Texas in My Soul (1967)

Not much info on the liner notes of this cd. Which reminds me, I just saw an article in the NYT or the WSJ (I still read the newsprint versions) that album sales are way down, and CD sales are dwindling. Writing about albums seems so quaint and old fashioned. Will anyone even understand the concept of an album in a few years? Sales of albums and CDs peaked in the ‘90s, and yet they have disappeared so fast. Even blogging is becoming a bit passé, and Twitter is supposedly for old folks. Youngsters Tumbl on Tumblr.

Nevertheless..this album was produced by Chet Atkins, but it doesn’t have all the strings and back-up vocals that marred many of Willie’s eleven albums released during the ‘60s. I won’t comment much on the lyrics because these are all covers. The theme of Texas is clearly important for Willie’s music and his persona. He mentions Pedernales in one of these songs, and George Straight clearly ripped off “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” from “Who Put All My Ex’s in Texas.” Straight’s song was the one that got me hooked on country in 1989. This is a fun album that helps you understand where Willie came from musically, and it probably provides a nice contrast to his other albums from the ‘60s. I’ll have to wait to listen to some of those before I say more. I pretty much played this one on repeat all day while working up at school. It got me thinking about how much simpler things were in 1967 (two years before I was born). Overall, this is a fun, catchy, pleasant album that gets a bit serious with “Remember the Alamo.”

Naked Willie (2009)

I love the concept of this album. Mickey Raphael probably knows Willie’s music better than anyone besides his sister, Bobbie, or his best friend, Paul, so he is the perfect person to “un-produce” some of Willie’s oldest recordings. My kids love the shot of Willie in the bathtub, but I’m afraid I don’t think Willie’s voice is naked enough on this album. I guess I prefer the buck-naked sound of Crazy: The Demo Sessions. Even with the syrupy strings and cheesy back-ground vocals removed, these versions still aren’t as raw as those demo tapes. Nevertheless, I’m glad Mickey Raphael un-produced these as much as he could. Willie (my youngest son) and my wife liked “Bring Me Sunshine.” It reminded them of “Sioux City Sue” from Willie’s album with Leon Russell (One for the Road). Up-beat and danceable. I hate to keep bringing up Proust, but Marcel would love “Her memory is following me around.” We either try to live in the past or it chases us down and haunts us (see “The Ghost”). We’re either searching for lost time or it’s searching for us. “The Local Memory” and “I’m a Memory” deal with the same issue. Even in “Sunday Morning Coming Down” we have regret for the loss of something from the past. “Something about a Sunday makes a body feel alone.” What is it exactly? And why do we need to get stoned to avoid the past from sneaking up on us like that? That smell of chicken cooking in the back yard.

Funny that Willie doesn’t play guitar on these tracks. Chet Atkins and Grady Martin pick on several of these. “Where Do You Stand?” and “What Can You Do to Me Now?” hit on another theme that is emerging in Willie’s music: questioning, doubting, re-thinking. “I Let My Mind Wander” and “If You Could See What’s in My Mind” also suggest this notion of a roaming mind. Willie didn’t have a cork-lined room, but his lyrics create a cork-lined space within his mind to play Proust or Hamlet. I also like the understatement (or is it overstatement?) of “Happiness Lives Next Door.” On one hand, his lyrics are so spare. He treats words the same way he treats the beat. Less is more. And yet this sparseness is paradoxical. On one hand, it can be understated, compressed, subtle, wry. But on the other hand, it can feel raw, direct, blunt. I’m not sure how he conveys both sides of sparseness simultaneously. I’m only 83 songs and 4 ½ hours into this adventure, though, so I’ve got time to figure it out. It’s as if I am climbing into Willie’s head, into the past (his and mine), through his music. It’s not the Congo, but it’s a journey into a heart of darkness of sorts. Jack (my eldest son) just chimed in from upstairs (what’s he doing up at 10:30pm on a school night?). He jokingly (I think) said he hates me because he has a Willie Nelson song stuck in his head and he can’t get it out. It may be a long year for my family. The horror, the horror. And it’s only six days into it. 359 to go.

Always On My Mind (1982)

My 13-year-old son said, “He’s creepy,” as I pondered the CD cover of this 1982 album. The turquoise bandana and the grey down parka don’t seem to befit a country outlaw. Willie looks more like he’s getting ready to hit the slopes at Vail. The covers of “Do Right Woman” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale” don’t quite work for me, but the title cut is worth the price of the whole album. The versions of “Permanently Lonely” and “Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning” are as good as anything Willie ever recorded. I want to compare these to his versions of “Permanently Lonely” and “Opportunity to Cry” from his Crazy: The Demo Sessions album from the 60s. We played Dominos last night (a version called Chickenfoot), and my wife was not impressed to learn that Willie once lost 300k on a game of dominos, and he wasn’t even that mad that the guy who beat him cheated. Hakuna Matata. The beatific smile. As the kids say, “My b.” Short for “My bad.” You were always on my mind, but…As if that makes it okay. And yet the song persists. It works.

