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A great record which successfully balanced commercial appeal with artistic quality.
Great review. The only other album to produce 5 #1 country songs was Brad Paisley’s 5th Gear and that’s only if you include “Waitin’ on a Woman” from the re-release.
This isn’t my favorite Rodney Crowell record – that honor goes to “The Houston Kid” – but this is a five-star effort nonetheless.
This was by far Rodney’s best album. Yes THE HOUSTON KID had a few outstanding tracks on it, but this was the most enjoyable album – not a dud track on it
This album surprised me in that I have Crowell’s prior albums and all of them were somewhat spotty. At the time I purchased this album, I didn’t think Crowell could maintain this groove and the immediate follow up album KEYS TO THE HIGHWAY found Rodney reverting back to the spottiness that marred earlier albums, although he maintained the basic sound of DIAMONDS & DIRT for much of the album.
I remember Crowell was all over TV singing “After All This Time”–with it’s jarring line “I could have killed you,”–including while sitting with Carson on the Tonight Show.
It was great an unique, but the complex lyrics, confessional, introsepctive tone, casual demeanor, and Crowell’s somewhat thin voice were much more in line with James Taylor or Stephen Bishop than, say, George Strait and Ricky Van Shelton. It’s not surprising that his surge at country radio was very brief.
This is one of the very few albums that, in my opinion, is without flaw. Songwriting, arrangement, grit, gravity, vocal precision, it’s all here.