Rodney Crowell’s new album Triage is being touted as his most personal to date. That’s saying something, considering for the past six decades, the lauded singer/songwriter has built a career on introspective songs that transcend being personal snapshots to become universal anthems others see their lives reflected in.

“’’Til I Gain Control Again’ is a very personal song and I was a 23-year-old man at the time, so the tendency was already there to write out my personal experience,” Crowell, 70, tells Billboard over Zoom. “Going back to Fate’s Right Hand, The Houston Kid and The Outsider, most of the work that I’ve done in the 21st century has been very personable and very singular.”

Triage, Crowell’s 18th album, was issued Friday on his own RC1 Records and marks his first release distributed through Thirty Tigers. “I’ll never be satisfied as an artist. That seems like the kiss of death, but I feel like I’ve done some good work here,” says Crowell, a two-time Grammy winner who has won six Americana Music Association Awards as well as the AMA lifetime achievement for songwriting honor.

Working with producer/son-in-law Dan Knobler, Crowell had almost completed Triage when a health crisis inspired “Transient Global Amnesia Blues,” the final song they recorded for the album. He’s currently on tour playing that and other songs from the new collection.

Crowell shares with Billboard how he weathered the pandemic, what happened the morning he wound up in the ER, and how his writing has evolved.

Why did you title the album Triage?

I looked up the definition to make sure I had it right, but triage requires establishing priorities if you’re going to medically save lives. When a head-on collision happens and help is on the way, triage is prioritizing what to do first. I feel like the song “Triage” [says] that the first thing we have to do is remember how to love. [Even people] that I don’t like, can I remember how to love them as human beings with the right to be on earth? How do I remember how to love and then how do I get it into these songs without being manipulative and without being boring?

What inspired “Transient Global Amnesia”?

It was Oct 9, 2020, a typical morning. I hike in the hills around my house. That’s really good exercise for me. … But after, I asked [my wife] Claudia nine times if I had walked. The ninth time she thought “Stroke.” So she loaded me up, and off to the emergency room we went. Three hours later, I wake up. I came to my senses in the emergency room and slowly started to put the pieces back together. Claudia went to get food for me, and I said, “I feel really strange. Bring my notebook. I need to write something down.” I had to stay overnight in the hospital and the next morning my daughter texted me a photograph of a sunflower growing on a piece of driftwood on the Thames River in the 1950s. I’m not even sure why she sent it, but it triggered the whole thing. One look at that and I said, “Oh, I got it!” I had my notebook there and I just started writing. I got out about noon. I had a couple of verses going, came home and finished it up that afternoon.

Have you had any other episodes with transient global amnesia?

There are some words that I’m forgetting these days, but I’m not sure. The medical people involved said, “Look, 98% of the time this never happens again, go on and live your life.” And that’s exactly what I’m doing. … It was a great way to get a song. The other song that I was going to record was elbowed right out and there was this brand-new fresh recording that I slid right in that third place in the sequence and I said, “Oh, now I have my album!” I actually wrote a better song.

The “Transient Global Amnesia Blues” video, directed by Haroula Rose, shares some powerful images, including your spreading the ashes of your friend Guy Clark’s widow Susanna Clark. How did that come about?

Claudia has bold handwriting that’s really gorgeous so I said, “Can we film Claudia writing out these [lyrics]?” We got a big piece of parchment and the camera operator filmed Claudia writing out all the words. That was my idea and Haroula built it from there. … Susanna  passed away in 2012. She was a really close friend of mine. Guy gave me half of her ashes and said, “Whatever you want to do, do whatever.” Strangely I wanted to set her ashes free in a particular part of a river where I spend a lot of time by myself, the Little Harpeth River. I wanted to get all of the really close friends like Bonnie Garner, Emmylou [Harris], Vince [Gill] and myself and Verlon [Thompson] all together. Because we were all working, it had never fallen together, and on March 11th, Susanna’s birthday, [because of] COVID, we were all here. I had her ashes up in my closet for nearly nine years. It just happened to be the day we were filming, and I said, “I’m going to release my friend’s ashes, you are welcome to film it, Haroula, if you want to.” So that’s how that happened.

Do you feel like you’ve come out of the pandemic different than you were before?

Yes, we all have. I jokingly said in the beginning about social distancing, I’m a songwriter. I’ve been social distancing for 45 years. I’m mostly introverted, but I do get on stages and play for people and try to entertain them with how funny and witty I can be so there’s an extroversion there, but I’ve known for a long time that without a song it’s not going to happen. It all starts with a song, and my songwriting comes from this introverted part of myself. In that sense, the fact that I wasn’t out there on the road showing off in front of people, I had an extended amount of time when I was able to really engage in the satisfaction that comes from introversion for me. It’s a healing thing for me. Now at the same time, the pandemic took some people close to me so while I was enjoying this introspective period and my phone not ringing that much, at the same time I was really grieving that there were a lot of people out there suffering, suffering in the worst way. And as much as I wanted to revel in my solitude, I was mindful that there were a lot of people hurting.

