Augusta (1995)

Just found another Willie Nelson friend album.  He recorded this with his long-time golfing buddy Don Cherry in 1995.  I’ve already reviewed Willie’s other collaboration with Don Cherry, “It’s Magic” (2007), but now I come to find there is also a third, “The Eyes of Texas” (2002).  I’ll have to rustle up a copy of that disc in 2011 as I zero in on the hardest to find of Willie’s albums.  I downloaded this off Amazon, so I don’t have any information about the musicians, but it sounds like Willie and Don singing behind a canned background.  What’s interesting about these collaborations is that Don Cherry clearly has a voice that is technically “better” than Willie’s, but Willie’s is more interesting, more memorable.  It’s hard to put a finger on why one voice is more interesting than another. 

“Augusta” is a paean to golf.  Which reminds me that yesterday as I was finishing Willie’s autobiography, it struck me why Willie is so obsessed with games like chess, dominoes, and golf.  For someone that is so “free” spirited in his personal life, he craves the absolute rule-bound nature of games like golf and chess.  It seems that even free spirits crave order and rules.  Interestingly, Willie spends most of his time playing these games, so he actually spends more time within the confines of circumscribed, rule-bound environments than he does being a free spirit.  He may sing and believe Sinatra’s “My Way,” but the thing about chess and golf is that you always do it golf’s way.  You can’t make up rules or break them and do it your way.  And we seem to crave environments where we can’t do it our way, where we don’t have to do it our way.  Willie’s vocals on this track make the cd worth buying, though the background sounds like synthesizer drums and strings.  Willie slows “One for the Road” (track three) way down.  The sax solo sounds canned, but this may be the only place to hear Willie interpret this song in such a mellow, laid-back way.  “When I’m gloomy, you simply gotta listen to me, till it’s talked away.”  I’m pretty sure Willie usually sings this in an upbeat manner (with Leon Russell).  “Red Sails in the Sunset” is another smart song selection for Willie.  It’s amazing that Willie has these hidden gem vocal performances scattered hither and yon on obscure almost-impossible-to-find albums.  So far, Willie has been on every track, which was not the case on “It’s Magic,” where Don Cherry has several solo performances.  I’m wishing Willie had recorded these songs solo with a legit sax player like Sonny Rollins or Joshua Redmon.  I wouldn’t have picked “Try a Little Tenderness” for Willie, but he finds something new in this song.  Unlike “It’s Magic,” I will need to re-visit this album to study Willie’s interpretations of songs that he may not have recorded anywhere else.  “Tangerine” (track six) didn’t do much for me, but Willie’s voice may be near its peak in 1995, so this album is worth owning as a study of Willie’s voice during this time period.  “Love You for Sentimental Reasons” gives further proof to this.  “Prisoner of Love” explores the need to escape love, something Willie has experienced again and again.  Willie sings, “I’m not free…my very life is in her keeping.”  Sounds like Petrarch again.  In his autobiography, Willie calls himself a troubadour, so the connection with Petrarch and the love poets makes sense.  “Tenderly” may be one of the best tracks on this album, closer to Stardust than the others, and it’s all Willie, no Don.  A real treasure that more folks should know about.  Don’s back with “Maybe You’ll Be There” (track ten).  This is the first song so far that doesn’t feature Willie at all.  Willie is also AWOL on “So Rare” (track eleven).  I’d actually like to hear Willie tackle this tune.  The album ends with another solo Don effort, “Don’t Go to Strangers.”  So all in all, it isn’t magic, but it’s better than “It’s Magic,” and despite it’s flaws, it’s worth owning.

The Gypsy (2001)

Can’t believe I’m just now discovering this album Willie recorded with jazz guitarist Jackie King.  It’s from that fertile period between 1996 and 2002 when Willie recorded so many of my favorite albums: Teatro (1998), Spirit (1996), Night and Day (1999), Me and the Drummer (2000), and Storytellers (1998).  That and the period 1971-1978 may be Willie’s peaks: Yesterday’s Wine (1971), Red-Headed Stranger (1975), and Stardust (1978).  It is fitting that I listen to this album after having just spent a good bit of time with Willie’s performance on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland and Jackie King in 2002.  They clearly have chemistry.  I wouldn’t rank this as highly as Stardust or Night and Day, but it remains a hidden gem that more folks should know about.  The title song, “The Gypsy,” defines Willie’s whole life perfectly.  I just finished his autobiography today, and it makes clear that Willie came by his wanderlust honestly, from both of his parents.  The book has a jazz-like quality because he alternates chapters between his own version of how things happened and chapters titled “The Chorus,” where other important figures in his life give their takes on Willie.  You get a polyphonic, impressionistic feel for Willie’s life this way.  “The Nearness of You” on track two is purely instrumental.  Willie is playing Trigger and is accompanied only by electric guitar (Jackie King), acoustic bass (Andrew Higgins), electric bass (Jon Blondell), piano (Don Haas), and drums (Bob Scott).  Willie’s vocals on “Heart of a Clown” (track three) contain some inspired phrasings, though I think he has better recordings of this song.  On track four Jackie meanders around the standard “Once in Awhile” for almost seven minutes.  “Jealous Heart” (track five) may be one of Willie’s more inventive vocal performances.  It doesn’t have the clean, polished, perfect finish of the Stardust numbers, but you get the sense that Willie is challenging himself, reaching, extending.  He starts out so slow it almost seems as if his voice will come to a complete halt, but then about three minutes into the song, the piano picks up the tempo and the second half of the song takes off with all of the musicians contributing lively solos.  “Back Home in Indiana” (track six) returns to a purely instrumental setting.  Interestingly, ITUNES (or GraceNotes) labels the genre of this album “Easy Listening,” but the attentive listener will find it to be more adventurous than this label suggests.  It’s only easy if you aren’t listening.  There’s nothing easy about Jackie’s guitar work on “Back Home in Indiana.”  Clearly Willie is doing this album to help out an old friend, but I wonder how much these friend albums really help Willie’s friends.  I’ll need to compare this version of “My Window Faces South” (track seven) to others Willie has recorded, but this one doesn’t disappoint.  The song could be the title of Willie’s biography.  Willie could have written the line “I’m never frownin’ or down in the mouth.”  Despite all the cheatin’ and cryin’ songs Willie has written and sung over the years, he makes sure his own window faces south at all times.  A Panglossian outlaw.  We never knew outlaws could be optimistic till Willie showed us how.  Dark figures always looking on the bright side.  The instrumental “Cherokee” (track eight) confirms that this album is Stardust on speed.  Again, reading Willie’s bio helps you appreciate how fitting it is for Willie to record an album full of gypsies and Cherokees combined with clowns and windows facing south.  Willie is the paradoxically cheery Cherokee.  This may not be Willie’s best “San Antonio Rose” (track nine), but it stands out because of the spare setting.  Willie ends with an almost seven-minute long excursion into “Lover Come Back to Me” (track ten).  I should mention that I listened to this album two or three times through yesterday and then another time through today.  This is an album I will revisit often with pleasure.  It would be nice in a mix with Stardust, Night and Day, Moonlight Becomes You, and the recently released American Classic.              

It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963 [Disc 3]

12/28/2010

I listened to this disc twice through today (all 30 songs) while making Beef Daub Provencal. It’s a good disc to cut five pounds of raw meat to. I’ve just finished the Graeme Thomson bio and have just started Willie’s autobiography, so it is safe to say I am stewing in Willie Nelson music and lore. While my stew simmers for its final hour, I’ll see what strikes me on this third listen through the third disc of this Bear Family compilation of Willie’s earliest recordings. I have reviewed all of these songs previously when I reviewed The Complete Liberty recordings, and I seem to remember preferring the recordings from his second Liberty album. The songs on this disc come from sessions in 1963, and they have a smaller cast of musicians and a sparer setting.

