Half Nelson (1985)

So I’ve listened to 401 songs and 22 hours of Willie Nelson music this January. In 31 days I have listened to almost an entire day of Willie’s music. At that pace, I’ll spend one full day per month listening to Willie Nelson (actually, it will be more because I often listen to each album three or more times).

I’ve already reviewed the first duet on this album, “Pancho and Lefty,” in a previous blog. At first, I was pretty skeptical of a collection of previously released duets, but hearing all of these together helped me appreciate the breadth of Willie’s recording.

“Slow Movin’ Outlaw” is the perfectly paradoxical song for a slow singin’, fast livin’ man like Willie. “Where has a slow movin’, once quick-draw outlaw got to go?”

“Are There Any More Real Cowboys” with Neil Young surprised me. I’m so used to Mickey Raphael on harp with Willie; hearing Neil Young’s harmonica on this track provided a pleasant change.

I’m not usually a fan of dubbing old recordings of dead singers into duets with living singers, but in this case I was curious to hear how Willie’s voice would sound next to Hank Williams’. It’s like hearing the source next to the stream. “I Told a Lie to My Heart.” That could be the title of every Willie Nelson song. The lies we tell our hearts, the tricks we try to play on memories. The tricks we try to play on time.

A live duet with Mel Tellis shows a very different side of Willie. Upbeat Western swing.

My wife even likes “Seven Spanish Angels.” More because of Ray Charles than Willie. Again, the sheer range of partners on this album boggles the mind. What possibly connects any of these partners? Who else could record with such a diverse group of people? Willie is so chameleon-like. I have to admit, though, that Ray steals the show on this song. The harmonica and the steel and the chorus tear me up on this one, too. And then that flamenco thing kicks in.

And who sings with Julio Iglesias? Who can pull that off? “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” fits that Proustian, Gatsbyian, courtly love theme. Sir Gawain could be singing this song, or Petrarch, or Don Quixote.

“They All Went to Mexico” has Willie singing in Spanish with Carlos Santana riffing in the background. A fun tune which reminds me that Willie’s not just a redneck hippie, he’s a Mexican redneck hippie.

I prefer the Rolling Stones’ version of “Honky Tonk Women,” but I respect Willie and Leon Russell for giving it a whirl. I think this could be really good live. The fiddle and the horns give this a unique blend. I’m curious to hear more country and bluegrass with horns. Big Band meets bluegrass. Benny Goodman bluegrass.

“Half a Man” has to be one of my top ten favorite Willie songs. George Jones actually sings it better, but the two of them together are pure honky tonk perfection. I think this may be better than the version with Hag and Willie on Pancho and Lefty, but I’d have to do a side-by-side taste test to be certain. When I run out of albums, I’ll start doing comparisons like that. I think I need a full album of Willie and George Jones duets. I can’t tell what’s sadder on this album: the Possum’s voice or Mickey Raphael’s harmonica and that solo fiddle and steel guitar weaving in and out of Willie’s voice. The lyrics for this song are among the cleverest and most profound in Willie’s repertoire. He seems to desire less body and less memory so he can feel less loss, less pain. I am tempted to start quoting, but you really just need to listen to the whole song and read along. Every line is a keeper. The song snaps shut perfectly like a sonnet. Most country songs have a good line or two and then some throw away filler, but this song is lean. No fat. Precise pain and heartache packed into three minutes and six seconds.

Highwayman 2 (1990)

The highwaymen open this Chips Moman produced sequel singing “We’re gonna ride.” Constant motion on a “Silver Stallion.” Outrunning the wind, trouble, and time itself.

“Born and Raised in Black and White” gets at the paradoxical mix of gospel and outlaw in Willie’s and Johnny’s music. Again, Mickey Raphael on harp is the only road band member to join Willie on this album of quartets.

“Two Stories Wide” is one of two Willie-penned tunes on this album. This may be the best song on the album. “Life’s too long to worry, and it’s too short to cry, and it’s too deep to measure, and it’s two stories wide. There’s your side and my side…Both sides make you lonely.” Of course Willie can’t mean this at all. He has made his career by worrying and crying. And he has taken his time doing. And for someone who thinks too much--like Hamlet, like Proust, like Willie—for someone who sees that life is two stories wide, your side and my side, phases and stages, it can be very lonely indeed. But the artist, it seems, light a nightingale, can redeem the dark night of the soul with a song.

Johnny Cash’s tribute to the sixties, to Woodstock, or to songwriting in general, “Songs That Make a Difference,” is an interesting meditation on songwriting.

