Airline Highway

Description

Full of deep empathy, sober insight, and catchy guitar licks, Rodney Crowell’s new album takes its title from a seemingly ordinary stretch of blacktop four-lane road that runs deep into Louisiana. It’s the route he and producer Tyler Bryant took to get to the remote studio where they recorded these songs, hauling a truck full of gear on a two-day journey that ended in the swamps. Along the way, Crowell looked at the route they were driving: Airline Highway. It’s the southernmost segment of Highway 61, also called the Blues Highway or Great River Road, and it follows the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans. Crowell knows this part of the country intimately. He grew up in east Houston, a few hours west of the state line, and made wild forays into Louisiana in his youth to drink or party or mostly to listen to live music. Airline Highway is an album full of old, lasting loves, whether it’s a favorite song or a lover you remember fondly. Songs like “Sometime Thang” and “Rainy Days in California” (the latter with Lukas Nelson) raise a glass to old romances and encounters with different women in California or Louisiana: falling in love, going through hard times, drifting apart until they become “that little 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 a core of truth. “At the core, there are a lot more years behind me than there are in front of me. Now it’s just about the work and what a blessing it is to be able to do it. The work really feeds me in the moment.