Rodney Crowell

18:11Malcolm Gladwell:It is an interesting song because it sounds like an old blues kind of wang-dang-doodle sort of riff. I should play it. Don't you think I should play it? You should absolutely play it.

18:23Rick Rubin:Let me just play, at least play some of it. She's a wildwood flyer and a red Corvette.

18:35Rick Rubin:Tanya Tucker meets Cate Blanchett. She's tagging like dishes in the kitchen sink. She doesn't give a damn what it is you might think. She got the blue-green eyes and a hoodoo smile Pearly white over by driver man wild Voice like butter when she opens her mouth Yeah, ever since I met her, I've been heading down south Now you can try to make it thunder, you can try to stop the rain She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing Sometime thing, sometime thing She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing Whoever said diamonds are a girl's best friend Might have set you thinking you could buy your way in In case you haven't noticed why you're flashing that green He was a rich guy She's happy feeding quarters to a slot machine.

19:53Rick Rubin:She's an open invitation to go back from where you came. She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. Sometime thing, sometime thing. She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing. You get on a Swiss chateau, half a block in Monaco, and the girls are mass on in downtown Saint-Tropez. You could take your Gulfstream jet And park it where the sun don't set In case you haven't heard me yet Be careful where you place that bed, pal You better heed my warning Tell me what did I say I'm gonna love that woman Till my dying day Go on and make a move on what you know to be mine Is only gonna lead you to the back of the line You can try to run your number Let me try to make it plain She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing Sometime thing, sometime thing She don't believe in making love to a sometime thing

21:13Malcolm Gladwell:The lines in there are so good. Thank you. stacked like dishes in the kitchen sink.

21:20Rick Rubin:Yes.

21:21Malcolm Gladwell:And the one that kills me is one-way ticket back to where you came, from where you came. Yeah. It's also, now that I know the story, somebody hitting on your girlfriend, somebody rich hitting on your girlfriend, it's not unsympathetic to the guy. Hmm. You could have written a song that was like, you're a loser. Yeah. You're out of her league.

21:47Rick Rubin:The guy was a film star, and I suppose still is. I'll never reveal his name. It doesn't matter. But thank you for pointing out that it is sympathetic toward the guy. I'm glad because, to be honest, it wasn't my intention to be sympathetic.

22:06Malcolm Gladwell:I really want to thumb my nose at him and pretty much what I'm doing. Maybe I should rephrase. It's sympathetic towards men in general.

22:18Rick Rubin:Yeah. Well, God knows we need that. Yes. Our gender is... Our backs have been against the wall for a long time and for good reason.

22:29Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah, we've earned that. You mentioned growing up in Houston. For people who notice how many references there are to rain in your songs, you come by it honestly.

22:41Rick Rubin:Oh, yeah.

22:42Malcolm Gladwell:Lots of hurricanes.

22:43Rick Rubin:Yeah, it rained a lot.

22:45Malcolm Gladwell:Torrential. You describe in your book basically your house falling apart growing up. Oh, yeah. Because of the rain.

22:52Rick Rubin:In England, they call them two up and two down. It's four rooms with a bathroom. And there's a kitchen and my parents' bedroom. I was the only child. But you could see the stars through the roof, through the ceiling in their bedroom. And they had number three wash tubs and igloo water coolers and pots and pans catching water coming through the ceiling. And same thing in the kitchen. But the water would, the light bulb in the center of the ceiling, it had to have been dangerous as it could be because the water would come pouring down around the light fixture in the ceiling. And it would rain and just rain and rain and rain.

23:36Rick Rubin:And I still love rain. I mean, rain feels like home to me.

23:41Malcolm Gladwell:You describe your father, he worked construction. He was a handy guy, but not at home.

23:47Rick Rubin:No, that's true about him. I mean, sixth or seventh grade share crop farm education in western Kentucky, he wound up running as the head guy at a big construction company in Houston, taking on really building barges and launch pads for ships being launched in a shipyard. They're really a smart guy, but it's just all the good things he did for other people just didn't make it home.

24:23Malcolm Gladwell:Was that ever a discussion like we can see the stars?

24:28Rick Rubin:No, I don't think so. I think it's no doubt my parents were Depression-era farm kids, sharecroft farm kids, disentitled. And I don't think that they really thought that they had a right to expect anything better than what was there. However, my dad would go off to work and really perform for the man. and my mother was a janitor at the school for a while there and I suppose she was good at it. I don't know, but if you knew my mom and dad, you wouldn't know why I'm a songwriter because my father played guitar and he had a beautiful voice and he was a savant in another way in that he grew up on a sharecroft farm where they walked four or five miles to someone who had a dry cell radio to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights.