“Right or Wrong” sounds like Randy Travis or George Strait from the late 1980s. I’m almost certain Randy Travis recorded this song on one of his early albums. Bobby Bruce’s up-tempo fiddle sets this song apart from other recordings. The yodeling at the end seems forced. It isn’t Willie. “Roly Poly” also opens with the speedy fiddle. There’s a jarring transition from two up-tempo Bob Wills-style Western Swing dance numbers to the moody, brooding ballads “Let Me Talk to You,” “The Things I Might Have Been,” and “The Way You See Me.” This captures perfectly the yin and yang of Willie’s musical repertoire. He can go as fast or as slow as you want him to. And he can switch speeds on a dime. On track six he picks up the tempo again with “Columbus Stockade Blues (version 1)” with Shirley Collie. It’s actually a slowed down version of this normally blistering crowd pleaser. Willie manages to enunciate words that other singers would slur. He seems to have a special ability to manipulate time. He is able to custom fit notes into bars. He measures out beats the way my wife’s Mississippi grandmother measured spices: one shake of this, two shakes of that. Willie sings to taste. His own taste. The raw banjo, the jazzy piano, and the Johnny Gimble-esque fiddle shine on these tracks. I like how the Bear Family puts Willie’s duets with Shirley together on this disc (as they did with Disc 2). Willie confirms in his autobiography that Shirley is the only person who could ever sing harmony with him. He says that she would anticipate where he was going. Sort of like shooting skeet. You have to lead the clay pigeon and shoot where it’s going to be, not where it is. She is the only one who could ever lead his phrasing and anticipate where he was going and end up in the same place. Jimmy Day’s steel guitar tries to save “You Took My Happy Away” from the strings and back-up singers, to no avail. Same with Roger Miller’s “Second Fiddle.” There are a half dozen violins listed for this track, but whoever has the solo redeems the rest of the string section, especially with the delicate flourish at the end. Willie pushes the limits of the meter with his phrasing even in an over-produced recording like this one. This isn’t one of my favorite versions of “Opportunity to Cry,” but it may be my favorite Willie song, so I covet every version I can find. Gene Garf’s piano stands out on this track and on “Lonely Little Mansion.” Hargus M. “Pig” Robbins takes over the piano for the April 25th session and the second version of “You Took My Happy Away.” The line “My sorry gets bigger each day” is vintage Willie. In Hank Cochran’s “Feed it a Memory” Willie sings, “I just feed it a memory to keep it alive.” Vintage Proust, vintage Fitzgerald. The next four tracks are from a November 20th session in which Willie sings other people’s songs: “I Hope So” (Shirley Collie), “This Cold War with You” (Floyd Tillman), “Blue Must Be the Color of the Blues (Jones-Williams), and “Seasons of My Heart” (George Jones). The back-up vocals and strings are toned down a bit, which gives Willie’s voice and Bill Purcell’s piano a bit more room to operate. Trumpets seem out of place on the last two of these recordings. “There’s a blue note in each song,” though, and Willie somehow finds the blue, the bruise, the pain, the hurt in even the most syrupy setting. “There are no seasons in my heart” and “my love for you will bloom eternally” are another way of saying “Funny How Time Slips Away.” “My tears like withered leaves will fall.” On November 21st Willie adds a flute to the mix. That may be “At the Bottom” of the list of instruments Willie should record with, but I’m sure it wasn’t his choice. I wish I could isolate Willie’s voice and Bill Purcell’s piano. I wonder if Garage Band or some other software would allow home users to do what Mickey Raphael did with “Naked Willie.” We could reverse engineer the songs and isolate Willie’s voice. “I’ll Walk Alone” may be the sparest song so far on this disk. Just Willie, piano, and flute with a bass behind them. This version of Fred Carter’s “River Boy” is equally spare. I started the day in bed listening to Neville Jason reading Proust’s Swann’s Way on tape. And then to hear Willie sing “nothin’ but a river boy.” The same social class issues Proust wrestles with through all six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Memories and longing and always feeling outside of something. The next four tracks come from the same date in 1963, but a different session. Willie’s vocals are as good as they get on “Am I Blue,” but the do-wop singers are back. “Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)” could be a Willie anthem, a honky tonk version of “Just as I Am.” “You’re trying to reshape me in a mold, love, in an image of someone you used to know.” But you can’t shape a shape-shifter like Willie. Willie channels Hank Williams on Hank’s “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight.” “If you think that you’re above me,” you got another thing coming. You can’t make me cry. I won’t let you hurt me. Then Willie does Hank Thompson’s “Tomorrow Night.” “You said tomorrow night that you might be able to keep this rendezvous with me at eight,” but tomorrow never comes. I’m beginning to appreciate Willie’s elocution, which his grandparents hammered into him. It adds seriousness and sincerity to every lyric. Not sure why Bear Family put these two alternate versions of “Columbus Stockade Blues” at the end of this set when they were recorded at the same time as the version on track 6. All of the versions are keepers. Maybe they thought listeners would not enjoy hearing the same song three times in a row. I wish Willie had recorded more with Shirley (and with Bobby Bruce and Gene Garf). The snappy snare drummer motors all three versions along as well. The disc ends with four tracks that were overdubbed in 1969. Not sure why they overdubbed these. “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street” is another “Funny How Time Slips Away” song. I think I prefer the version of “River Boy” on track 20. Willie’s vocals are more front and center in the version on track 20. The overdubbed version puts Willie’s voice in the background and brings the strings up front. The overdubbed version of “At the Bottom” nixes the flute that was on track 18, which is a plus. Willie’s always better at the bottom. “Better at the Bottom” could be his motto. You have nothing to fear when you’ve already gone to the dogs. Where else can you go? The overdubbed version of “I Hope So” tones the back-up singers way down to a faint whisper. “Happiness is sometimes hard for hearts to cling to” indeed. “You say your heart will never break.” Famous last words. Imagine an unbreakable heart. Would we want one if we could have one?

The Monument Recordings (1964)

According to Graeme Thomson, Willie left Liberty Records in 1964 and recorded two sessions with Monument. Like the Pamper demos and recordings, these songs do not show up on the major compilations that I have found except for one song: “I Never Cared for You,” which shows up on The Essential Willie Nelson (Disc One). Thomson calls this Willie’s “most distinctive and successful recording of the entire 60s” (page 64). If this is true, why does no one include it in their compilations? And what of the rest of the Monument recordings? Fred Foster produced a session on July 6, 1964. Willie recorded three songs. One of which was “”(There’ll Be) Someone Waiting For You.” I haven’t found a recording of this yet. Three weeks later, Foster produced another session with a much smaller band and fewer bells and whistles. “I Never Cared For You” was recorded in that session, but I have no idea what other recordings were made at that time. Seems like someone needs to release these babies or tell me where I can find them.

It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963 [Disc 2]

12/22/2010

All of the songs on this disc can also be found on the two-disc compilation titled Willie Nelson: The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings (Plus More). The mixing or re-mixing is probably different, but I would have to do a more careful side-by-side listen to see which is better. Both compilations come with excellent liner notes, but it is a bit confusing because the roughly 60 songs are sequenced in a very different order in each collection. Someday I’ll have to sit down and compare the liner notes and try to discern the rhyme or reason for the way the two compilations have arranged essentially the same material. I’m also not sure why the Pamper Recordings, that only seem to be on Crazy: The Demo Sessions, don’t appear on either of these collections. Perhaps they couldn’t get the permissions, or perhaps their status as demos set them apart from these other “official” recordings. Someday the ultimate Willie Box Set will be released on ITUNES like the Beatles catalog, but to much less fanfare, and it will be MUCH bigger. It took Willie 15 albums just to get warmed up and figure out who the heck he was.

See my blogs on The Early Years for more details on these recordings, but I’ll just hit a few highlights this time through. I did finally read through the extensive liner notes (a book, really) from It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’, and the Bear Family seems to group their comments by recording sessions and dates.

I’m also working my way through Graeme Thomson’s Willie Nelson: The Outlaw, so I’ll open with a quotation he attributes to Willie:

“I had to stop thinking that I had a home” (page 8).

