The Houston Kid

While this album would be a welcome addition to the Crowell canon anyway, it has the added attraction being of a far more personal musical odyssey than he’s heretofore undertaken, with lyrical themes touching on his childhood memories of Houston, Texas.

Not surprisingly, it will draw comparisons with Springsteen’s Nebraska but it’s a less sombre backwards trip than Bruce’s and paints a picture of levity mixed with dogged survival in the face of deprivation.

Crowell spots the quirky bits of life that lesser writers miss, and the mood is neatly set with the opener ‘Telephone Road’ which, despite experiencing worse weather than the Angela’s Ashes film, portrays a cheery life of ice-cream, cheeseburgers and memorable gigs by Cash, Perkins and Lewis.

In fact Crowell has always had an uncanny ability for uniting down-in-the-mouth themes with upbeat tunes and he repeats the trick here on ‘Topsy Turvy’, a relentless romp about his sobbing mother, drunken father, domestic violence and childhood loneliness.

‘U Don’t Know How Much I Hate You’ has a soaring 12-string guitar from Fletcher Watson to counterpoint the bleak lyrics about unrequited love for an Irish girl. ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ is a painful and graphic exposé of life in the gutter, although Crowell gets a yellow card for nicking the phrase “squandered my resistance” from Paul Simon.

In the oddly jaunty ‘Wandering Boy’ he apologises for some homophobic comments, and ‘I Walk The Line (Revisited)’ tells of his first hearing of the Cash classic, with the man himself joining in a stunning vocal duet. ‘Highway 17’ recounts a life of robberies, violence, death and living on the run.

‘Why Don’t We Talk About It’ is too close to ‘I Fought The Law’ for comfort, but that’s a small price to pay for what is a superb album.

This is not Americana. This is America, inside and outside.