25:27Rick Rubin:And I guess the way it was, he could hear a song once or twice and have it. And most of those songs were simple in that way. And my father actually took me to Hank Williams' Next to Last performance in Houston in 1952, right before Christmas, and I was two years and four months old. Do you remember that? And I wrote about it in my book, but what I remember is the smell of his hair tonic and a little bit of a light and that kind of hushed audience sound before things start to happen. But he reinforced the memory over and over and over again because as I was from childhood on, he was like, Don't ever forget that I took you to see the Hillbilly Shakespeare, which is what they called Hank Williams back then.

26:22Rick Rubin:So he drove it home. So my memory of it is his memory. And I tried to write about it that way.

26:31Malcolm Gladwell:You don't remember the show itself.

26:33Rick Rubin:No, no. No way. But I do remember a couple of years after that being on the floor with a little record player and those Hank Williams 78s. I'd figured out how to get them on a small turntable and listen to those Hank Williams 78s over and over and over again.

26:54Malcolm Gladwell:What were the songs that stuck with you?

26:56Rick Rubin:Oh, well, it's like moving on over. Come in last night about half past ten That baby of mine wouldn't let me in And man, that caught me, even age four. It's like whatever the role of that language. And Chuck Berry had sort of the same effect on me. You know, those cartoons of the cat floating through the air following the catnip. Those kind of rolling, tumbling, lyrical events like those. So I've always been on the lookout for that kind of thing. It's like, boy, how do you string them together where the song becomes a freight train?

27:39Malcolm Gladwell:Are there songs of yours you think you've succeeded in doing that?

27:43Rick Rubin:I've succeeded from time and time again. I've been doing it for 50 years, so at least twice in a decade I've succeeded in stringing.

27:55Malcolm Gladwell:With that particular kind of rolling feel.

27:58Rick Rubin:Well, I've never tried to ape somebody else's success. I've tried to find it in my own way. But like, I look for trouble and I found it, son, straight down the barrel of a low man's gun. For my ain't living long like this, that was like that. Or Faith's Right Hand. You know, when you're moved like that at a young age and you're actually on your way to becoming a professional songwriter, Those things never really leave you. They're there. They're there to stay because it's like it becomes a benchmark. It just happened in so many ways along the way to hear Chris Christopherson woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.

28:44Rick Rubin:To hear that is like, oh, boy, okay, there it is. I don't want to do that, but I want to access something inside of me that is my own version of what that is. To me, that's the search.

29:02Rodney Crowell:We'll be back with more from Rodney Crowell after the break. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Broken Record. Sunday is built on a deceptively simple premise. A healthier yard starts beneath the surface. By analyzing your soil and using climate data, Sunday creates a custom yard plan powered by nutrient-dense ingredients instead of traditional synthetic treatments. It's a shift away from guesswork and towards understanding, which historically tends to produce better outcomes. Go to GetSunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That website again is GetSunday.com. Small businesses are the pulse of every community.

29:50Rodney Crowell:They bring people together, create opportunities and drive growth. With a widespread presence in communities across the country, Chase for Business supports small business owners at a local level. That makes it possible for you to connect, learn from each other and grow together. There's a real commitment to seeing small businesses succeed. The Chase for Business team has knowledge and expertise that span a wide range of financial areas. They can help you make more informed decisions as you navigate the complexities of running your business. They'll help your business grow with individual guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place.

30:24Rodney Crowell:With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com slash business. Chase for business. Make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC, copyright 2026, JPMorgan Chase & Company.

31:38Rodney Crowell:We'll be right back. assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

31:50Malcolm Gladwell:Before we go back to songwriting, I do want to mention your mother, who's this incredible

31:54Rick Rubin:character in your book.

31:58Malcolm Gladwell:She took you to church. She wasn't particularly musical herself, but you got a lot of church music through her. She went to evangelical churches.

32:07Rick Rubin:Yeah. Well, my mother was, the way they referred to it back then is she's a Pentecostal woman. And she spoke in tongues. I jokingly say we were just a couple of cuts below snake handlers. But my mother used to drag me up on the east side of Houston, used to drag me to this place called the Emanuel Temple where they had, if you read the book, it sounds like you have, it's like there were two preachers at this church. They alternated. I don't remember why they alternated. One guy was really slick. He was sort of insinuated that he was the evolved spiritual leader of this thing. But I didn't trust the guy.

33:01Rick Rubin:At age four or five, it's like something. But there was another guy named Brother Pemberton who later reminded me of Jerry Lee Lewis. And I liked him because he was slinging it from the hip. He was making it up as it was going. He was saving us all from roasting in hell just at the very last minute. And he just had a knack for it, and I loved him. And the thing about it, the whole thing in the church was that if the preacher was doing his job, we would all go down and kneel by the podium there and confess our sins and everything. And I was just kind of disinterested and looking around. I happened to glance up at the guy, and he was standing over me, and he winked.