For Willie, from the very beginning, every part seems to be “the part where I cry.” In fact, life is the part where we cry. A Buddhist view. “Touch me and you’ll know how you’d feel with the blues.” Yet you can’t touch Willie. He won’t let you. To touch the untouchable. To touch the essence of loss and emptiness. Like touching a black hole. Maybe the “Record Man” can touch what can’t be touched in any other way. Is that what art and radio does for all of us? Fills the empty air between lost souls? In “Go Away,” Willie pushes away the very thing he longs for in “Mr. Record Man.” Barking to get out, barking to get in. “I feel much better when you’re gone.” I feel much better when I feel bad. When I’m with you, I miss missing you. Now there’s a song Willie should sing. “I Miss Missing You.” “The Waiting Time” produces all the art there ever was. The hurting time, the parting time. The arting time. Art fills the mundane parts of life, which are about 90% of the time, like the dark matter in the universe. Only 10% is visible matter. “Where My House Lives” describes Willie’s sentiments quoted at the start of this blog: “I had to stop thinking that I had a home.” So he started singing about home instead. You sing about what you can’t think about. Is that what art does? It allows you to do something with the things you can’t think about? “Country Willie” gets at the rural/urban tension, the town and gown. “How Long is Forever” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” may be Willie’s defining songs. Willie’s touchstones, his madeleines. “Three Days” are the three parts where Willie cries, at the beginning, middle, and end. I guess I am just connecting the dots between his songs. Weaving together his albums like panels into a larger quilt. He has so many albums, that it is hard (even, perhaps especially, for him, I suspect) to see the forest for the trees. Willie doesn’t yodel very often, but he does a little Hank Williams on this recording. He sounds like he’s trying to sound like someone else, which he rarely does. The irony of syrupy doo-wop singers crooning in the background of a song called “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” strikes me anew upon this listen. Are these supposed to be the heavenly choir of angels singing as he dies of a heartbreak? George Jones’s voice was hoppy enough to cut through this syrup (like a double IPA) and still sound sad, but Willie’s not sad enough. “One Step Beyond” stands out this time. Not sure why. “Just one step beyond caring anymore.” One step beyond the blues. One step ahead of suffering. Can we really outrun pain? Willie isn’t really a Buddhist, though, because he doesn’t want to escape this life to escape suffering, he just wants to outrun it, stay one step ahead, so he can still enjoy the thrill of the chase. Like his first wife throwing pots at his head. “Undo the Right” is a Manichean, yin-yang kind of song. Country music is about finding the pain, finding the catch in the throat, in the note, that will perfectly reflect, embody the physical pain. Same with the blues. Towards the end of “Undo the Right” you hear Willie searching for that inflection, that phrasing that will somehow be more honest, more true. “Crazy” is track 13 on this disc. A bit ironic since it has been the luckiest song Willie ever wrote. The background singers cheapen the song, but Willie’s phrasing still intrigues on this classic recording. It’s crazy to try to love in a fleeting, ephemeral world. Crazy to put down roots, crazy to long for something lasting. Like running up the down escalator. Why do we do it? This string of recordings—Crazy, Funny, Hello Walls—is on a half dozen compilations. The liner notes indicate that Willie recorded his most famous stretch of songs in a short burst of creativity which emerged from a uniquely poignant, painful time in his life. And he has spent the next 50 or so years re-working and re-interpreting this same material. The way the monsters in Monsters, Inc. lived off the canned screams of children, Willie has bottled some pain from 1960 and made it last for 50 years, like a batch of yeast for friendship bread past down through the generations. Willie hits the word “time” with a wah-wah pedal in his voice: tie-ai-ime. Then he personifies everything, the pathetic fallacy that all of nature feels his pain. This only happens when life hits us so intensely, so for Willie it was 1960 or so. It seems sappy and sentimental to folks who aren’t in the throes of it, and yet we buy it up and listen to it on lonely drives in the car across the desolate plains of our empty lives. Okay, that’s spreading it a bit thick, but I know what I mean. “Wake Me When It’s Over” begs to be re-mixed without the back-up vocals. To desire to sleep through the pain of life is to desire to sleep through life itself. Life is the pain. Life without pain is not life. It is Brave New World, not Hamlet or Keats, who are banned in utopia. Soma is the only way to avoid pain, which is what marijuana is to Willie, I guess. Then we have a string of duets with Willie’s second wife, Shirley Collie, the only person who could ever truly sing harmony with Willie. I’ve listened to pretty much everything he’s ever recorded multiple times, so I feel pretty confident in asserting that no one has ever been able to follow Willie’s phrasing step for step. All duet partners end up singing polyphonically with Willie, an interesting but distinct vocal line weaving in and out of Willie’s, but not a true homophonic duet. She may be the only person who could ever play Garfunkel to Willie’s Simon. But like Simon, Willie had to ditch his Garfunkel and move on. “Our Chain of Love” cannot last long indeed. I’d like to hear Willie try “Is This My Destiny” again. “The grave would be escape for me from this my destiny.” “Willingly” gets at Willie’s will. The role of free will in the face of fate. Does it matter what we will if time slips away regardless? I like how the Bear Family puts all four duets with Shirley Collie next to each other. These are unique recordings in Willie’s oeuvre, and they deserve special attention. He doesn’t sing like this anywhere else. I’m not sure he ever really tries to sing with someone else the way he tries to sing with Shirley. “There Goes a Man” shows Willie’s ability to empathize, to detach from himself and see the other side, to see “both sides now.” It’s a maddening, paralyzing, Hamlet-like empathy. It’s Keats’ negative capability. “There’s Gonna Be Love” raises the question, is Willie Martin or Candide? Maybe both. Maybe we are all both. Maybe that’s the human condition, that we can’t pick one or the other, yet we perpetually yearn to do so. “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street to Say Goodbye” is “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “How Long is Forever This Time” all wrapped into one. The guitar work on this second version of “How long is Forever” stands out. And Willie holds the space after “forever” for what seems like forever. This song could be a textbook for how Willie works. How he uses his phrasing to build tension. He doesn’t break meter, but he bends it almost to the breaking point. And listeners break a sweat feeling that he just might break it this time. It takes a certain skill, a certain discipline to appreciate Willie’s vocals on these recordings. Despite the dreadful setting, he’s doing interesting things with his phrasing at every turn. “Take My Word” could be an up-tempo crowd pleaser today if Willie wanted to dust it off and breath some new life into it. Willie stretches the spaces in “The Last Letter” to the last possible moment. I’m a sucker for this soulful, bluesy rendition of “Home Motel.” This could be another funky crowd-pleaser with the right band behind it. Version two of “Take My Word” blows the other out of the water speed-wise. Could be one of Willie’s fastest tunes. Begs to be re-done.

So maybe each time I listen to the same recordings and try to capture them, it’s like a photograph of the same object at a different time of day, in different weather. You see something different each time. Or like different takes of the same song. Some are better than others. Maybe it’s good to take several stabs. Stabs seems especially apt. Stabs at the right word to pin down the feeling, because words can never truly pin down feelings like butterflies behind glass. Each word is an essay, an attempt.

And maybe non-fiction is writing with training wheels. Or a coloring book. You have the content, the outline, so all you have to do is fill it in, color it. But the pressure of pure invention from a blank page, which is too overwhelming for all but the poet or novelist, is somewhat lessened for the historian or nonfiction writer. There is still room for creativity and invention, the same way Willie can be creative and inventive while interpreting other people’s songs just as easily as he can with his own. But it doesn’t have to be written from the same place of desperation.

Willie on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland (2002)

12/21/2010

Willie on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland (2002)

I have to find a way to get a copy of this show. Not sure why Willie hasn’t released this as a CD or a download. Right now you can stream it here:

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/24/131571288/willie-nelson-on-piano-jazz

I just heard the show for the first time a few weeks ago, but it was originally recorded in 2002. Willie plays with Marian and Jackie King. Somehow I missed Willie’s recording with Jackie King called “The Gypsy.” I just ordered it today, so I’ll be reviewing it soon. Jackie says during the interview that this album is recorded on his label, Indigo Moon. Apparently this show was in conjunction with the release of this album.

Willie opens with “Heart of a Clown.” Then he plays “The Gypsy.” I have been playing this show over and over and over. It ranks right up there with Stardust in my mind. Marian is the perfect partner for Willie. He should do an album with her. She seems to be a match for his quirky phrasing. Willie tells a great anecdote about singing Bob Wills’ classic tune “San Antonio Rose” with Bob Wills, but when Willie sang it, Bob couldn’t jump in with his usual “ah-ha” because Willie would still be singing. When Willie takes someone else’s song, he makes it his own, so much so that the author himself cannot sing it with him. Then Willie does a song from Milk Cow Blues, which he says is his first true blues album. Willie says he heard “Milk Cow Blues” from Bob Wills and the Texas Cowboys. Willie says he didn’t even know it was blues. Willie was pre-genres. He played gospel and blues and country and jazz and pop before he knew what they were, which is why he seems to defy categories to this day. The first song Willie ever learned was “Amazing Grace” and “Just as I Am.” Fiddle player Johnny Gimble told Willie there are only two songs: “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the blues. Willie plays “Rainy Day Blues” next. Willie’s vocals are as good as they get. 2002 is a vintage year for Willie’s vocals. So many of my favorite Willie albums come from about 1998-2002. Willie live in a radio studio with just a piano and a guitar is about as perfect a setting for his vocals as you can find. Willie and Marian talk about Django Reinhardt. Johnny Gimble gave Willie a Django record when Willie was 20 years old. Willie realized at that time that Bob Wills and Willie’s dad had been influenced by Django. Marian, of course, knew Django. She played with him in Paris during the liberation after World War II. So they go into “Nuages,” a Django tune. Jackie’s solo on “Nuages” is brilliant, and Willie and Marian work in around him with piano and acoustic guitar. From this they go into “All of Me.” Jackie and Marian have lovely solos on this song. Willie chuckles during Jackie’s and then tells Marian to “play it.” And she does. Willie follows them with a solo of his own on Trigger while the others comp. The line “You took the part that once was my heart so why not take all of me” reminds me of the lyrics for “Half a Man.” I could add this to my ideas for Willie albums based on recurring themes. One is houses, mansions, homes. Another is body parts. Both are examples of incarnation, how the physical, the carnal, the tangible strives to capture, to literally “embody,” the ineffable, the spiritual, the transcendent. Art is always a grasping for this impossible task. Always a beautiful failure. “I can’t stop smiling,” Mariane says after this song, and I find myself smiling, too. Marian asks Willie, “Who were your many influences on guitar?” He replies, “Chet Atkins, Grady Martin, Hank Garland, Johnny Smith.” Next they play “Stardust.” A bass player, Gary Mezzerape, is also accompanying Jackie, Willie, and Marian, so we have a quartet in the studio for this recording. “My consolation is in the stardust of a song.” Willie’s music is a consolation, like Alan Gurganus’ short story “Reassurance,” about Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse during the civil war. “The memory of love’s refrain.” It’s Proust all over again. Our memory is a refrain. Marian says after this song that, “Nobody should try to do that.” Nobody should try to play and sing like Willie. Don’t try this at home, kids. Jackie apparently wrote the chords for “The Great Divide,” and Willie put words to it. They sing this, spare as a Cormac McCarthy landscape. I’m reading the novels of McCarthy now, starting with the border trilogy, and it seems that the bleak landscape resonates with Willie’s music. A boy traveling alone with a wolf across the border to Mexico. Willie’s music, too, crosses the borders of culture and genre. I’ve probably listened to this show a dozen times now, and I think it may rank as one of Willie’s untenable top ten performances. “The Great Divide” album came out in 2002 as well. As many times as I have heard this song, it’s crazy, but this version of “Crazy” just gave me the chills. Marian says on the webpage that Willie was so into this session that he invited Marian to be his special guest at Irving Plaza that night, and they played several duets. Only Willie could invite some 80-year-old lady on stage and maintain his macho cowboy image. Who else could sing the testosterone-infused “Beer for My Horses” with Toby Keith and then play a tender jazz ballad with Marian McPartland? And who else could see no contradiction? Willie is the ultimate in negative capability. Willie and Marian seem to laugh together more than any other guests I have heard on her show. They seem to be soul mates. It is also interesting how Willie seems to be serving as the hub for all of my interests: Proust, Cormac McCarthy, Marian McPartland, Walt Whitman, and neuroscience. They end with the Proustian “They’ll Never Be Another You.” There will never be another Daisy or Odette who can live up to the memory the likes of Willie, Fitzgerald, and Proust can conjure with their art and their imaginations. This may be my favorite from the entire set. I can’t believe Willie just walks into the studio and throws off a performance like this during the day and then goes on to play a show that night. Such causal, offhand brilliance. Like nature itself.

