wanted to leave something as an artist that my (four) daughters
would be proud of."

``The Houston Kid" revisited, with understandable trepidation on
Crowell's part, its creator's less-than-idyllic childhood in that
Texas town. Crowell, who plays the Cisco Systems Bluesfest today,
also financed the album, a worrisome venture at the best of times and
doubly so in an era of sickly CD sales.

Two years later, ``Fate's Right Hand" found Crowell -- nominally a
country musician, but always open to rock and other influences --
digging into the present tense of the examined life and spiritual
concerns.

The album was rife with the possibility of pretentiousness, but he
plunged ahead and wound up with a widely acclaimed disc that found
life funny, frustrating and precious.

``The Outsider" is a natural next step in the trajectory, focusing
mainly on Crowell's anxieties about the outside world.

"I wrote most of this record abroad, kind of from the point of view
of an expatriate in an election year," says Crowell, who turns 55 in
August and is unlikely to get a birthday card from George W. Bush.

"Given the so-called polarization of America, I had some
apprehensions about really speaking my heart, so I decided, 'Ah, I'm
afraid of this. I better go right down the middle with it.'"

Bristling with sociopolitical statements including the title track
and ``Ignorance Is the Enemy," which features a Jehovah-like John
Prine and Emmylou Harris calling foolish mortals to account, ``The
Outsider" is bound to keep Crowell exactly that -- excluded from
Nashville's king-making process.

It wasn't always so.

In the 1980s and early '90s, Crowell was very much an insider. He
began his musical life as an 11-year-old drummer in his father's
country combo, advanced to sideman with Harris's much-esteemed Hot
Band and debuted as a solo musician in 1978.

His songs, including hits such as ``Ain't Living Long Like This" and
``Lovin' All Night," were covered by such pacesetters as Waylon
Jennings, Bob Seger and Patty Loveless.

Crowell also produced albums for his then-wife Rosanne Cash, her
father, Johnny Cash, and others.

As well, he saw his 1988 release, ``Diamonds & Dirt," spin off five
No. 1 singles, including ``It's Such a Small World" and the Grammy-
winning ``After All This Time."

Then Crowell wrote a song about his father's death.

``Things I Wish I'd Said," one of Crowell's most intimate and
compelling compositions, was released as a single from 1989's Keys to
the Highway.

Just a little too direct for radio, "that was the last time that door
was open to me."

He went on to release three more albums, but after 1995's ``Jewel of
the South," Crowell went into a six-year hiatus from recording and
performing, devoting his time to his family (after splitting with
Cash, he married his present wife, singer Claudia Church) and a re-
evaluation of his art.

And when he roared back with ``The Houston Kid," the cheering
exploded from the much smaller alt-country crowd, not commercial
radio listeners.

``The Outsider" will have the same limited appeal.

Take the punk-tinged song The Obscenity Prayer (Give It To Me), a
first-person mantra of a guy who would be right at home in ``Bonfire
of the Vanities."

Crowell recalls that while writing the song, he thought to
himself, "'Oh, you know what, there's going to be people who take me
literally and not realize that there's irony at work here.'"

In fact, Crowell's fear recently crystallized when an audience member
at a Dublin concert was offended by the line "the Dixie Chicks can
kiss my ass." She had to be reassured by a friend that the voice was
not Crowell's, but that of his narrator.

Anything but a mere tirade, ``The Outsider" shows Crowell's usual
sense of balance by also including masterful love songs such as
Glasgow Girl, a meditation on artistic creativity in Beautiful
Despair and a superlative rendering, with Harris, of Dylan's
``Shelter From The Storm."

And the album has no shortage of humour, wry as it may be.

"If you pull back and look at the comedy, the beauty and the despair,
of the human condition," concludes Crowell, "it could be really
despairing or we could have a cosmic laugh at ourselves and
say, 'Look at how silly we are.'"