'Til I Gain Control Again

Crowell wrote "'Til I Gain Control Again" early in his Nashville years, while he was a staff writer for Jerry Reed's publishing company and, as he told American Songwriter in 2008, back to back with "Song for the Life"; he called both a projection into a future he later lived through, and said one rhyme in it would trouble him now. To Songwriter Universe in 2018 he described the song as being like a prayer, one that could be addressed to a woman or to some higher being, and said it came to him out of the ether at a time when he was keeping company with Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury and Steve Earle. Many people, he has noted, name it their favorite of his songs.

Emmylou Harris recorded it first, in June 1975 in the Enactron Truck in Los Angeles with Brian Ahern producing, for Elite Hotel, released on Reprise that December. Crowell's own version came on his third album, Rodney Crowell, released by Warner Bros. in 1981 as his first self-produced record, where it is the ninth track at 5:11; it was not a single. The next year Crystal Gayle took it to number one on the Billboard country chart for a week, released on Elektra on October 27, 1982 from True Love and produced by Jimmy Bowen and Allen Reynolds. Waylon Jennings (Ol' Waylon, 1977), Willie Nelson (Willie and Family Live, 1978), Jerry Jeff Walker, Bobby Bare, This Mortal Coil (Blood, 1991), Blue Rodeo (Five Days in July, a Canadian country hit in 1994), Van Morrison (Pay the Devil, 2006) and Alison Krauss (2016) have all recorded it. The upload in the hypersongs web is Crowell's studio recording on the label's own channel.