33:52Rick Rubin:He just gave me a wink. And it's like it set me free for the rest of my life. It was like to me he was saying, hey, man, this is show business. And even then you felt. He let me in on the secret. Of course, it took a long time for it to dawn on me what that wink really meant. And maybe he didn't mean it. But later on, when it dawned on me, it was like, ah, he was letting me in on this show business, man. Because that's what it was. The slick dude, it was show business for him. He was just doing it in a more suave way. Were you ever religious then? No, no, no, man. It's like organized religion doesn't work for me.

34:37Rick Rubin:A spiritual life works for me. You know, I'm a God guy. You know, I think whatever that is, I got a connection to it. But it's strictly my connection. I wouldn't even dare to assume that it was anybody else's connection. I think one of my problems with religion is that they try to lead you down their path instead of your own path.

35:02Malcolm Gladwell:Your mother also, and you talk about this a lot in your book, she had seizures. She had epilepsy, I guess.

35:09Rick Rubin:Full blown. She had polio too. That girl started out, you know, polio, dyslexia, I'm sure. Epileptic. I mean, she had grandma, serious, serious epilepsy.

35:27Malcolm Gladwell:But you had to look after her.

35:29Rick Rubin:Had to. After my grandmother passed away, it was my job. Because, see, there's a thing about this epilepsy with my mother is that it never happened when my father was around. I think those were the rules. But in her case, when she would feel it coming, she knew when it was coming. And it never caught her off guard because like four or five blocks down the corner grocery where she'd go buy a six-pack. I'd go with her, walk down there, and she'd buy a six-pack of Jack's beer and chug it down. And then I would nurse her through those epileptic seizures. And, you know, she was on the floor foaming at the mouth, the whole thing.

36:14Rick Rubin:And I had a spoon, tried to keep her from swallowing her tongue. It was, you know, when you think about it, it was harrowing. But at the time, I'd watch my grandmother look after her and pretty much had absorbed what she would do to look after her. So when my grandmother passed away, it was my job. Interestingly, until I was about 17 or 18 years old, and my mother had all the signs of it coming on. And I just won't repeat the words here, but with a lot of expletives, I just said, you can die as far as I'm concerned. I'm never going to nurse you through one of these things ever again. More vitriolic than that.

37:06Rick Rubin:I'd had enough of it. And with the exception of one small seizure, that was it for her. It's like I finally blew the whistle on it and apparently I should have done that a long time before.

37:21Malcolm Gladwell:You said you thought it was your job. What made you stand up one day and say, I can't do this?

37:27Rick Rubin:I was just fed up with it. Plus I was on the verge of heading out into the world, go to college or something, senior in high school maybe. But it wasn't anything that I rehearsed. had just came up. I just had enough. Things can change in life in the strangest way. It's just something that should have happened four years ago couldn't have happened four years ago. And that was it.

37:56Malcolm Gladwell:So tell me, when did making music start for you?

38:01Rick Rubin:Well, I was graduating high school. And, you know, you have a class song. And so I was really interested in popular music, you know, from the Beatles on and Chuck Berry and all the things that I like, Bob Dylan. And so I went home and wrote a song for the class of 68, Crosby High School, 43 seniors graduating. I wrote this song, really not a very good song, but they all voted it in. You're not going to play it now. Oh, God, no. I went to my 25th class reunion, the only one ever, and I went. And by then, I had a reputation for making records and what have you, writing songs. So some of my classmates from back then were like, hey, are you going to play our class song?

38:58Rick Rubin:You're going to play our class song. I said, no, no, I don't think so. I don't have a guitar. No, no, that's not, that's real, no. And there was a woman named Miss Henson who was a home economics teacher who I always really loved when I was in school. And she was hard on me. But I really liked it. And I could tell that she liked me. But all these students from my high school were gathered around. And it was almost like the Red Sea opened up. Here comes Miss Henson, surely in her 90s by then. And she comes walking up and I said, well, you know, I'm not going to play. And she said, she said, good.

39:41Rick Rubin:That song wasn't any good then and it wouldn't be any good now.

39:46Rodney Crowell:Wow.

39:46Rick Rubin:And I said, Miss Henson. And I hugged her and I said, you're so right. You're so right. It was wonderful. It was the perfect thing to happen.

39:58Malcolm Gladwell:And so you started playing in bands, though, or you got together with guys and played. in clubs.

40:03Rick Rubin:Yeah, well, I left home. It wasn't runaway. I left home at age 15 to join a band in a little country town. We lived on the east side of Houston, and these brothers-sister team that I knew came to the door and said they were putting a band together in a little town about 35 miles northeast of where we live. So I took a guitar and left home. And my mother, I don't remember what she said, but my dad said, tell him you write your own songs. So first rehearsal, I'm there with these teenagers, and I started playing. If you ever change your mind about leaving, leaving me behind. You know this song. And I said, yeah, I wrote that song.

