Stagecoach 2016: Backstage with Rodney Crowell talking Dylan, Hank, Merle

Rodney Crowell is one of the most lauded songwriters of the last 40 years, and he’s developed a deep catalog of revered songs that have been recorded and performed countless times by other musicians.

Probably his best-known is “Ain’t Living Long Like This,” most famously covered by Waylon Jennings, and performed in public as recently as about an hour before Crowell tackled it during his own set Saturday at the 2016 edition of the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio.

Preceding Crowell, it was sung on Stagecoach’s Mane Stage by Chris Stapleton, perhaps the hottest songwriter and singer to come out of Nashville in the last year.

And yet, even though Crowell has no shortage of his own songs to draw from, he made room to salute three of his own major influences: Hank Williams (with a performance of “Honky Tonk Blues”), Merle Haggard (“Sing Me Back Home”) and Bob Dylan, with an audience-participation version of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

It was a manifestation of what another of the world’s greatest songsmiths, Leonard Cohen, was getting at in his “Tower of Song” when he wrote:

I said to Hank Williams, “How lonely does it get?”

Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet

But I hear him coughing all night long

Oh, a hundred floors above me in the tower of song

Crowell said he turns to Dylan’s rock classic from time to time because “I feel like it’s one of those songs that belongs to all of us. It’s archetypal. ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ is archetypal.”

I asked Crowell what he makes of Nashville’s songwriting factory, which churns out a remarkable quantity of new songs on a daily basis, although the quality can range from stellar to dismal.

“The publishing companies are responsible for that,” he said. “They started throwing money at people to write songs, so they would schedule you to come in Thursday at 2 and write with so-and-so. I always found that strange because I thought, how do I know if I’m going to be inspired on Thursday at 2?

“That sure wasn’t the way Hank did it,” said Crowell, who has more than passing knowledge of Williams’ writing method, having served as music supervisor for the recent biopic “I Saw the Light.”

“That’s also not the way Waylon [Jennings] did it, or Johnny Cash, or Merle or Buck Owens or anyone I know,” he said.

“But I think it’s starting to even out a little bit,” he said standing at the back of the Mustang stage a few minutes after his set concluded.

Discussing an emerging group of songwriters including Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, Sturgill Simpson and several others, Crowell, who plays a solo show Sunday at Sweetwater Union High School in San Diego, said, “I think things are starting to get better again.”

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