Academy-Award winning writer and director Cameron Crowe joins Southern Craft Radio with Joy Williams on Apple Music Country to talk about his music, craft and upcoming projects. Listen here.
“She looks back at the early stuff where she’s singing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ or something, or even her early songs, which she’s now forgiven, where they’re just … Some of them are kind of cute and lovely. And I think she’s like… For many years she was like, ‘I don’t want to be the moon, June, spoon, cute and lovely folk singer. I want the Slouching Towards Bethlehem Joni Mitchell. Like I want the real stuff, man. Like that’s the stuff, that like I want Bob Dylan to hear this and cry it’s so good.’ And what she kind of had to find out was those early songs were great and the first kind of brick in the great kind of structure that she’s built as like our greatest artist, I think. So she’s now working through her entire career, Joy, in increments now. So the first archives ended with her first album. And the second set is a mother. The second set begins with the first album through ‘Blue.’ And it has rarities, concert stuff that she’s never put out, Carnegie Hall solo Joni ’72. This is manna from heaven. And she’s going to talk about it and just kind of give it context and everything. So I don’t know… on those days I just pinch myself. Like I get to actually have a conversation about this music with her.”
“There was a record store in San Diego, which is the same street that the ‘Almost Famous’ begins on, when Frances McDormand is walking down the street with their son. There was a record store right by the beach. And I don’t know how they pulled this off, but the sun would just beat into this record store, and they used no curtains. Every record was warped. So I walked by one day and they’re warping in the sun on the little stand, it said the new Joni Mitchell album and it was just that cover of ‘Blue.’ So I will never forget that time. Not even knowing there was going to be a new album, and there it was in the sunlight, in the window, that amazing picture of her. And I got the record, miraculously it played, and that takes me right back to that time. And it was kind of like a manual for romantic hope and heartbreak, and some of that ideal is still with me. So I go right back there, and it’s such a cool thing to have. It’s almost like a smell can take you back to a certain time in your life very vividly, the music’s the same way. And so I look at the cover of ‘Blue’ and I’m instantly a little guy with my face pressed against the window in San Diego, just on the verge of knowing that this is everything to me, music, writing, experiencing it. So Joni being a river, no pun intended, that runs through all of this is really important to me.”
“There’s this collection book that we’ve been working on for a long time, which is named after a line in ‘Almost Famous,’ it’s called ‘Hamburgers For The Apocalypse.’ And it’s all the kind of Rolling Stone era stories collected because I’ve never collected them in anything before. They’ve been reprinted by Rolling Stone and various other places. But we’re putting them all in one thing, but here’s the deal, over the years I have gone back and had almost every single one of the people whose stories are being collected, comment on themselves as a younger person in the story. So I’ll read them back quotes from back then and have them respond as to sound like somebody that you know, and would you have this dialogue with your younger self. And so over COVID I got the last big kind of revisiting the original article through the eyes of all of them today. And that was Fleetwood Mac. So now we have Fleetwood Mac, Joni, David Bowie, before he died, which is amazing. A little bit of Gregg Allman, Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Linda Ronstadt, Led Zeppelin and Elton John.”
“True North for me is catching a moment that’s small but huge. Like the little thing that a character or someone you’re interviewing can say that just kind of opens a flood gate, and you think to yourself, ‘Well, that little thing I just saw, that’s going to be the first line in my story.’ Or with a performance, you see somebody that’s got a secret smile, you’re doing an audition, you see an actor has a secret smile that just comes from you watching them. And you’re like, “I can give that secret smile a home, and it’s in this scene, and we’re going to shoot it tomorrow.” And then the next day you have it. It’s like catching that comet, because there’s comets everywhere creatively. You know that, you catch them all the time. A lot of people wait to be thrown some glorious kind of realization, but in fact, you got to reach for it, and just be open to all kinds of stuff. And when those things land, and it’s simple, and truthful, and personal, like in all my writing, that’s been the stuff that people responded to the most.”
“Just being a fan never showed a disservice to me. I mean, we’re friends because you had somebody, somebody sent me some special vinyl of the Civil Wars, and I was like, ‘Wow, I love them. And they even know who I am? That’s fantastic.’ And we reached out. So it’s one link in the chain to another, and nobody ever said, ‘No.’ And very rarely have they ever said, ‘No,’ if was a chance to talk to somebody who loves and understands their music or art. And to me, there’s nothing more fun than that.”
