Album Review: Kin: Songs by Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell by Rodney Crowell / Mary Karr

There's more to Rodney Crowell than meets the eye -- or so he keeps telling us. A country music maverick, he's written some great songs, been a top-line country star with videos and the whole enchilada, was married to Rosanne Cash for over a dozen years, and has collaborated with Emmylou Harris and countless others as a songwriter, musician, and producer. His songwriting has gotten increasingly autobiographical in recent years, and in 2011 he published a memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks, that detailed a childhood in Texas full of dysfunction and abuse -- which brings us to Mary Karr, a poet and writer whose best-selling 1995 memoir The Liar's Club kicked off a whole craze for such things.

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On paper, Kin: Songs By Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell has the makings of a classic. Karr is an acclaimed poet and a bestselling memoirist, known in both genres for an earthy, plainspoken lyricism. Her book The Liar’s Club, about her emotionally desolate childhood in east Texas, is a classic of the genre. Crowell is a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and producer whose work straddles the fence between traditional country and Americana and he published his own memoir about his own hardscrabble east Texas childhood, Chinaberry Sidewalks, last year.

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