The Houston Kid - Rodney Crowell

If you want music that isn't fluffy and has some depth to it, then 'Houston Kid' is for you.

Rodney Crowell is a very talented man and that can be proved with every album I have heard from him and 'Houston Kid' is no exception. Eleven songs full of meaning and depth with each one somehow touching listener's emotion in some form or another.

"Telephone Road" finds Rodney reminiscing about the past when he would go out with other kids and do things like go swimming in his birthday suit and ride his moped. Though the kids were poor they would always have some money for the ice cream man. The soft background music at the beginning of "The Rock Of My Soul" lets the focus remain on the vocals with lyrics describing a father who abuses his wife & the son who grew up to become a thief that landed himself in jail.

"I Wish It Would Rain" was written about a friend that Rodney knew from one of his old neighborhoods who got AIDs. "I offer no excuses for your sympathies to gain. Oh, I wish it would rain." Back when "I Walk The Line (Revisited)" was released as a single, I loved with the video and of course the song itself. I love how Rodney sings about his experience hearing "I Walk The Line" for the first time only to have Johnny Cash himself sing the original in between memories.

"U Don't Know How Much I Hate U" is about a man who is depressed because the house that used to be his, now isn't and he is all alone in a nasty world without his sparkling blue-eyed lady. He says he hates his former wife but then tacks on "I wish it was true," meaning that he really misses her.