It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963

It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963

The late 1954/early 1955 version of “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song” appears here and on the “One Hell of a Ride” compilation. I prefer the 2007 version that also appears on “One Hell of a Ride,” but it makes me want to hear Willie do a new version of “Lumberjack.” This 1954 version of “No Place for Me” also appears on “The Classic and Unreleased Collection” and “One Hell of a Ride,” but only the Bear Family has tracked down the three alternate takes. Alternate take #1 was recorded in Portland, Oregon in 1957, and it features Willie’s vocals much more prominently. The slower pace of this version makes it my favorite of the four. Sounds like Hank Williams. The primary version of “Lumberjack” also appears on the “Classic and Unreleased Collection,” but the Bear Family has found two alternate takes from the 1957 sessions, and alternate take #1 is by far the best of the three. 1959’s single “Man with the Blues” also appears on “Nite Life” and “One Hell of a Ride,” but my favorite version may be on 2010’s “Country Music.” “The Storm Has Just Begun” (1959) suffers from some syrupy back-up singers, but it continues Willie’s Hank Williams style. I think this same version appears on “The Ghost (part 3),” but the mix on this compilation is far superior. The shorter 1955 version is the best version, but this is another song Willie needs to record again. “What a Way to Live” (1960) is a little more Sinatra than Hank. This version also appears on “The Ghost (part 3)” and “Nite Life,” but the version on “Me and the Drummer” (1998) is my favorite. The mix on the Bear Family version is the best of the 1960 versions. This is the only place I have ever seen “Misery Mansion” (1960). It fits into Willie’s collection of house songs. He could fill an album with songs about houses, mansions, and motels. He is obsessed with home, though (perhaps because) he is so rarely there. The 1960 version of “Nite Life” appears on half a dozen compilations, but this is the only one that has an alternate take. Most times it appears as “Night Life,” but here it is “Nite Life.” “Rainy Day Blues” also appears everywhere, but only here with both takes, the first of which is the better, though the slower, jazzier alternate take grows on you. The “Attention Songwriters” ad promo gives a nice sense of Willie’s voice and accent in 1960.

It's Been Rough and Rocky Travelin': The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963

Sadly, it’s been a month since I’ve blogged, but I have a very good reason to resume today. I just received my birthday present to myself: the amazing Bear Family Records 3-cd compilation of Willie’s earliest recordings. It wasn’t cheap ($135 new on Amazon), but it was worth it. I have only listened to the first few songs on disc one, but the LP-sized booklet with liner notes contains the most detailed info I have seen about Willie’s earliest recordings. It appears to contain pictures of every vinyl single and LP he recorded between 1954-1963. I have heard some of these recordings before (on The Complete Ghost, The Complete Liberty Recordings, and various other compilations), but this may have some alternate takes (for example for songs like “Lumberjack”) that aren’t available elsewhere. Without even listening to the rest of the cds in this set I can tell that my Christmas present to myself will be Bear Family Records’ 8-cd set “Nashville Was the Roughest.” If the pictures and liner notes are anything like this box set, it will be well worth the steep price tag (I think it is closer to $175 on Amazon). I’ll have more info soon as I listen to these discs and read the liner notes.

Just One Love (1995)--take 2

“Just” is another word like “always.” It’s funny how time slips away and how just one love turns into two and three and four before you know it. “Just one” sounds so limited and antithetical to the freedom of the road. I’m noticing this time around that this album has a darker tinge to it. Notice the key words from the song titles: night, cold, forgotten, sin, walls, smoke, cold, retreat. Willie sings the two Floyd Tillman songs solo (tracks 2 and 3). “Better Left Forgotten” is the most Proustian song on the album. “Why, oh, why, won’t my mind let go…your memory will never set me free.” Our memories hold us hostage, captive. The tension between the captive and the fugitive haunts Willie and Proust. The tension between the forgotten and the forgetter. “It’s a Sin” is another version of “Better Left Forgotten”: “It’s a sin to keep this memory of you when silence proves that you’ve forgotten me.” “Four Walls” is another version of “Hello Walls.” Another house song, another pathetic fallacy, another personification song. It’s also another “she’s gone” song. Willie’s been left again. Willie’s always being left and always leaving, too. He leaves even as he’s being left. It’s the quantum physics of love, the expanding particles in the universe, speeding toward and away at the same time with equal force. I’d like to hear Willie sing “I Just Drove By” by himself. Proust took many of these same drives, these same walks down memory lane. Drive-by memories. “I wonder if love is the way it was back then.” It never is. This version of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” comes 20 years after the original on Red Headed Stranger. This makes me want to hear Willie re-do that entire album, maybe live in concert.

What a Wonderful World (1988)--take 2

I’m afraid I need to stand by my January blog on this one. “Spanish Eyes” with Julio Iglesias is no “To All the Girls I Loved Before,” but the lyrics have richer associations for me this time around. “Please don’t cry. This is just adios and not goodbye. Soon I’ll return…Say you and your Spanish eyes will wait for me.” So many of Willie’s themes are present here: eyes, tears, waiting, goodbye. This song harkens back to “Silver Wings” and “If I Could Only Fly.” I appreciate hearing Julio sing in Spanish. It lets you understand better what Willie owes to the flamenco and mariachi traditions. Romanticism infuses this album. You have exotic Spanish eyes, moons, enchanted evenings, south of the border, buttermilk sky, Moulin Rouge, and twilight. All of these suggest the exotic, the romantic, the other. In “Moon River” Willie sings of “drifters off to see the world.” He sings of “heartbreak” and his “Huckleberry friend,” evoking Mark Twain and the Mississippi: Jim and Huck, lighting out for the territory, chasing “the same rainbows.” A slave and a freeman chasing the same rainbows? How can that be? How can they be missing the same things, longing for the same things? Mickey’s harmonica accentuates the longing of the river that both Jim and Huck share. In “Some Enchanted Evening” Willie imagines a stranger appearing, a ghost of a memory returning, haunting, laughing. “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” When she calls you “Fly to her side and make her your own,” and “Once you have found her, never let her go.” Never hit the road and leave her behind, never fly away. Hmmm. Willie thinks to himself: “What a Wonderful World.” Wonderful in his mind. As Hamlet says: “Thinking makes it so.” “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” is where Willie fell in love with stars above. His “thoughts stray south of the border.” “She smiled as she whispered manana, never dreaming that we were parting, and I lied as I whispered manana, for our tomorrow never came.” So in the night we smile and lie about tomorrow, about morning. Why is that? Manana could be the title of many of Willie’s works. Three days that give us trouble: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In “Ole Buttermilk Sky” Willie is “happy as a Christmas tree” going to the one he loves. He is looking to the moon again. Mooning, mellow and bright. In “The Song from Moulin Rouge” Willie is worrying and wondering again: “Whenever we kiss, I worry and wonder: your lips may be here, but where is your heart? It’s always like this.” Willie’s always worrying or carefree. How is it that he can be both worried and worry free, a “worried man” without a care in the world? In “To Each His Own” Willie insists “my own is you.” In other words, another person can be more you than yourself. Paradoxically, “To Each His Own” doesn’t mean we are all different, it means we are inseparable, we are one. Our uniqueness, our difference is what binds us. “Twilight Time” hits the themes of darkness and of time. In “Deepening shadows” and “deep in the dark” “your kiss will fill me.” Willie prays for the dark. It is in the dark that he can call forth memories and dreams. What is the Red Headed Stranger doing singing “Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive”? It’s all about our attitude. In the darkness we can be light, we can stay positive. “Thinking makes it so.” In the end the crying cowboy has always been a man of the mind, cerebral, ruminative. His mind either worries him to death or helps him stay positive. Like Hamlet he alternates between both extremes of human reason.