Triage tackles important themes from environmentalism to forgiveness to mortality. As a songwriter, do you more acutely feel a responsibility to address those topics in today’s world?

I don’t feel the responsibility more acutely, I feel the experience more acutely. As a younger man I was working from the inside out trying to express myself out in a big way to draw attention to me: “Hey bang, bang, bang … Here I am! Look at me! Notice me! I’m writing these songs. I sing like this.” With age, naturally we tend to bend back toward introspection. Certainly I do. It’s the nature of staying alive for a while. Nobody gets out of this alive and it’s a wise move to really consider your interior spiritual life as you move ever closer to the end of it. So I can’t take on the responsibility that I need to address all of these things thinking that I alone am going to change the world. That’s not going to happen. That would be a bloated ego and it just wouldn’t be cool.

Your songs are personal, yet they strike a universal chord.

I found out in writing songs a long time ago, when I get it right for me, it seems to work for other people. Maybe not everybody, but when the songs that I’ve written really hit the mark, when people hear them, the best thing that can happen is the song becomes theirs. It’s no longer my song. It becomes their song for that moment and then I’ve done my job. My only responsibility is to be true to myself and if I’m true to myself, it’s going to be OK.

Kanye West has been living inside an Atlanta stadium while working on his new album.

A representative for the performer said Monday (July 26) that West planned to remain inside Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium while working to complete Donda, his 10th studio album.

West held a massive listening session at the stadium Thursday and was seen on social media attending a soccer match over the weekend.

Donda, which was slated to be released last Friday, is now due Aug. 6.

The Grammy winner’s album was named after his mother, Donda West, who died at the age of 58 following plastic surgery complications in 2007.

West unveiled Donda in front of a sold-out crowd at the venue after he announced two days before that the first public listen of his highly-anticipated album would take place. He barely said a word while introducing his new music during the event, which brought out several big names including Rick Ross, Khloe Kardashian and his estranged wife Kim Kardashian West, who showed up in a red jumpsuit with their kids.

West’s new project is a follow-up to his 2019 gospel-themed album Jesus Is King, which won a Grammy for best contemporary Christian album.

Last year, West announced on Twitter — with colorful cover art and a track list — that he would release his latest album. At the time, his tweets indicated that his project would release on the same day as Taylor Swift’s project Folklore, but his album was postponed.

On Monday night (July 26), Whiskey Jam will celebrate 10 years as a can’t-miss event in Nashville’s music scene, with a sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium. The feat is impressive given that no talent lineup has been announced in advance.

“Even the artists performing don’t know who else is on the lineup. It will be a wonderful surprise,” Whiskey Jam founder Ward Guenther tells Billboard of the event that bills itself as “10 years of good music for good people.” “It was the artists trusting the fact that we have a show at the Ryman, that it was going to be our best ever, and it was me trusting I could tap into our pool of artists and past guests and say, ‘Can we come back together for one song, on one night, of our biggest celebration ever?’”

Over the past decade, Whiskey Jam’s free weekly concerts at local venue Winners Bar & Grill have become must-see evenings. Whiskey Jam has also become a proving ground for aspiring musicians, with more than 3,500 artists, bands and songwriters having performed to date. Now-household names including Luke Combs, Ashley McBryde, Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves and Chris Stapleton all played the Whiskey Jam stage early in their careers. More than a concert series, Whiskey Jam quickly became a networking hub, with top industry execs and musicians in attendance.

“Whiskey Jam is the biggest rite of passage in modern-day Nashville,” says singer-songwriter HARDY. “Every single songwriter and artist in this town that is on the radio right now has gone through Whiskey Jam. Ward has built such an incredible program and I hope that Whiskey Jam continues to be a place where new artists get their start and people go to network.”

Dozens of subsequent Country Airplay No. 1 hits have either been written or performed by Whiskey Jam guests, such as Tyler Farr’s “A Guy Walks Into a Bar.” Farr recorded the song after hearing songwriter Jonathan Singleton perform it at Whiskey Jam. The song became Farr’s first Country Airplay chart-topper in 2015.

Guenther recalls Stapleton performing for the first time at Whiskey Jam in 2012, three years prior to Stapleton’s star-making turn at the 2015 CMA Awards, when he earned three trophies and collaborated with Justin Timberlake. “It was the first time in Whiskey Jam history that I remember the room being completely silent. It’s such a rowdy atmosphere, but when Chris started singing, the room went quiet. To this day, I’m not sure that’s happened again.”