41:00Rick Rubin:and of course all everybody knew i didn't it was like you didn't write that song i said yeah i wrote that song so i never did back down and uh i had identified myself as a songwriter and i wasn't gonna back down what kind of uh gigs were you playing then oh well we played the legion hall it was called the Crosby Stomp Legion Hall and it was teen dances and then over in a little town called Humble, Texas, all these little outlying towns, they had Legion Halls and teen canteens and that kind of thing and we had a band called the Arbitrators and we were a cover band, we played country songs we played Beatles songs, we played Beach Boys One of the guys in the band had a falsetto voice like Brian Wilson, so we could play Beach Boys stuff.

41:58Rick Rubin:And we earned a little bit of money. And I moved in with this family. And eventually my parents left that house. That house finally fell down because the water finally got the best of it. And they moved out to the little town there. They rented a place out there, and I moved back in with my parents. or probably somewhere around the junior year of high school.

42:23Malcolm Gladwell:And then when did you start to think, this could be a career for me, this is what I want to do?

42:29Rick Rubin:It takes me a minute to think about that because I always wanted to do it, but it really, I mean, really, I mean, I'd already been, Emmylou Harris had recorded a couple of my songs and I'd moved to Los Angeles to be in her band and go on tour with her, But I think it was when Willie Nelson at the old Palomino Club, unbeknownst to me, called me up on stage and said, I'm going to do a Rodney Crowe song called Till I Gain Control Again, which Emmylou had recorded first. And I remember walking up there thinking, huh, this is like I'm being knighted by King Arthur. I think this songwriting thing is going to work.

43:12Rick Rubin:and that was the first time I ever had that thought like, okay, this is my career.

43:19Malcolm Gladwell:Really? Yeah. Because you'd already moved to Nashville by that point.

43:23Rick Rubin:Yeah, this was five years after I'd moved to Nashville.

43:27Malcolm Gladwell:Did you move to Nashville wanting to be a performer or a songwriter?

43:31Rick Rubin:I got to Nashville under false pretenses. I'd gone to Crowley, Louisiana with a buddy of mine. We had a duet thing, kind of a Simon and Garfunkel wannabe, and we went to Crowley and made a record over there. And the producer went off to Nashville, called me sometime later, a good six months later, and said— How old were you at this point? 21. He called me, found me somehow. He said, get up here to Nashville, find Donovan, my buddy, my college roommate who I sang with he said get up here I've signed you to a 10 year recording contract with Columbia Records and you're going on the road with Kenny Rogers in the first edition for a year opening okay I'm in the business so we hopped in we got in the car I found Donovan and we were off we went there but when we arrived in Nashville none of this was true we went to Columbia Records reported for duty at Columbia Records and walked in.

44:35Rick Rubin:And the intake secretary is like, who? So finally somebody, three tiers up, came down and said, look, we've never heard of you. You don't have a recording deal here. And so that's how we realized, ah, this is a sham. And as it turns out, the producer had sold the tapes and the publishing for a bus ticket back to Houston. And there I was in Nashville, so I decided to stay.

45:04Malcolm Gladwell:He just wanted you out of Houston so you wouldn't make trouble?

45:09Rick Rubin:The backstory on him was that, God, he was a brutal, brutal, brutal alcoholic. I have a lot of compassion for the amount of alcohol he could consume. And God knows what goes on when you're a blackout drunk. But it got me to Nashville. and within a short period of time I bumped into Guy Clark and a couple of guys, a guy named Skinny Dennis Sanchez who's an upright bass player and a guy named Richard Dobson and they took me in because I was washing dishes, making a little money and they said I was seven or eight years younger than they were and making a little bit of money so they had an extra bed.

45:56Rick Rubin:But this house became, I mean, it was Paris in the 20s there in its own way because Guy Clark was, Skinny Dennis had been a bass player in a folk trio he had in California. and so all of these guys started, Towns Van Zandt started coming in and out of that place and so it was kind of ground zero for songwriting

46:29Rick Rubin:pre-record deal because that's where Steve Earle first came around in there and Dave Runkle and it was just a salon and Towns Van Zandt was traveling. He was already a Wheeler Dealer folk singer, but he would come through Nashville and that's the first place I heard Poncho and Lefty in like 3 a.m. in this house on Ackland Avenue in Hillsborough Village in Nashville.

46:58Malcolm Gladwell:You were sitting around and he played it? Yeah, yeah.

47:02Rick Rubin:Well, we would gather around every night pretty much, five nights a week at least in that house. songwriters would come in. Guy Clark was a curator of this mindset around then because Chris Christopherson had done for Nashville what Bob Dylan had done for Greenwich Village. Nashville music business wasn't corporate then, but it was a closed community. But Chris Christopherson opened it up to these kind of would-be poet songwriters, which I fell in with. I didn't have any songs worthy of playing in the wee hours, but I knew all of these old Appalachian dead baby songs that I learned from my father, and I could throw them out and stay in the room.