Seashores of Old Mexico (1987)—take 2

Merle’s title track, like the album and Willie’s career and style in general, has “no destination in mind.” There’s that obsession with mind again. What would it mean to have the destination in your mind? “The border meant freedom, a new life, and romance, and that’s why we thought we should go. Start our lives over on the seashores of old Mexico.” Like Proust going to Venice. The temptation, the allure, the seduction of starting fresh and new and clean. “Things will blow over on the seashores of old Mexico” the way they blow over on the road, the way they blow past you. Merle’s “Without You On My Side” reminds me of several of Willie’s songs where he says he needs a woman by his side to keep the memories and the past at bay. It seems that things don’t just blow over on the seashores of old Mexico or on the road. “The bad dreams wouldn’t leave me, and it would all start to grieve me” without a woman on my side. “When Times Were Good” remains my favorite song on the album and one of my very favorite Willie recordings. This song and the final pages of the sixth volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” both deal with resurrecting impressions from the past and trying to give them permanence. Willie, Hag, and Proust conclude that art is the only way to do that, and they resolve to “write one for the memory.” Merle’s “Jimmy the Broom” describes a man who “came to the city to forget a woman…[but] not even the havoc of the nightlife of Reno could keep her memory away, so he turned to the bottle, and somehow it deafened her call, but Jimmy the Broom never lived to be free of it all.” Another man fighting away memories, trying to keep them at bay, drowning them out with booze. But nothing completely frees a man of these memories. We’re either in search of lost time or trying to escape from it, trying to lose it. Either way we lose. Willie sings “Yesterday” on Live Country Music Concert (1966), and I discuss the lyrics in that blog from May. Twenty years later he sings it again. In 1966 he wasn’t half the man he used to be, so in 1987 he must be one fourth of the man he used to be. The notion that “Yesterday came suddenly” is a striking one. Normally we think of our kids growing up too fast and time flying by. You blink and they’re grown. And yet here, the past comes back suddenly, like those precious memories that return to Proust unbidden of the Madeleine soaked in tea. So the future rushes up to meet us, but the past rushes to us from the other side as well. And we get caught in the undertow, in the conflicting gravitational forces of time (centripetal and centrifugal). If we could only fly, if we only knew “which way to turn and go.” We “feel so good” and then we “feel so bad.” We could “bid this place goodbye.” Not sure how flying would help us avoid loneliness. “Tell me things get better somewhere up the way. Just dismal thinking on a dismal day. Sad songs for us to bear.” If we could only fly, we could flit back and forth between the road and home, we could commute between the foreign and the familiar. We could have the best of both worlds. And if we could fly fast enough, faster than the speed of light, we could outrun time and loneliness. Merle’s “Shotgun and a Pistol” just tells a good story. In “Love Makes a Fool of Us All” “The one that he’s tied to is the one that he’s lied to.” Love makes liars, cheaters, beggars of us all. It’s funny that way. It makes us say things like always and forever. It drives people like Willie and Hag and Proust to distraction. And all we can say is “just look at us now.” Look at what love’s done to us. “Why Do I Have to Choose” is the only Willie-penned song on the album. Willie wants to have it both ways, to have the road and his home, too. Why should he have to choose between the two conflicting desires? Why can’t he have both? “The love is not the same, but either love is true.” Willie wants to be true to everyone. Merle’s “Silver Wings” tries to end the album on an upbeat note (figuratively and literally). “Don’t leave me, I cry. Don’t take that airplane ride.” It’s a “she’s gone” song, but an upbeat one. Ironically, he sang earlier “If I Could Only Fly,” and here he laments that his woman can fly on silver wings, but she’s flying in the wrong direction. So flight can cut both ways. Overall this is a terribly melancholy and sad album, but it’s tender, soothing. It’s hard to know exactly how to take it. “You locked me out of your mind.” Willie doesn’t like people to lock him out of their mind because he keeps his mind open, and people are always on his mind. Like Proust he remains always open to impressions from the past that might yield new sensations.

The Troublemaker (1976)—take 2

In “Uncloudy Day” Willie sings of “A home far away…where no storm cloud arrives.” In one way or another, Willie is always singing about home. How great it is, how far away it is, how unattainable, how much he longs for it even (and especially) when he runs away from it. Interestingly, Willie seems to have arrived, in 2010, at that “uncloudy” state of unfettered happiness. And yet, one has to wonder how this squares with Willie’s early angsty honky tonk outlaw songs. The title of this album is “Troublemaker,” and yet every song is about the antithesis of trouble, the redemption of trouble. We begin with an “uncloudy day,” and then look to heaven in “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” looking forward, with hope, to the future bliss. This is not looking for bliss and ultimate contentment in the present (which Willie claims to subscribe to at other times—see Outlaw bio) or to the past (where he has often found solace in local memories that linger). From “yonder” to “Whispering Hope” to a “Fountain” of hope to an “unbroken” circle. Uncloudy days and unbroken circles for troublemakers and outlaws. Then a “garden”, a place “Where the soul never dies,” the “sweet bye and bye,” a place to “gather” (as opposed to scattering like outlaws, who by definition head out and do not gather and come together; if they did that, they would be in-laws), “precious memories,” and lastly “amazing grace.” Of course, none of these songs are written by Willie, so he may be constitutionally unable to sustain such unfettered optimism and bliss in an album of his own songs. He has to sing other people’s songs when he seeks this kind of contentment. I wonder what this tells us. “Whispering Hope” impressed me more this time around. “Wait till the darkness is over.” It has a more melancholy optimism. A more honest, realistic hope grounded in genuine struggle and suffering and pain. “Hope is an anchor,” but it is an anchor in a stormy sea. Hope does not calm the seas and clear the skies. It calms your mind and spirit amidst the still very real storms. I wonder if “Redeeming love” really has been Willie’s “theme.” To what degree has he sung “thy power to save”? I really don’t know. I think he has and he hasn’t. “Do you love the hymns they taught you, or are songs of earth your choice?” Now that’s a question to put to Willie’s whole career. “Songs of Earth.” He seems to sing of both with equal vigor. His voice and his lyrics, his life and his manner, are nothing if not earthy. But what of his spiritual side? Can he be both earthy and ethereal? Maybe earthereal? The spare solo title track maintains its status as the best song on this album. “In the Garden” has that more plaintive feel of “Whispering Hope.” It isn’t a shouting hope, but a muted, mournful hope. A hope emerging out of brokenness, not out of triumphant confidence. A hope that springs out of need and dependence. A hope responding to grace. The hope of the truly prodigal son, of the truly repentant. Mickey’s harmonica comes into its own on this nostalgic track. It’s hard to imagine the crying cowboy in a place where there are no “sad farewells” or “tear-dimmed eyes.” No opportunities to cry, no place for time to slip away to. Does this mean nothing is funny or wry in the sky, in the place “where the soul never dies”? “Sweet Bye & Bye” slows it down again. “We shall sing on that beautiful shore the melodious songs of the blessed, and our spirits shall sorrow no more, not a sigh for the blessings of rest.” So does this mean still is indeed still moving? It sounds like still won’t be still moving, and we won’t miss all that moving. We won’t miss the road when we reach the shore. When we “gather at the river,” the shore, the uncloudy day, the unbroken circle, the fountain, the roll call up yonder, we won’t miss all our moving. Willie seems to be asking: How will we feel when our “pilgrimages cease”? “Precious Memories” lingers as one of my two favorite songs on this album. At 7:37, this song lingers literally. “Old home scenes of [his] childhood” race across the “The lonely years,” outrunning even the wheels of the bus on the road. “In the stillness of the midnight, precious sacred scenes unfold” that no amount of running away can prevent. The origami of the mind, once folded, the creases can never be completely removed. “Old times singing…glad times bringing.” This stillness of the midnight, this flooding of memories, the preciousness and sacredness of time and mind and memory, is all very Proustian. Notice how midnight, darkness, is the time of perfect stillness. How could we get such stillness in the light? Don’t we need the darkness in some way? What happens if we completely block it out? If we close our eyes to the darkness? The final four live recordings from 1974 at the Texas Opry House are as good as anything Willie has done. Great fiddle and harmonica. Jazzy and trippy like all the other songs from this concert. 1974 may be one of Willie’s best vintages for musicians, for his voice, for everything about him musically. I love the way these gospel tunes meander like his melancholy medley of Funny/Crazy/Nite Life. There’s just a touch more hope and optimism to these gospel tunes, and great energy in the crowd.

San Antonio Rose (1980)—take 2

7/24/2010

There’s only one Willie-penned song on this duet album with Willie’s mentor Ray Price. In Ray Price’s own “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)” the two outlaws pledge undying love and loyalty, unconditional love. In so many of their songs they’re either boasting of their ability to love this way, or lamenting their inability to do so. I’d like to see Willie sing Harlan Howard’s “I Fall to Pieces” more often. A slow and sparse 2010 version could be even more powerful than this solid 1980 rendition. “Time only adds to the flame.” So many of Willie’s songs are about pieces, which is what time is and does. It breaks life up into pieces, sections, increments. It divides, parcels mortality. Willie’s “lonely all the time” in “Crazy Arms.” It’s another song about the mind being willing but the body being weak. The arms want what they want. “They reach to hold somebody new,” but the “troubled mind” won’t go along. The disconnect between mind and body provides much fodder for Willie’s songwriting. In “Release Me” Willie declares, “I don’t love you anymore.” He begs his lover to release him so he can “love again.” He wants out of his unconditional, “always” commitment from the previous songs. He wants a loophole to allow him to pursue warm lips to replace the ones that have turned cold. “Release Me” is time begging to slip away. It’s funny how Willie asks to be released when he lamented his lover asking for the same thing in so many other songs. You’d think he would get tired of hurting lovers by asking to be released from his commitments, but it sounds like humans in general never get tired of hurting each other. Even, and perhaps especially, when they know how it feels, when it’s been done to them before. Gimble’s fiddle and Raphael’s harmonica put some extra hurt into this song. I’d like to hear Willie do this song more often, though George Jones does it best. “This Cold War with You” basically states “fish or cut bait.” We’re either in or out, but let’s quit debating and hemming and hawing. But that’s what real love is: a constant negotiation. Willie wants a definitive love, a platonic, ideal love. True or false, “do right” or “we’re through,” there’s no in-between. Funny how the only Willie-penned song on the album, “Funny How Time Slips Away,” is still my favorite. It stands out like Willie’s voice, like Mickey’s harmonica, like Gimble’s fiddle. This version is growing on me, moving up the ranks of the numerous