In “Living Legend,” the highwaymen are singing about their own history. “Was it better then with our backs against the wall?” They seem to be asking, were we better back then? Was the past really as good as we think it was? “Was he bitter then, with our backs against the wall…2,000 years ago.” They’re singing about Jesus. How do we know what to make of the past? How should we take? How should we feel about it? Should we live in it? Look what it did to Gatsby? Miss Havisham.

I wasn’t crazy about Willie’s “Texas” on “It Always Will Be,” and I like it less on this album, except for Mickey Raphael’s harp. I do appreciate the trippy, creepy, macabre, jazzy, jaunty, flamenco concoction that Willie has brewed. I don’t even know how to categorize it. So I respect it, but I don’t really enjoy it.

Highwayman (1985)

I guess I’m on a Chips Moman binge. This one has to be the greatest all-star quartet ever assembled. Cash, Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson. To hear all four major league voices take a turn on each song accompanied by Mickey Raphael on harp seems like almost too much of a good thing.

“The Last Cowboy Song” has that nostalgic, Proustian feel. The four old cowboys seem to be singing at their own funeral.

Cindy Walker’s “Jim, I Wore a Tie Today” tells a story about a cowboy’s funeral.

The Highwaymen take the opportunity to cry on Johnny Cash’s “Big River.” “I taught the weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry.” One cowboy crying isn’t bad enough, we have four, that’s eight eyes. It reminds me of the courtly love tradition and Petrarch where the men wear themselves out crying over unattainable women. The theme of the river, like the road, like time, always moving. This one’s made of tears, though, and it takes their memories down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Willie and Johnny are wry as ever when they sing “They’re taking good care of me committed to Parkview.”

The chorus on “Desperados Waiting for a Train” is a bit much. But the irony of desperados waiting, standing still, reminds me of “Still is Still Moving to Me.”

Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)” is an interesting choice with a little flamenco touch.

If you have to be on the “Welfare Line,” you want these guys and Mickey Raphael to keep your spirits up. Who else can make the welfare line sound like an exciting, cool place to be? This tune bounces with the drums, bass, and harp.

Not sure Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” needed re-making, but the song fits thematically, nostalgically. “She swore that it would never end.” And yet time just slipped away. That elusive promise of eternity. “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” I wish I didn’t know about time. I wish I still believed it didn’t apply to me. But “the years rolled slowly past.” I’d actually like to hear Willie sing this one solo. He interprets it in an interesting way.

Listening to “The Twentieth Century is Almost Over” in 2010 I can’t shake the funny feeling that time slips away. “Where in the world did the twentieth century go? I swear it was there just a minute ago.” Willie has upped the ante here. An entire century, 100 years, have slipped away, been misplaced, lost. “Father time is a rumbling and a rapping…everyone is waiting for something to happen.” Time itself, personified, makes an appearance in this John Prine song. History itself cannot stand up to time. It, too, is defenseless.

City of New Orleans (1984)

Another Chips Moman produced collection of pop standards from the 1980s. Willie doesn’t have any of his road band with him on this one except for Mickey Raphael on harp. The title track is obviously the big single. I think this is only the second album I’ve listened to thus far to have horns (sax and trumpet). This is the first album where I feel that the strings are appropriate. Instead of adding cheesy strings to try to soup up a song that doesn’t need souping up, this album feels like songs that naturally require strings and that Willie is simply blending his voice into the pop genre.

“Just out of reach of my two empty arms” makes my hall-of-fame for country music turns of phrase.

“Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” gets at the time theme I keep hearing in Willie’s music. “They said this town will waste your time. I guess they’re right, it’s wasting mine.” Wasted time, lost time, killing time. There’s always something wrong with time. Whether Willie’s breaking meter or fighting with his memory, he’s obsessed with manipulating time.

“Why Are You Picking On Me” is the only Willie Nelson tune on this album. I have to say I actually admire Willie for his chutzpa in covering Michael Jackson’s “She’s Out of My Life.” He simply has no fear when it comes to covers or duets. So many of them fall flat, but he is always open to the one that just might be a homerun, like “Always on My Mind.” What other country artist could have pulled that off? I can’t believe Willie never finagled a duet with Michael Jackson in his prime. It would have been better than “Ebony and Ivory” or “The Girl is Mine.”