Willie becomes time itself on “I’m a Memory” (previously unreleased). Close your eyes, I’m a memory. Proust would love this. Waylon’s vocals on “A Whiter Shale of Pale” become even more poignant when you know how much he envied Willie’s success and how his life (like Tom Buchanan’s in The Great Gatsby) must have “savored of anticlimax” at the end. When Willie kicks off this song, I always think it is someone else. He strives for notes he doesn’t usually hit (I’m not sure he quite hits them here either). “The Party’s Over” is a bit too dance-like for my taste, but this seems to be a theme in Willie’s work. He frustrates your expectations. You have sad lyrics, you expect a sad tempo; Willie dances along. Is he joking, mocking? Is he toying with us? You’re never quite sure. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” should not be messed with. How can you out-do Art Garfunkel? Why would you try? This song just did not need to be re-done. Willie’s version is okay, but I’d rather hear Paul and Art do it. And I don’t want to hear Paul doing “Always on My Mind” either, much less “Permanently Lonely.” Not sure what he means when he sings that “The Man Who Owes Everyone…seems to like it that way.” I’ve listened to this album a half dozen times today, and I’m glad I own it. Not a top ten for me, but an important one to return to from time to time. Chips Moman produces, and some of this is recorded at Pedernales. Just as Ray Charles shocked the world by recording a country album, Willie shocked country music out of its Urban Cowboy stupor, ironically, by recording a bunch of pop standards. Go figure.

American Classic (2009)

So Willie’s on Blue Note now. Except for Mickey Raphael on harmonica for four tracks, none of Willie’s usual band members (Paul, Bobbie, etc.) are on this album. Willie doesn’t even play guitar except on track 8. I didn’t like this album much when I first got it a few weeks ago, but it’s growing on me. It isn’t Stardust and never will be, but it’s not bad. His voice is fading, but his timing is still impeccable, impeccably off, that is, but that’s his shtick. Diana Krall and Norah Jones are perfect choices for duets. Their perfect smoothness juxtaposed to his gravelly meandering makes for an interesting, full-bodied sonic flavor. I wanted to like this version of “Always on My Mind,” but he has so many other wonderful versions, that this one can only pale in comparison. Makes me wonder how Willie’s voice can and will age. His voice sounded well-aged at 20, so how can it age at 77?

So I’m listening to the album a second time through. I’m downstairs in the cold basement watching my daughters bounce on their new trampoline and reading an article in the New Yorker about the CEO of Whole Foods, the organic food chain started in, where else, Austin, Texas. The home of the cosmic cowboy. This mixture of cowboy and hippie intrigues me, like Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who blends liberal and conservative ideas. They tend to make both sides mad because they are not toeing either party line blindly. What I like about Obama now is the way he is making his own party mad, which suggests to me that he is not blindly toeing his own party line. Like Willie Nelson. Is he country, Jazz, folk, rock, hippie, cowboy? Who knows. As Professor Greenberg said about Beethoven. Beethoven isn’t like anything. He is just himself. There is nothing really to compare him to. Paumgarten writes, “Austin isn’t really Texas.” So is Willie Texas? Is George Bush? Who knows.

American Classic sounds a bit like all the tracks were emailed in separately. Diana Krall and Nora Jones don’t sound like they are in the studio with Willie while he is singing. That kinda ruins it for me. Nevertheless, Willie is all smiling and looking like he’ll live another 20 years on the cover of this album. He looks younger than he did on the cover of Spirit in 1996. “Ain’t Misbehavin’” is particularly strong. “On the Street Where You Live” is also good. This version of “Always on My Mind” gets worse each time I listen to it (I’m on my third listen today while cooking dinner). As I said before, it sounds like a Shakespeare sonnet with one of the words changed. When a sonnet is perfect, it snaps shut with a comforting sense of closure. Change a word, and you break that spell of wholeness. Willie already has a near-perfect version (or two) of this song, so any change of phrasing (which is usually Willie’s strong suit) actually works against him in this case. This won’t ever make my top ten, and probably not my top 30 or 40, but I’m glad to have it in my collection, if nothing else, for comparison purposes.