47:53Rick Rubin:Guy Clark would say to me, he said, just shut up and listen. You might learn something.

47:58Malcolm Gladwell:And he was right. What did you learn from particularly Guy Clark?

48:02Rick Rubin:Self-editing. It took a while for it to dawn on me, But Guy Clark is probably, as songwriters go, that I know personally, he's probably the best self-editor I've ever been around. Because when I started drifting over to his house and you showed me what he was working on, lines that other songwriters would not elbow it out for anything in the world. He'd elbow it out and say, hey, this is not serving the narrative. It's got to go. That was important.

48:35Malcolm Gladwell:Did he help you do that with your songs?

48:38Rick Rubin:No. The only thing he would do is when I had a new song, and his wife Susanna was equally as formidable on this front, but I'd go over with a new song and he'd say, okay, put your guitar down, now look me in the eye and say those words to me. and he had these like hawk eyes you know real intense stare and and i realized when i if i tried to say the words to him that whenever i wanted to avert my eyes away from him the lines weren't true and it was a really valuable lesson to learn because when it was a really subpar line or something that didn't work a soft rhyme or just something that didn't move the narrative along, his eyes would narrow, and I would feel ashamed that I had exposed it.

49:37Rick Rubin:It was a good lesson.

49:38Malcolm Gladwell:That's a tough lesson, though. Mm-hmm. Was. Have you ever done that with other songwriters? Had them look at you?

49:45Rick Rubin:Well, I host these songwriting camps, you know, 120-so songwriters come to find out about songwriting, and now and again I'll say, okay, you want to know how I learned to do it? And I get them to put the guitar down and speak their lyrics to me. I don't think I had the intense eyeballs that Guy Clark had, because some of them would gaily just look me in the eye, smiling and really tell me really subpar lyrics and happy that they had.

50:16Malcolm Gladwell:What is it about putting the guitar down and saying it that exposes them?

50:22Rick Rubin:Mind you, I don't know if you know Guy Clark or have any recollection of what he was like. He was an intense man and a beautiful writer, Hemingway-ish in his own way. And to look him in the eye with something inferior was a daunting proposition. It was just the perfect thing for me at the time.

50:50Malcolm Gladwell:Did you ever present songs to Townes Van Zandt?

50:55Rick Rubin:Towns was not, well, first, the only song that Towns ever kind of nodded toward me was a song, Till I Gain Control Again, which was the one that was, I wrote that early on and I got there and was able to move along with that song for a good bit. That's the only one that he ever kind of nodded approval of. But Townes wasn't as generous as Guy. He was an incredibly gifted poet. But Guy had, for all of his imposing will, he was a generous artist. And he shared his knowledge pretty freely. But Townes was more, he held more back? Yeah, Townes was competitive. Okay, Townes was super competitive, which is a good thing, you know, a good thing for, I got no problem with that.

51:59Malcolm Gladwell:So when you're sitting around doing songs, it's a contest?

52:03Rick Rubin:Well, you know the Donovan and Bob Dylan in London in the hotel, you know.

52:12Malcolm Gladwell:Oh, in Don't Look.

52:12Rick Rubin:Savoy, whatever hotel they were, where Donovan's on the floor and he plays this really kind of mealy love song. It's just going nowhere. And Dylan reaches over and gets a guitar and sings Crimson Flames tied to my ears. It's like I was so much older then, I'm younger. Whatever it was, it just annihilated. I bring that up because Townes had that too. And early on, if I'm sitting listening to Poncho and Lefty, I was smart enough to not make that mistake because he had to hit me with any one of those songs he had written by then and just shrunk me down to nothing. So it was better to observe and to listen and see just how.

53:06Rick Rubin:Now, Townes was able to pluck out of the ether real poetry, whereas with Guy, it was closer to the experience was that he was a working songwriter. He was somehow crafting it on the desk in front of him where Townes was plucking it out of the ether.

53:31Malcolm Gladwell:Was Townes competitive with Guy?

53:34Rick Rubin:Yes. Towns was competitive with Guy, but Guy ignored it. I say this because I watched those two closely.

53:45Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah. Yeah.

53:46Rick Rubin:Now I'll tell you about Towns Van Zandt was, had Towns come along 30 years later, he would have been a champion skateboarder. Because there was one thing that I did do that Towns and I were friendly is that somehow we got a hold of a skateboard. And there was a slope in Hillsborough Village, and we would set up beer cans and slalom on skateboards. This was way before skateboarding was anything. I didn't have a knack for it, but Towns was fluid. The man was extremely physically talented, and he was a lot to take in, but he would slalom through those beer cans as if he was actually made of water.