Clean Shirt (1991)—take 2

7/23/2010

Here’s another album without a single Willie-penned tune. It opens with Waylon’s “If I Can Find a Clean Shirt.” “Come on now, Willie, don’t look at me that way…no I ain’t goin’ down to the border tonight, drinkin’ tequila and takin’ chances with our life.” Waylon is trying not to let Willie talk him into a wild adventure. Then Waylon thinks, “On second thought, if I can find a clean shirt I might.” It’s those second thoughts that can sometimes get you in trouble. Not thinking before you act and thinking too much are two different ways to get into trouble. Sometimes your first thought is your best thought. See Hamlet. Look before you leap. He who hesitates is lost. “I Could Write a Book About You” picks up on an idea raised in the first song. Earlier Waylon mentioned how he knew Willie like a paperback book, one which he had read carefully and knew every page. Here, both Waylon and Willie insist that they could write a book about each other, but both insist “That’s not how I remember it.” Though they claim, “I know you like a brother,” they disagree about their memories. They saw it differently though they were both there. In the end they agree not to write the book after all. Interesting that Max Barnes wrote half the songs on this album. Troy Seals wrote several as well. I think they also wrote several for Randy Travis around this time. “Old Age and Treachery” always overcomes “youth and skill.” They’ll try almost anything: “What Waylon won’t Willie will.” These songs all seem to be a conversation between Waylon and Willie. “Two Old Sidewinders” is no exception. “That ain’t no hill for a couple of climbers.” Willie and Waylon seem to be lamenting being over the hill. Maybe they are trying to side-step time. “Tryin’ to Outrun the Wind” is like tryin’ to side-step time. “Her memory turns over and over again.” Why do memories do that? “He’s like an old stallion longing for freedom, trying to out-run the wind.” Who is? Willie? How is a guy who has fooled around chasing lots of women but now remembers a more perfect woman and a more perfect love like a stallion longing for freedom? Sounds more like a free stallion longing to be penned. Or maybe it’s a song about the tyranny of freedom. “The dreams all ended too soon” in “The Good Ol’ Nights.” This is a song about picking and choosing your memories. Willie asserts control over his own past, his own memories, his own time. He remembers what he wants to. “Guitars That Won’t Stay in Tune” follows the previous song that mentioned guitars and women that were both in tune. Both songs also mention Cadillacs. In the last song Waylon said he didn’t care about them because he never owned one. Here he worries about making payments on one. Actually both Willie and Waylon are saying they don’t like payments on a caddy or guitars that won’t stay in tune. In “The Makin’s of a Song” Willie sings, “When you start to feel at home out on the highway you’re damn sure qualified to sing the blues.” So feeling at home on the road is the blues. That’s a puzzle and a paradox. Because Willie sings in the next song: “I been on the road most all of my life…in search of some pleasures and treasures and things…whatever pleased me the most.” Yet “Home is where the heart is…my heart is there in the middle of Texas beside the old Alamo.” “Put Me on a Train Back to Texas” seems to be about returning to the roots you have tried to run away from all your life. No different than the Dixie Chicks on “Long Time Gone.” Country music is always about leaving home and longing for it at the same time. It’s like the Fragile X handshake in that way. Wanting so badly to leave and stay at the same time. “Rocks From Rolling Stones” is about the twin longing for roots and rootlessness. For freedom and form. And if you “can’t make a rock from a rolling stone,” why do we keep trying. “There’s a river of freedom runnin’ through your veins.” We want something foreign and familiar, new and old, and we want it at the same time, like sweet and sour. We want to break free from the past and return to it with equal vigor. The centripetal and centrifugal pulls of the past and memory. The gravity and tides, the moons of memory.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow (1985)—take 2

7/22/2010

I didn’t comment on any of the lyrics in my January blog, so I’ll focus on those this time. I also notice this time around that this is one of the few albums with no Willie-penned songs.

In the opening track, “Mona Lisa,” Willie asks, “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa, or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?” A poignant question that could apply to much of Willie’s work. The mystery, the paradox of that Mona Lisa smile puzzles Willie as it has puzzled Proust and every other artist who wrestles with the psychology of love. Freddie Powers and Willie take turns singing “Exactly Like You.” “Now I know why momma taught me to be true; she meant me for someone exactly like you.” Interestingly, Willie insists in this song that his love is better than the movies: “No one does those love scenes exactly like you.” This runs counter to many of Willie’s songs which depict women who fail to live up to the platonic, Hollywood ideals. Willie asks why he should spend money on picture shows (on art or music or literature) that depict ideal love when he has waited and found that perfect love in the flesh. “Who’s Sorry Now” has Willie crying again. His heart is “aching for breaking every vow.” Being true isn’t as easy as he made it sound in “Exactly Like You.” In “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” Willie swears he loves her: “honest I do.” But he’s afraid that someday she’ll leave him. All his life depends on her, but he knows he dreams dreams of her in vain. This whole notion of confessing, of telling truth, of lying, of leaving, of pledging, promising, vowing. The truth gets so tied up in love and emotion. The legality and logic of relationships. “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon” reverts back to an optimistic, hopeful view of love. The fiddle work on this album ranks up there with the best in Willie’s repertoire. Johnny Gimble and Paul Buskirk really go at it on the strings. The title track, “Over the Rainbow,” may be my favorite track

Pancho and Lefty (1983)—take 2

7/21/2010

Re-listened to this on the drive to Detroit yesterday and again today in the hotel room before the International Fragile X conference. I commented on every song in my January blog, but this time I notice this line: “Lefty, he can’t sing the blues all day like he used to.” I wonder why Lefty can’t sing the blues anymore. What can make you so blue that you can’t even sing the blues? What can put you beyond the blues? I’m intrigued by the notion of police, federales, letting a criminal go “out of kindness.” What kind of sympathy or empathy is this? It’s almost a Les Mis moment. A moment of grace. They could have had him any day, but they let him go. This fits with Willie’s general attitude toward judgment (“Beer For My Horses” excepted). No fault, no blame. An outlaw is outside the law. He requires grace and mercy. I’ll be re-listening to “The Troublemaker” soon. What is it about outlaws and troublemakers that gets closer to the truth, closer to being fully human? Could it be their awareness of their own need of grace? Like the prodigal son? The transition from the adventurous “Pancho and Lefty” to “It’s My Lazy Day” is a startling one. I don’t think Pancho and Lefty ever took anything easy. Hag wants to go fishing, but he sings, “I got to thinkin’ it over,” and it turns out he is too lazy to fish. But even at his laziest, he has to think things over. In “My Mary” Hag is “dreamin’ those dreams again.” Hag is “dreamin’ of the hours [he] spent with Mary.” He is alone spending time with the past, spending time with memories. These are Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility.” In a way, you can experience them more deeply afterward, in tranquility, than you can live in person. And thus you can experience them more intensely in art. So the role of the artist is to capture emotion, distill it, frame it, so we can walk around it and see it whole, fully faceted. The artist does what our brains do at night, de-frag our thoughts. This is why we can practice a piano piece all day and never get it right, but when we wake up the next morning we can play it perfectly. Our brains work on it all night, cleaning out all the insignificant info from the day and clarifying the important, deeper connections which we can now see in fuller relief. “Half a Man” reminds me that many animals can let half of their brain sleep while the other stays awake. Maybe this is what Willie desires. A reptilian brain. Cry with one eye and sleep with the other. We could function more consistently this way without the vicissitudes of emotions slowing us down. But then again lizards don’t sing the blues and we’d have no country music and no Willie Nelson. The interesting implication of this song is that love dehumanizes us. It makes us less human. Destroys us. If “the low is always lower than the high” and the reasons to quit keep getting bigger each day, how come they don’t ever “outnumber all the reasons why”? “No Reason to Quit” suggests an answer. Willie has “no reason for livin’ right. And there’s no other way to forget.” So we’re back to memory again. He can change and sober up, but he can’t forget. “Still Water Runs the Deepest” suggests that Willie is the upright, dependable spouse who has been “done wrong.” The unwitting victim. The cheated upon, not the cheater. So he’s leaving. “Too long we’ve been together.” Not sure how this song relates to “Still is Still Moving.” “My Life’s Been a Pleasure” takes the direct opposite view. “You’ve proved your love is true…and I’ll still love you as I did in yesterday.” What evidence bears this out? Since when does our love today ever match our love from yesterday? Words like “still” and “always” are fraught with problems as so many of Willie’s songs have shown. In “All the Soft Places to Fall” Hag and Willie sing about how “These memories are fun to recall.” It’s safer to recall all these rowdy outlaw memories of “rocks and brambles” within the safe confines of a secure home life with clean sheets and a “safe place to fall.” Then Willie ends this album with three Willie standards: “Opportunity to Cry,” “Half a Man,” and “My Own Peculiar Way.” This isn’t one of my favorite versions of “Opportunity to Cry,” but I applaud the idea of a trippy, jazzy version. This version of “My Own Peculiar Way” may be the only five-star song on this album. It may even be my favorite version of this song. Certainly one of the most interesting. Willie again asserting that he will “always” love her, but in his own peculiar way, which is in his mind. She will always be on his mind. Don’t let anyone say that he has “ever been untrue.” Willie has never been untrue. Not sure what kind of definition of truth this is, but there is a sense in which this statement is true, in the same way that Willie sings in time, in a certain sense of time, a quantum, Willie-sense of time.

