We sat down with Crowder to talk about his new album Neon Steeple, which was released on May 27th. Crowder is nominated for a K-LOVE Fan Award for his song ” I Am,” which you can find on his new album. “I Am” rose to the No. 3 position on the Christian Songs chart. He will be performing at the Opry this weekend for the first time.
WS: Congrats on your new album, what do attribute to your longevity?
Crowder: Honestly, who knows! That feels like asking how you won the lottery or how you got struck by lightning. Mysterious and humbling. I believe people respond to something authentic more than they do perfection and I’ve tried to present the most vulnerable portions of my interior and make sure folks knew I was just as bent as them and just as intent on finding the bits of light we have here among us. I hope that is what it can be attributed to.
WS:Â What was your inspiration for Neon Steeple?
Crowder: Well, this album comes out of a significant movement of life for me. I was born and raised in Texas and had up and moved to Georgia. Home is a theme that gets attention in lots of forms of art, whether it be literature or film or music, the search for belonging, the move from a place of orientation to disorientation to reorientation is common. The Holy Scriptures vibrate with this theme. The garden, exile, promised land. The garden, the fall, redemption. The prodigal son. This movement of location to dislocation to relocation is thick on this record. I think the same story is told about our present tense as a society. I had this image, this steeple and this modifying word, neon, in my mind. We don’t build churches like we used to. Used to be that the dominant architectural feature in a town would be the church and that thing pointing to something greater and grander and more transcendent than what we were experiencing. Life and death used to live closer together. To stay alive was miraculous. To have a thing in the middle of town echoing a return coming and eminent, a return to the dream of God, this was formative. To live here now, in the future. I say this to myself all the time, I will be talking out loud while holding this thing, this internet machine close to my face, saying things like, “where is pizza?” and this thing talks back to me and says that pizza is right around the corner. We live in the future! And so, me, believing that vehicle you transport a thing in is not neutral, there is history and context in the means of communication, whether it be a banjo or a Boss drum machine, the vehicle is not neutral. I wanted to throw my arms around the awareness of our condition that we seemed closer to in our past and I wanted to lean into what is coming, to acknowledge that there is a heck of a lot of noise going on to get your message through. Neon, an inert gas arrived at from distillation of liquid air, a thing stereotypically used to sell or market a product or way of life that distracts us from the difficulty of here and now. I wanted this recording to cut through the noise and point to something transcendent, a call and response.
WS: On this album you have a collaboration with Emmy Lou Harris, how did this come about?
Crowder:Â Â This and your next question are exactly as I responded to the question of longevity in your first question. Miraculous. Not a thing dreamed of because even my dreams were not so expansive.
I love reading liner notes and long ago, when I was but a wee lad, I kept coming across the name Phil Maderia on songs that I loved. Turns out he can poke at pretty much anything you put in his near vacinity. Just ridiculous. Well, I had a band mate who couldn’t make a run of dates on this club tour we were doing and it turned out that Mr. Maderia was free and by kind connections joined us for a number of dates out. We bonded deeply. Too many moments to mention, but I love him dearly and it took all of a couple of minutes of meeting him in person that things took. He happens to have been in Emmylou’s band. In making the Neon Steeple album I was most definitely going to have Phil add his two cents to as much of it we could squeeze into schedules and there was this tune that we had uncovered while on the road together. It resonated deep within us. Well, I had the guts of the thing put to tape but was looking for a female presence, a voice to bring the longing of the thing to the surface. Turns out Phil had just the gal to introduce me to. I can say this, the honey sweetness of her voice barely belies the person. What a lady. I have been moved by her writing and singing long enough to call her legendary. I believe the voice and the person will be a moment that history looks back on thankful to have been blessed with such a thing.
WS: You will be playing at the Opry this weekend with Emmy Lou Harris, is this your first time to play at the Opry?
Crowder:Â Yes. This is my first time to play the Opry. Stating it is a great honor is an understatement. This is a thing that I didn’t have the creativity to add to any sort of bucket list or goal or life statement or whatever. No. This exceeds dreaming. I was fortunate enough to befriend Marty Stuart a number of years ago—he was kind enough to let me tag along with him while he was holding court there. It is not easy to describe what it feels like standing in front of Roy Clark after spending every night as a kid gathered around the family television on Saturday nights while taking our turn to wash our hair and bathe so we were ready for Sunday morning church. To stand side stage while Connie Smith sings at the Opry is just about heaven. Never once did it enter my head that I might step foot out there and commence to singing my own self. About like winning the lottery or being struck by lightning.
Tickets are still available for Crowder’s performance with Emmy Lou Harris this Saturday, May 31st.