54:40Rick Rubin:Amazing.

54:40Malcolm Gladwell:I didn't know that about him. Did you see signs back then of his later mania and his difficulties?

54:48Rick Rubin:Yeah, because the songwriting community around then, Amy Martin had a place there, and when Towns would come into town, usually he'd be a couple of days up in Kick and Heroin up in Amy Martin's place, while all of the wannabe songwriters, including me, were down in the garden there waiting for Towns to come down so we could play. But we would all sit around playing songs, these really inferior songs at each other. Meanwhile, one of the masters was upstairs kicking heroin. It was pretty romantic.

55:22Malcolm Gladwell:Are you competitive?

55:24Rick Rubin:No, I'm not competitive. I wish I were. I don't think I could host these songwriting camps that I do if I were competitive. because you have to be of service to these people who pay money to come be around me and see what they can learn.

55:45Malcolm Gladwell:Well, you've also had so many collaborations.

55:49Rick Rubin:Yeah, and also I was married to Roseanne Cash, too, and I learned my lesson there because I was producing her records and she shot through the roof with the records I was helping her make. and I didn't at that particular time. Was that difficult? It was difficult. And had I been more competitive, I would have probably hit the road because I wouldn't have been able to take it. But I had a sense that, you know, I'm part of this and what I'm bringing to this is not easily recognizable because I was helping her with material and helping her get there, and she deserved every bit of it. She outdistanced me.

56:39Rick Rubin:Eventually, I caught up.

56:42Rodney Crowell:One last break, and we'll be back with Rodney Crowell. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Broken Record. Sunday is built on a deceptively simple premise. A healthier yard starts beneath the surface. By analyzing your soil and using climate data, Sunday creates a custom yard plan powered by nutrient-dense ingredients instead of traditional synthetic treatments. It's a shift away from guesswork and towards understanding, which historically tends to produce better outcomes. Go to GetSunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That website again is GetSunday.com. Being a small business owner isn't just a career, it's a calling.

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59:10Rodney Crowell:Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. You are the third ex-son-in-law of Johnny Cash that we've had on the show.

59:34Rick Rubin:Am I?

59:34Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah.

59:35Rick Rubin:Yeah.

59:35Malcolm Gladwell:And Marty Stewart, well, Marty Stewart, and we've had Nick Lowe.

59:39Rick Rubin:Yeah.

59:39Malcolm Gladwell:Nick Lowe certainly had a story about meeting Johnny Cash for the first time. Do you remember your first time?

59:46Rick Rubin:Well, the first time I remember was at the Beverly Hills Hotel in one of the bungalows. He and June had a bungalow out back, and Roseanne was bringing her boyfriend to dinner, a candlelit dinner in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow.

1:00:08Malcolm Gladwell:Were you nervous?

1:00:09Rick Rubin:Oh, yeah, I was nervous as I could be. But they were sweet and very accommodating. And June, I actually was able to tell June the story that when I was, the Carter family, you know, in the late 30s, they had made all of these, it was one of the border radio stations where the Carter family would come out live. But my grandmother and I would listen to the Carter family rebroadcasts in the mid-50s. And June was an 11-year-old comedian at the time. And so I had a crush on her. As a 5-year-old kid, I had a crush on an 11-year-old girl I was hearing on the radio. And so I got to tell her that story, and she was charmed by it.

1:01:00Rick Rubin:And so we were good from there. Well, I did have my drunken run-in with John later on. Oh, you did? Yeah, in Jamaica.

1:01:08Malcolm Gladwell:Okay. Was this after you were married?

1:01:10Rick Rubin:No, it was before we were summoned to Jamaica because we were living together by then, and those were against the rules. So I did a little bit too much drinking between L.A. and Montego Bay and the flights. And so by the time the sleeping situation came around, I felt like I had to stand my ground because I heard some talk down the hallway and stepped around. And Roseanne said, well, you know, we live together. And so I stepped in all cavalier like, yeah, well, yeah, you know, I'm not going to be a hypocrite, you know. We sleep together in L.A., you know. And he said, you know, he looked and I've told this story before, but it bears repeating.

1:01:58Rick Rubin:He looked at me and he said, son, I don't know you well enough to miss you if you were to leave. With that voice. Yeah. Voice of Abraham Lincoln. So that sobered me right up. And I said, yes, sir, you're right. And I wandered off down the hall and went to bed.

1:02:16Malcolm Gladwell:I would have left. Yeah. I want to get back to Roseanne, but I first want to talk about your time with Emmylou Harris.

1:02:26Rick Rubin:Emmylou.

1:02:26Malcolm Gladwell:Because she had recorded one of your songs and then asked you to join her band. Yeah. And who else was in the band when you were with her?