Waylon and Willie (1978)—take 2

Proust might have written “Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be writers.” Artists are notoriously unstable and reckless. Dangerous additions to the family. Again, I covered this album pretty thoroughly in my January blog, but this time around I notice the presence of time even more. “Time slips away till you die.” Waylon sings of “the future of the homesick and the brave.” And in “Pick Up the Tempo”: “Some people are saying that time will take care of people like me.” As I am reading the final volume of Proust’s six-volume “In Search of Lost Time,” I am seeing more and more connections to Willie’s lyrics. Willie is living too fast and he can’t last much longer. Proust lives too slowly, yet he, too, wastes away. We can die from living too fast or too slow. Why is it we don’t want to live in normal time, in 4-4 meter, in the present? Why must we swing life, living ahead of or behind the beat? Why do we always have to “pick up the tempo”? Proust could have written “If You Can Touch Her at All” about Albertine. “She can be worth the world if you can touch her at all.” But Albertine, like Daisy, remains untouchable, elusive. Waylon’’s “Lookin’ for a Feelin’” is written in a similar vein. “I’m lookin’ for a feelin’ that I once had with you…that I lost when I lost you.” Proust’s novel could have been titled “Lookin’ for a Feelin.’” The lovers “never seem to do.” That Platonic ideal of love always eludes Willie and Proust. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” is the only Willie standard on this album. This may be the slowest, lonesomest song on the album. Mickey’s harmonica accentuates its melancholy edge. Willie slows the whole album down right before he picks up the tempo with “I Can Get Off on You.” I just noticed Willie’s humming at the end of “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” He doesn’t do that on any other song I can think of. I guess “I Can Get Off On You” is the flip side of “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” It could be titled “I’m Supposed To Be Able to Get Off on You.” Still one of my favorite up-tempo Willie songs. Right up there with “Sioux City Sue.” Stevie Nicks’ “Gold Dust Woman” could also have been penned by Proust about Albertine:

Well, did she make you cry, make you break down,

Shatter your illusions of love

And is it over now, do you know how

Pick up the pieces and go home

Willie picks up the pieces and goes to Venice after Albertine leaves him. Then he goes home to Paris in volume six. Proust’s novel could be called “Illusions of love.” Maybe time, like love, is an illusion. Maybe we are disillusioned equally by both. Albertine and Gilbertte and all of Proust’s lovers are gold dust women. Too good to be true. Daisy’s voice is full of money. And Proust’s dreams, his prose, are truer than reality. Willie delves further into the recesses of time with Shel Silverstein’s “A Couple More Years.” Willie’s not wiser from age alone but because he’s spent “more time with [his] back to the wall.” So he has suffered into knowledge, truth. Willie picks up years like pieces, like lovers, like memories. Time is a woman. A woman we are always trying to “hook up” with. Picking up the pieces of the past while “in search of lost time.” Where do you find pieces of lost time? Where do you look? In your mind? Willie and Proust win “The Wurlitzer Prize” for not wanting to get over anyone. “I Don’t Want to Get Over You” could be the title of Proust’s novel and all of Willie’s songs. Even if Willie says he is over her, or wants to get over her, don’t believe him. He lies. He likes not getting over people. He hits the road and seems to easily get over people, but he doesn’t. He never outruns his memories. They catch up with him even on the road. They are his muse. What would he sing about and what would Proust write about if they got over these past lovers? Getting over lovers would be tantamount to getting over art itself. Art is a way of not having to get over anything. The lovers on Keats’ Grecian Urn never get over each other. They never have to because they are frozen in art. Art allows us not to have to get over people.

Me and Paul (1985)—take 2

This version of “I Let My Mind Wander” (track 3) may be my favorite. It’s hard to believe this could be on the same album with the smokin’ version of “I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train.” It’s jazzy, trippy, and wandering, meandering like Willie’s mind. Mickey has a lovely solo at the end. “She’s Gone,” it goes without saying, is a “She’s Gone” song. This version seems especially mournful and melancholy. Mickey’s harmonica sounds like loneliness itself. Once again, I clearly underrated this album the first time around. I missed the wonderful slowness of several of these songs. I missed the sadness of Mickey’s harmonica. This version of “I Never Cared for You” anticipates the flamenco-inflected version on Teatro. Ironically, this version of “Me and Paul” is not my favorite. I think this song is better live. A line from “One Day at a Time” leaps out at me this time: “Yesterday’s dead and tomorrow is blind.” Willie seems to want to live only for today in this song, but so many of his songs are about yesterday. About wanting to live in the past and dwell in a land of memories. This album is clearly one of Mickey Raphael’s best. He steals the show on “Pretend I Never Happened.” This is the only occurrence I have found of Willie singing Billy Joe Shaver’s “Black Rose.” Willie should sing and record this more often. This woman has the tools to “make a new fool every day.” And I think I was a fool not to put this in my untenable top ten.

Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson (1979)—take 2

In “Me and Bobby McGee” Willie is “Feelin’ nearly faded as my jeans.” Willie’s clothes match his philosophy about time. Clothes and memories fade, and yet they gain a certain majesty, a certain authority, as they fade, like the lines and wrinkles on Willie’s face and hands. Willie alters the connotations of words so that faded becomes a positive thing. Time, as always, is everywhere. Even the “windshield wipers [are] slappin’ time.” Here again we see that Willie feels best when he feels bad: “feelin’ good was easy when Bobby sang the blues.” In other words, it’s easy to feel good when you feel bad. Huh? And yet it makes sense. Willie always feels worse when he feels better. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” but Willie always feels better when he’s losing things. Freedom is, in fact, a terrifying state, because it means you have nothing else to lose, and all of Willie’s songs are about loss. In my last blog I talked about how Willie sells songs about loss, so he is essentially selling loss, selling nothing, selling what he doesn’t have. If he loses everything, though, he has nothing left to sell, no loss left. Thus Willie has devised a system for saving his losses; he has developed a container for his collected emptiness. His mind, his memory, is that container for controlled losses. Sort of like a controlled burn. You can lose things again and again in your memory. This is why Willie, like Proust, would “trade all of [his] tomorrows for a single yesterday.” He can control the losses of yesterday better than future losses or even present losses. He needs help to “Make it through the night” of the present night. He can find his way around the past more easily. “All I’m takin’ is your time.” That’s all? All I’m taking is everything. “Let the devil take tomorrow.” The devil can have the future. “Yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow is out of sight.” Earlier he said he’d trade all his tomorrows for a single yesterday, but here he seems willing to trade all yesterdays and tomorrows for a single today. But of course you can’t have a single today because it becomes yesterday so fast. You can’t make today stand still the way you can with the future and the past. I can see Proust writing “Help Me Make it Through the Night” about Albertine. “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” describes a homeless man “wearing yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile. Once he had a future full of money love and dreams which he spent like they was goin’ out of style.” So this man has lost his past and future and only has today. “He’s traded in tomorrow for today.” Another example of the bartering, the deals we cut with time. Earlier Willie was trading the future for the past; here he is trading the future for the present. Like Willie, “he’s a walking contradiction.” In “Why Me” Willie laments that he has wasted his time and his life. Willie wants to repay the time he’s essentially taken from God. You get the sense that our past, present, and future are all gifts from God that we should strive to appreciate more and put to better use. From wasted time, Willie transitions to “For the Good Times.” “Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together. There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burnin’.” No need to worry about the present or the future. Let’s just enjoy the past. It’s Willie’s unique spin on the carpe deim, seize the day, “eat drink and be merry” philosophy. His version is: seize yesterday, when we ate, drank, and were merry. “Don’t say a word about tomorrow or forever. There’ll be time enough for sadness.” We have a love-hate relationship with forever. We want it, but we don’t want to talk about it. Willie’s “got the time” in “You Show Me Yours (And I’ll Show You Mine).” She’s got “rings on [her] fingers and time on [her] hands.” Again, time is everywhere in these songs. In “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” Willie’s “wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been.” He’s forgetting the past, and his lover is “teaching me that yesterday was something that I’d never thought of trying. Talking of tomorrow and the money, love, and time we had to spend.” I’m puzzled a bit by these lyrics. But it seems to be messing with the trinity of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The three days that Willie hates. Willie marvels at “The easy way she opened every door in my mind. But dreamin’ was as easy as believin’ it was never gonna end.” Willie doesn’t have the answer for why love was so easy in this situation and why it is so hard so often. Again we see the belief that this one, this love, is the big one, the one that is “never gonna end.” The “always” love than never “slips away,” that never hits the road. “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” focuses on a poignant sliver of time, a day, which, like a season, like a river, is both always the same and always new. “There’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone.” Something about a slice of time that hurts, that makes us feel mortal, vulnerable, finite, limited. We ourselves are slices of time, notes on a musical staff. “Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.” Sunday seems to be the yesterday of the week. It savors of the past. It seems to be the most nostalgic, most melancholy of days. Unlike hopeful Mondays, fresh starts.

