Airline Highway

Full of deep empathy, sober insights, and lively guitar licks, Rodney Crowell’s new album takes its title from a seemingly mundane stretch of four-lane blacktop that runs deep into Louisiana. It’s the road he and producer Tyler Bryant drove to reach the remote studio where they recorded these songs, hauling a truckload of gear on a two-day journey that ended in swamps. Along the way Crowell looked up the route they were driving: Airline Highway. It’s the southernmost segment of Highway 61, also called the Blues Highway or the Great River Road, and it follows the Mississippi River from Minnesota down to New Orleans. Crowell is intimately familiar with this part of the country. He grew up on the east side of Houston, just a few hours west of the state line, and made wild forays into Louisiana as a young man to drink or carouse or mostly to catch live music. Airline Highway is an album full of old, abiding loves, whether it’s a favorite song or a lover you remember fondly. Songs like “Sometime Thang” and “Rainy Days in California” (the latter featuring Lukas Nelson) raise a glass to old romances and encounters with different women in California or down in Louisiana: falling in love, toughing out hard times, growing apart until they become “that small voice on your phone,” to quote a devastating line on “Taking Flight,” co-written with and featuring Ashley McBryde. Some are fictional, Crowell explains, but they all contain some kernel of truth. “At a basic level there are a lot more years behind me than there are ahead of me. I’m up in my seventieth decade of my life, and I’m glad that I’m still looking forward to certain things I want to do, but a lot of what’s worth talking about is behind me.” One of the things Crowell looks forward to is making more music with musicians he genuinely loves. “I’m just in love with the experience now. I’ve worked with amazing people in the past, but I was looking too far ahead. I wanted the music we were creating to make a name for me, so I wasn’t completely present with them. My ego was involved. But now my ego seems to have finally evaporated. Now it’s just about the work and what a blessing it is to be able to do it. The work truly feeds me in the moment.”