Audiobooks Narrated by Rodney Crowell

The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings

This program is read by Margaret Atwood, Rodney Crowell, John Doe, Jim Fletcher, Ari Fliakos, Maggie Hoffman, Ross Marquand, Will Patton, Seth Rogen, Michael Shannon, and Neela Vaswani. The Flame is the final collection of the seminal musician and poet, which he was determined to complete before his death. Just weeks before his death in late 2016, Leonard Cohen told The New Yorker that he was ready for the end to come. He just wanted enough time to put his last book in order. Fortunately, that time was granted. The Flame is Cohen's eloquent farewell, a valedictory collection of lyrics and poems that maps his singular creative journey. As noted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's citation, "For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the world through poetry and song-his deep and timeless humanity touching our very core." In addition to new poems about war, desire, regrets, lamb chops, and hummingbirds, and lyrics from his last three albums, including the chart-topping "You Want It Darker," The Flame includes carefully selected excerpts from Cohen's voluminous notebooks, which he kept faithfully over the years. Listeners will hear about the subjects that have always preoccupied Cohen: the dimensions of love, the secret code of existence, and the hope for transcendence in a broken world. In the words of Cohen's longtime manager and friend, Robert Kory, The Flame "reveals to all the intensity of his inner fire" to the end.

Leonard Cohen (Author), Ari Fliakos, Jim Fletcher, John Doe, Maggie Hoffman, Margaret Atwood, Michael Shannon, Neela Vaswani, Rodney Crowell, Seth Rogen, Will Patton (Narrator)

Audiobook

Play Sample Listen For Free

Chinaberry Sidewalks

From the acclaimed musician comes a tender, surprising, and often uproarious memoir about his dirt-poor southeast Texas boyhood.The only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, Rodney Crowell was no stranger to bombast from an early age, whether knock-down-drag-outs at a local dive bar or fire-and-brimstone sermons at Pentecostal tent revivals. He was an expert at reading his father's mercurial moods and gauging exactly when his mother was likely to erupt, and even before he learned to ride a bike, he was often forced to take matters into his own hands. He broke up his parents' raucous New Year's Eve party with gunfire and ended their slugfest at the local drive-in (actual restaurants weren't on the Crowells' menu) by smashing a glass pop bottle over his own head.Despite the violent undercurrents always threatening to burst to the surface, he fiercely loved his epilepsy-racked mother, who scorned boring preachers and improvised wildly when the bills went unpaid. And he idolized his blustering father, a honky-tonk man who took his boy to see Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash perform live, and bought him a drum set so he could join his band at age eleven. Shot through with raggedy friends and their neighborhood capers, hilariously awkward adolescent angst, and an indelible depiction of the bloodlines Crowell came from, Chinaberry Sidewalks also vividly re-creates Houston in the fifties: a rough frontier town where icehouses sold beer by the gallon on paydays; teeming with musical venues from standard roadhouses to the Magnolia Gardens, where name-brand stars brought glamour to a place starved for it; filling up with cheap subdivisions where blue-collar day laborers could finally afford a house of their own; a place where apocalyptic hurricanes and pest infestations were nearly routine.But at its heart this is Crowell's tribute to his parents and an exploration of their troubled yet ultimately redeeming romance. Wry, clear-eyed, and generous, it is, like the very best memoirs, firmly rooted in time and place and station, never dismissive, and truly fulfilling.From the Hardcover edition.

Rodney Crowell (Author), Rodney Crowell (Narrator)

Audiobook

Play Sample Listen For Free