Without a doubt, “Cry” is the best song on this album. “If your heartaches seem to hang around too long, and your blues keep gettin’ bluer with each song.” Mickey Raphael’s harmonica kills me on this song. “So let your hair down and go on and cry.” Here we have the theme of crying over lost time. Willie is still taking every possible “Opportunity to Cry.” Here again we have heartaches and memories hanging around, loitering, lingering like locals at the cracker barrel. Memories are tangible, animate, personified. In fact, they are realer than real people, more poignant. Like Gastby’s perfect image of Daisy which she can never live up to. Why does absence make the heart grow fonder? “In a way I’ll be better off when you’re gone. In another way it turns me inside out.” Maybe we like the control we have over memories. As if our life were imported into IDVD and our mind is the film editing software that we can splice and rearrange any way we see fit. In “Until It’s Time For You to Go,” Willie sings, “Don’t ask forever of me.” And yet he’s always asking for forever and laughing when it slips away.

Just One Love (1995)

Willie has many (but not all) of his road band members with him on this album. Bobbie, Jody, Grady. Noticeably absent is Mickey Raphael. I’m growing fond of Buddy Emmons on steel. Grady Martin produces this duet album with Kimmie Rhodes. The recording was done at Pedernales.

“Each Night at Nine,” an old Floyd Tillman song, fits into Willie’s repertoire perfectly. Setting a very specific time to remember an earlier time is a very Willie thing to do. Having a date with time. Making love with time.

Why does Willie, like Proust, always remember things “Better Left Forgotten”? “Why, oh, why won’t [his] mind let go of a love that used to be? Though [he tries]… Your memory will never set [him] free.” “Sometimes, right out of the blue, [he hears] a voice and [he turns] and [looks] for you.” Why is he so sensitive to the past, to memories, and, in so many ways, insensitive to the present? It reminds me of Gatsby.

“Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette” is a different kind of song for Willie. It’s more of a Charlie Daniels kind of humorous story song. Willie’s vocals are strong and full and front and center on this album.

“I Just Drove By” to see if things had changed. That’s Willie. Get in the moving car and drive by to check on the passage of time. It’s a physics problem. If you are moving yourself, how can you possibly measure the passage of time, which is itself always moving? Something has to stand still in order for you to measure it. Something must be fixed. Maybe Willie’s music is a search for something fixed. An Augustinian “our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee.” Or a lament that nothing is or can be fixed. “Love is just a fragile thing.” “to see if love is still the way it was back then.” “Standing still is not time’s way.” And yet we want it to stand still. Or we want to outrun it.

It’s nice to hear Willie do country standards after hearing him do so many pop standard albums. Despite his success with Stardust, these seem a better fit. And the backing is solid and serviceable if not remarkable. It doesn’t get in the way. It does no harm.

Willie sings with Opry star “Grandpa” Jones on the last track. Not really my kind of song, but it is nice to hear Willie’s voice juxtaposed with Grandpa Jones’s, if for no other reason than it gives me a nice gauge of where Willie fits historically and stylistically in relation to the Opry stars of the past.

What a Wonderful World (1988)

Another Chips Moman produced album of pop standards from the late eighties. I’m afraid this may be my 26th favorite album of the 26 I have reviewed thus far. Willie’s voice is strong and clear, and Mickey Raphael does his best on harmonica to make something of these tunes, but none of these really worked for me. “Some Enchanted Evening” intrigued me with its ruminations about the magic of time and memory and love. Willie’s “What a Wonderful World” just can’t stand up to Satchmo’s, but whose can? The back-up vocals on some of these tracks harken back to the Nashville Sound days of Chet Atkins. “Twilight Time” touches on the enchanting, seductive quality of time and memory. “Deepening shadows gather splendor.” Paradoxically, things get brighter as they get darker. “I fall in love again as I did then.” He looks forward to twilight, when it gets dark, so he can fall in love again in (or is it with?) his memories. Making love to his memories. How many outlaws could get away with mooning around like this and then singing “You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive and e-lim-inate the negative”? Only Willie could howl at the moon one night, like Hank Williams, and than make moon eyes at the “Ole Buttermilk Sky” the next.

Seashores of Old Mexico (1987)

I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did. Produced by Willie and Hag and recorded at Pedernales, it has a very different feel than any of the other 25 albums I have reviewed. The horns (sax and trumpet) give it the fittingly Mexican mariachi band flavor. At times the album veers into easy listening, but Willie somehow manages to bring authenticity and credibility to easy listening. Hag’s vocals are probably peaking in 1987. Johnny Gimble’s fiddle adds legitimacy to several of these tracks.