Spirit (1996)

Another stripped down album from the late ‘90s. Must be Willie’s flamenco phase. Sounds similar to Teatro in many ways, which was recorded in an old Mexican movie theater. This one is recorded at Pedernales, Willie’s own studio on his golf course in Austin, Texas. I was re-reading the lyrics to the songs on Teatro and noticed that they are even darker than I first thought. “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” is about a guy strangling his woman so she can’t ever say goodbye:

The flesh around your throat is pale
Indented by my fingernails
Please don’t scream, please don’t cry
I just can’t let you say good-bye

Cha-cha-cha. Yikes. I also discovered that “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” was written in 1998, which shows two things: one, that Willie could still flat-out write songs in the late ‘90s; and two, that the placement of this new song directly after “I’ve Just Destroyed the World” is even more poignant as it telescopes thirty-six years of heartbreak from 1962 to 1998. Willie’s always circling back, discursive, spiraling around and around the same old themes, staying old and new at the same time. So many of his albums recycle old material and yet blend it with the new. Grafting new songs like apple tree branches onto solid stock. It’s Proust again, battling time. Or is it Buddha? A Buddhist Proust?

I’ll start ranking songs and versions of songs at some point, but I know that “Too Sick to Pray” will be in my top ten list of songs. Spirit, not surprisingly, is Willie’s most spiritual album, even more spiritual, I think, than his gospel albums. With Willie’s Hindu/Buddhist reincarnation mentality, it is often hard to take his gospel songs seriously because you don’t hear a lot of repentance or redemption. You hear it on this album, though. It wasn’t too long after the IRS fiasco and him losing everything, so this album may reflect more honest soul-searching than the take-it-in-stride feel many of his songs and albums have. The sound is very polished, and yet there are only four musicians: Willie on lead guitar and vocals, Bobbie on piano, Johnny Gimble on fiddle, and Jody Payne on rhythm guitar and harmony vocals. It isn’t raw and unpolished the way Storytellers and the IRS Tapes are, but it has a clean and polished sparseness, if that’s possible. And yet not sterile. Somehow it is still gritty and real. Maybe it’s the vulnerability of the lyrics or the wrinkles, the creases, the lines in Willie’s face and hands on the black and white photos on the album cover that brings this out. The guitar picking stands out as it does on Storytellers. “I Thought About You Lord” may make my top ten, too. Willie thinking about life ending and love unending. About his music and time. Looking back, looking forward. Looking for meaning. Questioning. What’s striking about this song is what it doesn’t say. He says what he’s thinking about but he doesn’t say what he thinks about what he’s thinking about. Where does he stand? He doesn’t offer any answers. It’s a song about just thinking about things that can have no answers. Fittingly, it opens and closes with the plaintive instrumental “Matador.” We begin and end wordlessly. As if to say, What can you say? In the face of loss, love, time, death, What can you say? The five minute “Spirit of E9” expands and extends the wordless exploration till he comes full circle, like Joyce in Ulysses—yes, yes, yes—with the 18 second reprise of “Matador.” He waves the cape, though not a red one, and we listeners, like bulls, miss glancingly with our ears. What is the audio equivalent of peripheral vision? Can we hear out of the side of our ears? Our ears are already on the side, so maybe we have to be able to hear out of the front of them. If we normally hear peripherally, maybe we need to learn to hear centrally. To hear with our eyes? Or with our eyes closed? This album makes you want to close your eyes, in a good way, and pray.

So I’m 42 songs and 2.3 hours in to my year-long adventure. I’m going to move one album per day over to my new 8 gig IPOD so the only music on my IPOD will be WN albums I have already written about thus far this year. It will help me keep track of where I am, and I can circle back and re-listen for things I may have missed on the first go. I listened to Teatro and Storytellers three times each, which seems like a good number. It may be hard when I am not on vacation, but I’m on listen #2 of Spirit, though I have played it more than almost any other WN album over the years, so it is comfortable to my ears like worn slippers or jeans. And I probably sing “Too Sick to Pray” to myself more often than any other WN song. Both because it is easy to sing and because it is so often true for me. Not that I am physically sick very often, but that I feel as pathetic (or apathetic, which is worse?) spiritually as he sounds and looks on this album. “Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave” has a hopeful, triumphant vibe. Not the dancing flamenco cha-cha of Teatro, but an upbeat downer song. Again, an oxymoron, I know, but that’s what it is. The joy C.S. Lewis writes about. A pain, but a pain we miss when it’s gone. A pain we want to feel again. And it isn’t masochistic or self-flagellating. It’s just that we feel more alive when we are hurting, we are more attentive, more fully awake. Tim O’Brian writes about this in The Things They Carried. How he felt more alive during battle. How he appreciated nature and being alive more intensely after a near-fatal skirmish. Second time through I notice that another instrumental song, “Mariachi,” is placed in the dead center of the album at track #6. Wordlessness within words. And maybe that’s the way to sum up this album. It feels like a silent film with words. It seems to speak and remain silent at the same time. It is an album about how words get in the way, or how words fail, or how we don’t know what to say, or how we are too tired or sick to say them. And it says this with words and without them. In short, the album is halting and tentative and vulnerable like prayer, yet hopeful and triumphant like prayer, too. It runs the emotional gamut of prayer. Amen.