Combs’ first performance came in 2014. “He developed this incredible following. Fans knew all the words to songs that weren’t even out. I stumbled on some old pictures the other day from the first few times they played… it’s the same band members he has now on tour, selling out arenas. In his case, it was just waiting for the world to discover him.”

Still, Guenther maintains, “It’s not about seeing somebody famous, it’s about knowing you’re going to be guaranteed great music.”

Guenther, who moved to Nashville in 2003, launched Whiskey Jam after experiencing his own frustrations as a musician. “I had been doing it for a long time, whether it was cover gigs, on the road, writers’ nights, and the scene stayed the same for so long,” Guenther says. “I would find myself at writers’ nights, bored of my own songs. I was playing cover gigs and I wasn’t having fun.”

One night in January 2011, Guenther joined fellow musician Frankie Ballard for an unpromoted “bar tab gig,” just to play music for fun. The next day, Guenther shared an off-the-cuff post about the evening on Twitter, calling it “Whiskey Jam.” Fellow musician Josh Hoge loved the name and became Guenther’s early partner in the venture.

“We wanted to create an event where friends could get together,” Guenther says, adding, “There’s no pretense, no shushing. There were no lineups, not even really a headliner. It was just purely a group of friends getting together to do the thing we moved to Nashville for: play music. In the earliest days, we were text messaging hundreds of our friends about Whiskey Jam, and you had people show up, all artists and musicians, who could speak the same language.”

What began as a weekly Monday night jam session for artists with a night off, expanded to include Thursdays and a Tuesday night “New In Town” show, for performers who have been in Nashville for a year or less.

The loose, organic vibe of Whiskey Jam drew more than newcomers: A diverse range of artists, including Melissa Etheridge, The Fray, Lady A, OneRepublic, Brad Paisley, Chris Young, and more have attended.

“They had been touring all weekend and they wanted a place to hang out with friends. You have artists like Sam Hunt and Miranda Lambert coming in and sitting down at a table. I’ve had Randy Travis come in and sit with my parents,” Guenther says. “The environment is comfortable enough where they can come in and people are very respectful. It became this feeling of, ‘This is Nashville’s best-kept secret that everybody knows about.’”

Eventually, Hoge left to focus on his own music career, and Guenther teamed with ROAR executive Ryan O’Nan to spearhead Whiskey Jam’s growth, adding business ventures in merchandise, booking and artist/writer services.

“Merchandise became a huge focus when we realized we were selling hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a local writers’ night, multiple times a week,” Guenther says. ”I’ve sold on the road before — those are big numbers for an artist.”

The company’s Roadshow Entertainment helps Whiskey Jam artists book regular, paying shows in and beyond Nashville. Roadshow has also booked Whiskey Jam events in Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Memphis, and at Key West Songwriters Festival, with plans to expand to additional markets.

As the company has been approached by partners in artist development, publishing and label services, O’Nan says they are using another venture, King Song, as part of “building out an arm of our business that helps create more opportunities for the standout artists that come through Whiskey Jam on a weekly basis.”

Over the past decade, Guenther has resisted suggestions to move Whiskey Jam to a different venue or charge a cover. “The spark here has been everything for us — it’s what made artists like Lady A come back, in our ninth year, and play a free show to a couple of hundred people. We want a comfortable, low-pressure environment for artists. If you try to blow it up bigger than it should be, you’d lose that support, that magic.”

A crucial aspect of Whiskey Jam’s success has been the team’s ability to focus on the needs of the Nashville community. On March 15, 2020, Guenther recalls Whiskey Jam “shut down pretty much overnight” due to the pandemic. O’Nan suggested a livestreamed event via Instagram, which became Risky Jam. As with in-person events, the Whiskey Jam team welcomed established performers such as Cole Swindell, Travis Denning and Craig Campbell, alongside newcomers — and the audience kept growing.

“We knew something was big when Facebook couldn’t handle the amount of traffic that was going on in their servers. You think about the old days where people gathered around their radios and felt like they’re part of the Grand Ole Opry — it felt almost like a new radio [outlet],” Guenther says.

Given how Nashville’s music community has helped establish Whiskey Jam, Guenther says all proceeds from tonight’s Ryman Auditorium concert will go toward establishing the Jam Fam Foundation, which will fund music-oriented charities and organizations. Tickets are $27, $37 and $47.

Guenther hints the show’s lineup will align with Whiskey Jam’s ethos, featuring a mix of newcomers and established artists. “The lineup ranges from people who were there on the very first night, to some that have never played before. That’s important to me, that this not just be a ‘greatest hits’ show. It’s more about, ‘Here’s the start of the next 10 years.’”