1:02:35Rick Rubin:Can I back up a little bit? I was in Austin. I'd left Nashville. But Emmylou came through like early in January 1975 and was playing the old Armadillo World Headquarters. And by then, she had recorded a song of mine, Bluebird Wine. So somehow she found me and said, come and sit in with me at my gig at Armadillo World Headquarters. So I went, and we sang something. I don't know what we sang, but after her set, she said, hey, I'm going to L.A. tomorrow. You want to go? And I said, well, yeah. And she said, I got an extra ticket. And she doesn't, I was with Emmy a couple of nights ago, and she doesn't remember where she got this extra ticket.

1:03:23Rick Rubin:I certainly never knew, but I flew from Austin to Los Angeles with Emmy Lou on somebody else's ticket in 1975. And stayed seven years, and unbeknownst to me, she was putting together a band and had decided that she wanted me in it.

1:03:41Malcolm Gladwell:There might be a guitarist in Austin who's still waiting for his ticket.

1:03:49Rick Rubin:Yeah, but that band turned out to be, half of it came from Elvis' band. And it was because of the band that had done Grievous Angel with Graham Parsons and James Burton and Glenn Harden and Emory Gordy.

1:04:03Malcolm Gladwell:So they were all still in the band.

1:04:05Rick Rubin:They were in the hot band, and John Ware and Hank DeVito and myself, we called ourselves the hippies. And James and Glindy and Emery were the pros. And off we went on a world tour. It's 1975 with him.

1:04:22Malcolm Gladwell:You've mentioned Till I Gain Control Again a couple of times. I have a running argument with my wife over whose version is better, yours or Emmylou's.

1:04:30Rick Rubin:Oh, my particular recording of Till I Gain Control Again is not up to snuff. I produced that, and I spent a lot more time on the musicians than I spent on getting a proper vocal performance out of myself.

1:04:51Malcolm Gladwell:Okay, I'm going to disagree. I think it's a masterpiece. Wow. Your version of that song.

1:04:57Rick Rubin:I wish I could share your opinion about that, but I hear it and I go, oh, man, I wish you'd have been paying attention.

1:05:05Malcolm Gladwell:You know, what I love about that song is what I love about a lot of your songs. And this is going to sound vague, so forgive me. But often your songs seem to me there's a theme running through, which is basically what it means to be a man in relation to women, in relation to yourself, in relation to the world. how you kind of proceed in the world that seems to be something that is in a lot of your songs Simple on the new album made me think of that

1:05:34Rick Rubin:very much could be Susanna Clark Susanna was probably 12, 11, 12 years older than me when I met her in my early 20s and she said to me clearly she said in your early 20s is if you meet a woman, or at that particular time, it's like I was on the make, you know, and Susanna held up her hand and said, hang on, you know, I'm going to teach you to be friends with a woman. Valuable lesson for me at the time, and I listened to her, and we developed a friendship, a real friendship, and a real, we had a long-running conversation, she and I. And then Emmy Liu comes along, and Emmy and I are really close friends to this day.

1:06:33Rick Rubin:And I think it started at that particular time. I have really close—I probably have more close women friends than I do men friends. It's just been that way. And I think it started with Susanna, my friendship with Mary Carr. We're close friends. We talk all the time. It's not romantic. It's brother and sisterhood. And I think maybe that's what you're talking about. And also I have four daughters who will tan my hide if I get a little too far ahead of myself.

1:07:14Malcolm Gladwell:Have you ever had to give their boyfriends the speech Johnny Cash gave you?

1:07:18Rick Rubin:God, I wish. I really would like to pull that. Well, you know, I've had to call them on their foolishness, but I've never been able to come up with my own line that would match. I don't know you well enough to miss you if you were to leave.

1:07:35Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah. Well, that should be in a song. You know, you did a great version of I Walk the Line with Johnny Cash, which is really about a kid hearing it.

1:07:44Rick Rubin:Yeah.

1:07:45Malcolm Gladwell:And that is a song about what it means to be a man. Yeah. and you reharmonized it, which is what I loved, his sections.

1:07:54Rick Rubin:Yeah. This was after Roseanne and I split the blanket, and I called him one day and I said, hey, man, we wrote a song, because I had been trying to recapture the first time I heard I walked a line in a fishing trip. So he came to the studio. I said, any of you come sing on this? So he came to the studio thinking that he was going to be singing some version of his song. And I sat there with a guitar, and I started banging on the guitar, and I got to the chorus where I used his lyric to make a chorus, which took me a long time to figure out, because I wrote all kind of choruses for that song that just sounded like child's play.

1:08:42Rick Rubin:Then I hit on his words, and so he came, and I'm singing it, And his eyes narrowed, you know, and he said, he said, man, you've got a lot of nerve changing my melody. And I said, yeah, and you're just the guy to go out there in the studio and do it. So he walked out there and did two passes and looked at him and he said, will that do? And I said, yes, sir, that will do. Meanwhile, he had a lunch date with Bonnie Raitt. she came into the studio. I guess that's where she was going to meet him. And so we played it back pretty loud. And Bonnie, when it was over, she said, God, it sounded like y 'all were in there taking Viagra when you recorded that.