VH1 Storytellers (1998)

I have no rhyme nor reason why I am picking a given album on a given day, but the spirit moved me to pick one I know well, one I have listened the heck out of, and one my wife actually likes. Perhaps the only WN album she likes, and it doesn’t really count because it is half Johnny Cash. I find it interesting that the first two albums I have selected are both from 1998. And the one I have selected for tomorrow is from 1996. I haven’t been looking at the dates before I pick the albums, but it seems that I am attracted to something about this time period. Is it the mellowness? The sparse background? The aged quality of Willie’s voice? I don’t know. I’m learning as I go. I’m feeling my way into his oeuvre. I know this, though. I will be very surprised if this album gets bumped from my top ten, even after I listen to 300 plus albums. I can’t imagine Willie’s voice or his guitar playing being better in any setting. Johnny is fragile and fumbling, but the banter between the two is priceless. Was “Stupid” really the original title for “Crazy”? “Funny How Time Slips Away” reinforces the Proust theme I’m noticing. In search of lost time. You said you’d love me forever, but now you’ve gone and left me. Funny how fast forever goes by. Only Willie could make eternity seem funny. Funny how cavalier we are with eternity. How small we can be about something so big. And yet it captures Willie’s attitude toward life. He’s not mad at this woman for leaving him so quickly after promising to love him forever. He finds it funny. He finds humans funny. The human condition. We’re flawed but funny. Flawed but forgivable. This may be the best version of “Crazy.” Better even than Patsy Cline’s. Patoski says there are at least 27 recorded versions of “Whiskey River,” and there must be close to that for “Crazy,” but I can’t imagine a better one. You get to appreciate Willie’s guitar so much better on this album because there are no other distractions. Why am I not surprised to learn that Rick Rubin produced this, after hearing his great work with Johnny Cash on those end-of-career albums. My question for Rick is this: isn’t it time to record five end-of-career albums for Willie? What are you waiting for? He’s 77 for God’s sake. Maybe you don’t feel his career needs resuscitating the way Johnny’s did, but wouldn’t it be great to get five Willie albums on par with those last five Johnny Cash albums: respectful, raw, spare, authentic. No frills. Maybe Willie already has so much of that he doesn’t need it, but I’d still like to have it. The choices on this album are perfect, but I guess the credit doesn’t go to Rubin for that. I can’t really pick out one or two to highlight because they are all as nearly perfect versions of these classics as I can imagine: “Me and Paul,” “Night Life,” “Always on My Mind,” “On the Road,” “Family Bible.” The only downside to the album is it makes me feel sorry for Johnny Cash. He seems so old and forgetful. He seems embarrassed by how much better Willie is on guitar, and how much healthier he seems. Regardless, this is in my top ten, and I don’t see it leaving.

Teatro (1998)

I resisted buying this album for years. I kept previewing it at Barnes and Noble and Amazon, but the background seemed hokey. I didn’t give it a chance. I am amazed at how wrong my initial judgment can be. It makes me wonder, What else am I wrong about? Many of these are old tunes re-recorded, slowed down, spare, with an aged vocal. This album is so Willie. So un-commercial. "Everywhere I go," a new tune in 1998," is as haunting as anything in Willie's repertoire. The Latin background, the echoing drums, and the jumpy harmonica were all a bit off-putting at first, but they seem just right to me now. Of course, having Emmylou Harris on back-up vocals helps. "Darkness on the Face of the Earth," from 1961, has a driving dance beat. It may be the most depressing up-beat dance tune every written. It provides that surprising juxtaposition that Willie is famous for. I guess that's what upbeat blues is. Sad songs you can dance to. Like sweet and sour chicken. "My Own Peculiar Way," from 1964, puts an up-tempo dance groove to a touching love song. It seems to be both slow and fast at the same time. Willie's songs sound like Escher drawings look. You think you're moving, but you aren't. Or you think your standing still, but you're moving. Willie is famous for singing behind the beat. In Patoski's bio someone talks about how dancers would end up with a foot in the air if they were trying to dance to Willie's music. I'll be listening to this album today and seeing what it has to say about New Year's day 2010.