“When Times Were Good” is easily my favorite track on this album. At 6:40 it is by far the longest song on the album. The lyrics, by D.L. Jones, fit Willie’s philosophy to a tee. “There’s a place I can go in my memory, back to a life I chose to leave behind. And sometimes I still need to remember when times were good and you were mine.” Time, memory, mind, love. The fiddle, like that violin motif in Proust, weaves in and out of these memories. As with “Precious Memories” on The Troublemaker, it seems like Willie is best on his longest, slowest, and trippiest tracks, or maybe that’s just my taste. This album almost felt like the Grateful Dead at times.

“Jimmy the Broom” tells a great story. Of course the one Beatles song Willie would cover would be “Yesterday.” “Love Makes a Fool of Us All” could have been an alternate title to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. As could In Search of Lost Love. Or Time Makes a Fool of Us All. Time and Mind and Love seem to be merging in Willie’s songs. This album grows on me with each listen. I don’t know what to make of the easy listening, jazz, Mariachi, country, pop blend. The genres, the lyrics, the tempos. It’s as if you shook them up in a jar and played whatever came out. But it’s unlike anything else I have heard. I can’t imagine what the market or the audience is for this. I’m sure this album is lost in the dustbin of time. Who will dust it off and resuscitate it? How many of Willie’s 300+ albums are lost gems like this one? “Love was such an easy game to play. Oh, I believe in yesterday.” Willie’s belief in yesterday makes these songs work, even if no one ever listens to them again. Willie’s voice seems like a plane barely gaining enough speed to get off the ground in “If I Could Only Fly.” You keep wondering if he’ll actually catch up to the beat or if he will “break meter” and crash the plane. Why is flirting with the meter so seductive? Why were Thelonius Monk, Billie Holiday, and Willie such consummate flirts? Consider me smitten, wooed, and wowed.

The Troublemaker (1976)

Recorded in 1973 at the same 5-day session as Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages, this gospel album did not get released until three years later, at which point it hit #1 on the country charts. I love that Willie just picked up an old hymn book and started recording these spontaneously between sets. Only Willie could take the most traditional possible music and record it in such a jazzy, funky, spontaneous way that he embraces both tradition and innovation simultaneously without contradiction. The same way he embraces the left and right, the hippies and rednecks.

He opens with “Uncloudy Day.” This from a guy who has lived his life under a cloud, a life full of storms and tempests. And yet one who has remained sunny and tranquil in the midst of it all. “Still is Still Moving” indeed. Sillness on the move. Stillness on the road. He has his standard four-piece road band: Paul English, Jimmy Day, Bee Spears, and Bobbie Nelson, but Mickey Raphael added his harmonica tracks in 1976. I’m not sure how common harmonicas are on gospel albums, but it works here. Doug Sahm’s solo fiddle weaves in and out of the vocals the way Johnny Gimble’s will in years to come. The young Larry Gatlin makes an appearance on back-up vocals.

Track 11 steals this disk for me. “Precious Memories,” of course. Why is it that this is the song Willie sings with most credibility? It seems he really means this one, as if he wrote it. First, at 7:37 it is by far the longest song on the album. Second, it deals with the preciousness of memories, a timeless (pun intended) theme of Willie’s music. Willie seems to value time above all else. He, like Proust, is obsessed with time and memory, time in the mind. The four previously unreleased tracks from the June 1974 Texas Opry concerts are worth the price of the album (these are tracks that don’t appear on the Complete Atlantic Sessions discs; I guess they weren’t completely complete; I guess they weren’t completely Atlantic, either, since he switched labels and these songs were released by Columbia). In any case, someone will need to issue the complete Texas Opry concert sets at some point.

Precious memories, “how they linger,” like local memories, loitering. “How they ever flood my soul.” Why do memories always flood? Willie’s vocals linger like memory itself. “Precious sacred scenes unfold” the way his voice unfolds, slowly, surprisingly, unpredictably, like fate itself.

Why are the bonus tracks often the best tracks on an album? Is it because they are less produced, less familiar, more raw, more authentic? Outlaw tracks?

