Southern comfort.

My daughter is a wonderful young woman, and she worries out me. When she heard my songs "I Wish It Would Rain" and "Wandering Boy"--about two twins, one of whom is gay-she said, "Oh, Dad, these are my favorite two songs that you've ever written. But I lie awake nights thinking that people who have bought your records aren't going to get it." And I say,

"You know what? People have to discover what they discover in their own way."

The inspiration for the songs started when I was 10 years old. My parents had friends who had twin boys. They were 10 years younger than I was, so I took little notice of them at the time. Then some years later, in the early '90s, word came to me that one of the twin boys, now grown up, had AIDS. When I heard that, an idea started coming to me for a song. So I took some liberties to reconstruct what I thought might be a scenario of these twin Texas boys. One was bisexual or homosexual, a street hustler, living in Hollywood--that became the song "I Wish It Would Rain." The other brother was slightly homophobic but coming to grips with his brother's life. The song "Wandering Boy" is about the healing that takes place when one brother comes home to Texas to die.

I purposely wrote "Wandering Boy" a bit short on details at the beginning. I wanted the emotion of the songs to be unresolved until the last verse, when the straight brother comes to terms with his own homophobia. He says, "I used to cast my judgments like a net / All those California gay boys deserve just what they get / Little did I know there would come a day / When my words would come back screaming like a debt I have to pay." To me, the metaphor is, these are two versions of the same person with a different sexuality. What it says is that no matter what, we're all the same.

I remember my first experience with someone I consciously knew to be gay. It was a woman who lived a couple of blocks away when I was growing up in Houston. She was very mannish, and what we were taught was that those masculine traits were evil--and that her evil was somehow infectious.

I grew up without buying into that particular frame of mind, I think, because I'm a born writer. I was born with an extra dose of empathy, and it's easy for me to put myself in someone else's place-maybe not so much their experience but the emotion they feel from rejection. I'm a straight man, but I've always felt like an outsider, an observer. I'm attuned to that inner dialogue that we all have going on inside us. Sometimes it's our private hell, and sometimes it's our private glory, but I just never bought that any of us could pass off judgments about what goes on in another human being's inner dialogue.

I believe it's my job as an artist to put a mirror up--for people to see themselves in my art and to see myself in it. So I think it's extremely important that my message is tolerance for any human being. It's my job.

And actually it turns out that my childhood sweetheart is gay. When I found out, about four years ago, I was delighted. I thought, Wow. I always thought she was exceptional, and now I know she is. She's just delightful. She came down to Houston with me to work on this little documentary film I've just made to go with my new record, The Houston Kid, and she outed herself in the film. Afterward she said, "You know, it's the first time in a long time I feel completely at peace with who I am and proud of who I am." Somehow going back to the breeding grounds of taboo, revisiting it, released her from a bit of a prison she'd been in.

I think music can also be a release for people. I performed in Cerritos, Calif., last month, and I sang "I Wish It Would Rain" and "Wandering Boy." After the show a lady came up to me--a straight woman whose brother had died of AIDS--and she was just in tears, because she was so very grateful to have some music that spoke to her grief. And both songs are really about grief.

When I first played these songs for my wife's best friend, who's gay, he was in tears. We talked long about it, and he said to me, "You're going to reach the gay audience with this," and I said, "Well, I'd love that." To me, reaching people that's being an artist.

Grammy winner Crowell has been a country music singer and songwriter for more than 30 years.