We drove to Spartanburg to visit friends from college, and over the course of the trip down and back, I was able to listen to the album three times in its entirety. On the ride down, my wife said it made her car sick. Willie’s voice wobbling behind the beat, disorienting, causing vertigo, disrupting the balance in her inner ear. She and my son Jack plugged into their own I-Pods on the way back to avoid the second and third playings. I read the first half of Patoski’s Willie Nelson: An Epic Life yesterday. It took Willie 77 years to live his life up to this point, it could have taken Patoski ten years to document this life in book form, and it takes me two days to read it. That is what I call condensation, distillation. Strong stuff. Time. In Search of Lost Time. Remembrance of Things Past. Willie and Proust have a few things in common. “Three Days” Willie hates: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Time is original sin, death. Maybe that’s why Willie sings behind the beat, and Emmylou Harris sings behind him, and behind her? Behind time itself? Nostalgia. Memory. Love. Death. Proust and Willie. “Time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.” Yet Willie flirts with it, messes with it, dares it, flaunts it, courts it, lives in it, on it, over it. He’s a preposition, a relationship. He pauses so long during some of these songs you think he may not come back. I can picture musicians leaving the stage to take a break during one of his pauses. Like John Cage, like Thelonius Monk, he plays the silences, the spaces between notes. For someone who lived so hard and fast, he sings so slow. It takes so long, as if he is stretching time, making it last, like Proust’s six volumes. So serious, and yet he’s singing “I’ve Just Destroyed the World I’m Living In” to a two-step or a cha-cha beat. Like dancing a polka to Amazing Grace, but maybe we should, if it’s truly amazing. Is he mocking the seriousness of his own lyrics? Mocking death and time? Death Be Not Proud. John Donne. Is he celebrating the death of death? Redemption? Peculiar music. Weird, Chet Atkins called it. People said he couldn’t sing. He sounded funny. Funny how time slips away. There’s time again. I like the sequence from “I’ve Just Destroyed…” to “Somebody Pick Up the Pieces.” Songs of total loss, total destruction, the end of the rope, the oh no, and yet two-step, cha-cha. The kids I teach, 10th and 11th graders, don’t listen to entire songs anymore. Their attention spans can’t even span 2 ½ minutes. They listen for 30 seconds and then move on. I wonder if I-tunes will start selling 30 seconds of songs (maybe they already do: ring tones?). But I worry that they lose the artist’s vision, the artist’s sequencing of songs when listeners get to decide when songs come in the sequence. There is something to submitting to the author’s vision. Maybe the web and hypertexts defeat this patriarchal power of authors, creators. And yet are we truly free when we refuse to submit to this power? I honestly don’t know what he means by “Home Motel,” but I know he is juxtaposing the familiar and the strange. So Willie’s a Russian Formalist. I was just reading in Dirda’s book about the Russian Formalists’ mandate that art make the familiar strange, defamiliarize it, estrange it. Willie is at home on the road and he is lost at home. He embraces “On the Road Again” and “Family Bible” at the same time. He embodies both fully at the same time without contradiction (as Johnny Cash did). He loves both; he is open to both simultaneously. His openness and tolerance for both makes him unique. G.K. Chesterton writes about this, too. Willie is both plain and peculiar, both simple and complex at the same time. He gets accused of being too plain, prosaic and boring, and too complicated and subtle. How can both be true? Like a complex wine or beer, he has body, depth; his voice sounded old when he was in his 20s. How did he do that? Like Dylan, yet without taking himself so seriously. Malcom Gladwell writes about the five elements of taste in “What the Dog Saw.” Ketchup hits all five (sweet, sour, meat, bitter, and one other). I wonder what the sonic equivalent is, but I bet Willie hits all of them: humor, sincerity, sadness, dance, jazz… Coltrane improvised off “My Favorite Things for 27 minutes, and I aim to improvise off the improviser himself for 365 days. He is the melody, the canvas. Meta-improvisation when you improvise off Coltrane or Nelson or Monk. The harmonica on Teatro sounds like an accordion That’s where I get the latin or klezmir feel. Willie is unafraid to risk singing badly. Unafraid of risking sentimentality, like Dickens, like Fitzgerald. He writes and sings so close to the bone. I can’t recommend this album highly enough. It is definitely in my current top ten.