1:09:33Rick Rubin:And I said, I know whose voice you're talking about. Because there was some big old Johnny Cash singing that chorus.

1:09:40Malcolm Gladwell:Mm-hmm. So after you had this great run of albums with Roseanne, so you said you were frustrated at that point, though, that you hadn't, that she was the star.

1:09:52Rick Rubin:Yeah, well, it was, you can imagine in a household where two artists working side by side and one of them's taken off. and mind you I stayed home with the kids we never were both gone at the same time which was I think a pretty good choice at the time but she deserved it Rosanna is she is an artist through and through she deserved it it's not her fault that it took off and it took me a minute she was in a Porsche and I was on a bicycle so it goes you know

1:10:30Malcolm Gladwell:You weren't in a bicycle long because you put out Diamonds and Dirt. Yeah. Which had, what, four or five singles?

1:10:38Rick Rubin:Yeah, the five number one songs off of that album. It's just like one right after the other.

1:10:43Malcolm Gladwell:She's Crazy for Leaving. One of my favorite songs of yours, After All This Time.

1:10:48Rick Rubin:Yeah.

1:10:49Malcolm Gladwell:I just want to ask you about two of the songs. One, you mentioned it earlier, Taking Flight, which you wrote with Ashley McBride. How was the writing done?

1:10:59Rick Rubin:Well, Ashley, I made a record called Chicago Sessions, one back, and Ashley came around the house, and we wrote a song called Making Lovers Out of Friends. It was pretty sweet, and I thought she would do it, but she didn't, and so I recorded it in Chicago. But the day we wrote that song, Ashley was coming back two days later, so I woke up the day that she was coming back just to get ready for Ashley to come around and I started riding, taking flight and it was just coming out of me in a hurry and I was trying to hurry up and get here, hurry up and get here. And she finally got there and I was pretty far down the road on it and I said, oh God, and she signed off on all of it and then we finished it up.

1:11:54Rick Rubin:But later on, when I realized it would make a good duet, we collaborated on the spoken word at the end of it to have a little conversation at the end to make the song a conversation.

1:12:09Malcolm Gladwell:A beautiful line about an unwed mother soon to be a small voice on the phone.

1:12:15Rick Rubin:Yeah.

1:12:15Malcolm Gladwell:Was that from you? Yeah, I claim that one. You should.

1:12:19Rick Rubin:Yeah.

1:12:20Malcolm Gladwell:And I do want to ask about the last song, which is just gorgeous. Maybe somewhere down the road.

1:12:28Rick Rubin:Yeah. Before I met Claudia, I had a friendship romance with a woman. She was a really interesting woman. And I helped her get to India. She wanted to get to India, and I helped her get there. and she did come back to the States and I never saw her again when she came back from India. But I later found out that she had taken her own life and in a pretty horrific way. So I thought about her a lot and I said, hey, God, the only thing I can do is she deserves a song. So I made the song, I wrote it and we recorded it. It was the first thing we recorded before we actually went down to Louisiana. And I didn't think it fit the record because the rest of Airline Highway was a little more lighthearted.

1:13:31Rick Rubin:But Tyler, the producer, he loved it. And I liked the song. I thought it was some good writing, but I just felt like it didn't work for the album. But everybody around me kept saying, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. And then one day, Trina Shoemaker, she rang in and she said, you're wrong. Everybody told me I was wrong. So I said, okay, well, then let's stick it on the end because it doesn't fit anywhere else. So there it is. And I always thought it was pretty good writing. And I think the performance is pretty good. And I'm glad it's on the record because the woman that I wrote it about deserve having a song, even though it was after her life was gone through.

1:14:23Malcolm Gladwell:Thank you so much for coming in. It's been a complete delight. Thank you so much.

1:14:27Rick Rubin:Thank you.

1:14:30Rodney Crowell:In the episode description, you'll find a link to a playlist featuring our favorite songs from Rodney Crowell, as well as his new album, Airline Highway. Be sure to check out youtube.com slash broken record podcast to see all of our video interviews. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at The Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tallade. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.

1:15:04Rodney Crowell:Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

1:15:25Rodney Crowell:This is Malcolm Gladwell from Broken Record. Sunday is built on a deceptively simple premise. A healthier yard starts beneath the surface. By analyzing your soil and using climate data, Sunday creates a custom yard plan powered by nutrient-dense ingredients instead of traditional synthetic treatments. It's a shift away from guesswork and towards understanding, which historically tends to produce better outcomes. Go to GetSunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That website, again, is getsunday.com. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In a world where everyone has access to the same data and the same AI, how do you actually win?

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