I’m elevating this album to my untenable top ten list. The trend seems to be that I underrated albums the first time around and they get better the second time through. This one I drastically underrated, or maybe my tastes have changed. Isn’t that what good music does. It doesn’t change with time, but it changes our minds, literally, chemically. It changes us, teaches us, trains us to hear better and more.

Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes (1991)—take 2

I listened to this album again in the car driving back from Maine on July 10th, and I have to say it was better than I remembered it, and I remembered it well. It struck me this time that when Willie was at his lowest, when his possessions were being sold out from under him, where did he turn? Not to some future scheme. He turned to the past. The past is his go-to resource when times get tough. He finds comfort and security in the past. Paradoxically, he is able to keep moving forward so smoothly by ceaselessly returning to the past. It’s so counter-intuitive, so Gatsby-like. One step back and two steps forward. I just re-read my lengthy January blog on this album, and I stand by my statement that this may be his best album. I commented on almost every song in January, but I’ll bring to bear this time the larger context of six months of listening and almost 100 albums as well as two more volumes of Proust.

In the haunting title track, Willie sings, “I’d like to start my life anew, but memories make me blue” and “When I remember how things were, my memories all lead to her.” Another “she’s gone” song and another connection between time and love. We remember best what we love most, and we love most what we remember best. I’ve never been a big fan of “Jimmy’s Road,” but this time I notice the line “Jimmy went to war, and something changed his mind around.” The biggest changes seem to happen on the inside, in the mind. “It Should Be Easier Now,” but again and again we see that time doesn’t heal, it reopens the wounds. “I made up my mind that you’re gone,” but it turns out we can’t really control our own minds, and we may not be able to control our own wills, according to Daniel Wegner in his book “The Illusion of the Conscious Will.” “They say everything happens for the best.” Who says this? Dr. Pangloss? Leibniz? Candide? Alexander Pope? Willie Nelson himself preaches this a fair amount in his other songs (see “Healing Hands of Time”). Time should heal, but “the wounds in my heart you’ve carved deep and wide,” maybe two wide for time to suture. Wounds “hollowed and washed by the tears that I’ve cried.” A stitch in time may not be able to save the memories in our mind. In “Will You Remember Me” Willie ponders “the test of time” and “the sands of time.” This is another “she’s gone” song. “Gone are the times.” Time is a woman. Time is love. And both are gone. Yesterday I heard on the radio a new song called “What Kinda Gone” by Chris Cagle.

I hollered, baby, is there somethin' wrong?

Thought I heard her say somethin' soundin' like I'm gone

But these days gone can mean so many things

There's gone for good and there's good and gone

And there's gone with the long before it

I wish she'd been just a little more clear

Well there's gone for the day and gone for the night

And gone for the rest of your doggone life

Is it whiskey night or just a couple beers?

I mean what kind of gone are we talkin' 'bout here?

Well it's gettin' dark out she ain't back yet

Ain't called home turned off the phone

Ah man ha this might not be good

I would have stopped her when she went to leave

But i didn't 'cause i didn't really think what i'm thinkin' now

I'm still not sure what gone is all about

Is it the kind of gone where she's at her mom's coolin' down?

She'll come around or the kind that says you had your chance

And she ain't comin' back

What kind of gone indeed. There are so many ways to be gone, to be lost, and only one way to be home. There’s the rub. G.K. Chesterton wrote often about this. C.S. Lewis, too. So many ways to leave. “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” Maybe the variety is what seduces us. Only one way to stay home. “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone” is a “she’s not really gone” song, and it focuses on our belief about time, our faith in time, our trust in time. How we feel about time, what we believe about time matters, so much so, that we think we can fight it with our minds, control it, manipulate it. “Yesterday’s Wine” is a drink at the bar with time. Time is wine. Time itself gets better with time. It has vintages. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” and “It Should Be Easier Now.” We think we know how the story’s supposed to go. Love and time, however, refuse to conform to our suppositions. We hope and pray that things will be different. That “you will not forget you Country Boy,” but people do forget, or they can’t forget. It’s not supposed to be that way, but so often it is. In “The Sound in Your Mind” Willie feels bad when time heals his wounds. Forgetting hurts more than remembering. Time does heal his wounds, but somehow the healing hurts more than the wound. Healing hurts more than hurting. It’s another “she’s gone” song (they all are, it seems). “Permanently Lonely” fits the bill as well. It’s a “She’s gone but I don’t care” song. Like “I’m Alright” by Jo Dee Messina. “So Much to Do” could also be titled “She’s Gone.” Every song seems to be about different ways to be gone, and different ways to deal with people leaving you. And as I’ve said before, she = time, and time leaves us like a lover. Leaves us in the dust, literally. It has more than fifty ways to leave us mortals. We are Lonely Little Mansions looking for someone to live inside of us for this brief span of life. Renters, really, are what we are looking for, even sub-letters. Home is what we leave, the place where the road starts. It defines the road. The road is everything that is not home. Everything we desire outside of what we have because we can’t desire what we already have, so we can’t desire home. Wanting = lacking, so we can’t lack what we have. The lacking is the vacuum that creates the desire. How do we maintain the pull of the vacuum when there is no emptiness? When the house is full? “Summer of Roses/December Day” fits the seasons category of song. These are mostly about autumn. Seasons help “soften the snowflakes,” help us face the winter snows, the hard times. Seasons resolve the paradox by having change within order. Variety within pattern. Innovation and individuality within form and formula. How can we do the same with home. How can we have the road within the home, or home within in the road. How can still truly be still moving? Like rivers, always changing and always the same at the same time. Finite and infinite at the same time. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed these lines before: “Love’s summer college where the green leaves of knowledge are waiting to fall with the fall.” Love’s summer college indeed. We learn about love from the leaves. They are green, but they know they will be brown soon, and they will fall. So what comes of all our knowledge about love? What’s the point? Do we forget it each time and have to learn it anew each season, with each new season of love? Proust seems to suggest so. We never learn, as the seasons never learn. They can’t anticipate fall. It won’t help. What can they do? “Pretend I Never Happened” suggests one answer. We can pretend we’ll never fall, pretend we never fell. Pretend love will last forever. Is that what art does—pretend! Erase our prior knowledge of love so we can start anew, with youthful idealism. Ignorance is bliss. Just forget about it. Except, of course, that we can’t. “Slow Down Old World” because “I live too fast” and I’m “too blue to cry anymore.” But how can you live slowly on the road? It’s another “still is still moving” song. “My life ain’t mine anymore.” Then whose is it? The woman who left you? Did she take it with her? Hurry slowly. The Taoist way. He’s too blue to take this opportunity to cry. Maybe you don’t need to “exchange the words I love you for goodbye.” Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe “I love you” is just the beginning, the prelude, to goodbye. So despite our summer college knowledge, despite the lessons of the leaves of fall, our “lesson in leaving,” Willie falls in love again (and again and again) in “I’m Falling in Love Again.” “If You Could Only See” what’s goin’ through my mind, you would know you were “Always on my mind.” But since you can’t, you’ll have to take my word for it, my art. Willie’s life has been spent trying to show us what’s going through his mind. Only with his art can he even begin to show us. “If you could see our love directing time.” So love directs time. It is time, but it directs it, too. Like a trinity, time and love and mind, father, son, and only ghost. Three persons, but one entity. “If you only knew the values of the unknowns.” Love = God = unknown. We love what we don’t know. And we love most what we know least, and since God = love, and we know him least, we love him most. He sees the “transitions going on,” but we can’t. “I’d rather You Didn’t Love Me” fits with “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way,” “It Should Be Easier Now,” and “Pretend I Never Happened.” These songs are all about us wishing things were other than they are. “I’d Rather You Didn’t Love Me,” but you do. Things are rarely the way I’d rather them to be. “How can I name the one to blame?” Who’s fault is it? “I suppose it’s the way you believe.” If you don’t love me, then you can’t leave me. That’s one solution. Take your ball and go home. You’d think that would make your heart safe, but “What Can You Do To Me Now” proves that wrong. We are always susceptible to falling in love again. We can always love again; we can always hurt some more. In Buddy, Willie asks, “Don’t let her get the best of me” and don’t let me “start feeling lonely.” “Let’s talk about things as they were, Buddy, before I got mixed up with her.” Yet another “She’s gone” song. Another “how do I deal with her being gone” song. Here he asks a friend to help him cope, to help keep the memories at bay, to help him slay the memories if needed, handcuff them, tame them. In “Remember the Good Times” Willie suggests another way to cope. “Don’t waste a moment unhappy.” Really? From the crying cowboy who feels bad when he feels better? Shouldn’t the advice be just the opposite? Remember the bad times, they yield better songs. No pain, no platinum (records, that is). Forget the good times, no one wants to hear you sing about them. Ironically, listening to sad songs makes you feel better. Listening to happy songs makes you feel envious and bitter. “Wake Me When It’s Over” suggests yet another method for facing time and love. Sleep it off. The truth is, the blues will never get up and leave your bed. They have set up permanent residence at the “Home Motel” on lost love avenue. “Who’ll Buy My Memories” could also be titled “Who’ll Buy My Lost Love.” Who’ll buy what I’ve lost? Willie is essentially selling everything he’s lost. Ironically, he is selling what he doesn’t have. And making a killing at it.