Of course, the only Willie-penned song, “The Troublemaker,” sums up so much about Willie’s career. Who else could record a gospel album titled “The Troublemaker” and have it reach #1 on the country charts? Where do I begin to note the contradictions? Willie is already an outsider in Nashville because he doesn’t fit the Nashville sound. Then he records gospel, which isn’t supposed to sell. Then he titles it “The Troublemaker,” which seems inappropriate if not disrespectful or blasphemous. Maybe Willie succeeds by offending people on both sides of every issue so they cancel each other out with their own crossfire while he ducks and just keeps right on playing. And then, of course, the wonderful irony of the song. We have made Jesus into such a tame, domesticated, well-mannered guy, when clearly, if we read the gospels, he was more like Willie Nelson than most churchgoers in their Sunday best. He was a troublemaker, a hippie, a redneck, an outlaw, a criminal. He was always on the road. Had no home. Hung out with tax collectors and sinners. Had compassion for those less fortunate. Turned water into wine. Probably the biggest troublemaker in history. 2,000 years of trouble. Willie’s 77 seem just a drop in the bucket in comparison.

San Antonio Rose (1980)

Willie produced this duet album with his mentor Ray Price. Now I finally hear how Price influenced Willie. On each duet the two seem to be competing to see who can sing further behind the beat. Willie clearly learned how to dance around the beat and “break meter” from Price. Willie has one of the more solid supporting casts on this album: Leon Russell on piano; Grady Martin on guitar; Mickey Raphael on harmonica; Paul English on drums; Jody Payne on guitar; and Bee Spears on bass. Buddy Emmons’ steel guitar also stands out to me. I need to start listening more carefully to which steel player I like best. These versions of “Night Life” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” aren’t my favorites, but I find them both quite interesting. The fiddle, steel, and harmonica wind in and out of the dual vocals in a pleasingly polyphonic way. Again, one of the marvels of Willie’s work is how he allows each instrument to maintain its distinct identity. You can hear each instrument’s contribution. Nothing blends or dissolves into the background. The songs are always quiet and slow enough to allow everyone to be heard, to have their say, to speak their mind, to say their piece. It is as if Willie is saying, take your time, slow down, listen to what everyone is saying. “Listen to the words they’re saying.” Willie so often talks to himself and listens to himself in a feedback loop that spins off a web of introspection and vocal improvisation, wild and just right at the same time. You might call it empathic music, music that listens to its listeners. Music so slow and quiet that it seems to be waiting for the listener to say something, to confess something. We’re never sure if we’re listening to Willie or if he’s listening to us.

This morning while cleaning the kitchen it struck me that Willie is a double outlaw, a double outsider. Like a black woman who is excluded on account of both her gender and her race, Willie is both a redneck and a hippie. And not only is he doubly alienated from some people because of these two affiliations, he also sits in the middle of a civil war of alienation because even the hippies in his own camp may dismiss him because of his redneck status, and vice versa. So he is alienated from without and from within simultaneously. Maybe this is part of his appeal. Christ-like, he takes upon himself a great deal of alienation. As a result, he is able to convey a great deal of empathy and compassion in his music.

Willie opens and closes this album with a Bob Wills tune. Wills is another of Willie’s heroes and mentors, but I’m not as familiar with his work as I need to be. I’ll be looking to find out more about his influence on Willie. “I remember our faded love.” I won’t comment much on the lyrics on this album because many of these songs have appeared on other albums. The harmonica, steel, fiddle, and vocals are what stand out to me on this album, especially the harmonica. The vibraphone doesn’t do much for me, never has. The drums and bass are steady and unobtrusive. I haven’t noticed Leon Russell’s piano as much as I thought I would. According to the liner notes, Price invented this concept of the lonesome solo fiddle behind the vocals. Price and Willie did an album together in 1961 and then another in 2003. I’ll need to check both of these out, but this one’s a keeper. One I will revisit with pleasure again and again, both for it’s historical importance and for its solid execution.

Clean Shirt (1991)

Clean Shirt (1991) Waylon & Willie

This came out the year I graduated from college. My initial judgment failed me once again. On the first listen this seemed to be a throwaway duet album. But on the second and third listens I discovered these gems: “I know what you’re thinkin’, and I don’t think you’re thinkin’ at all.” And then, “on second thought, if I can find a clean shirt I might.” Again, not thinking gets you in trouble, but thinking too much (having second and third thoughts) makes you crazy (“I still get crazy when I think of you” on “Tryin’ to Outrun the Wind”). And why do you need to find a clean shirt to act dirty?

“I don’t think much about the good old days, just about the good old nights.” “Talk about the good times, talk about the times the time was right.” Willie continues to think about time, and he continues to wrestle with his desires to be both clean and dirty, rock and roll, day and night, domestic and daring.

“You can’t make a rock from a rolling stone.” “Fiddles don’t make violins. Motel rooms don’t make homes.”

“Old age and treachery always overcomes youth and skill.” Wisdom and experience conquering time?

“I saw an angel once and the devil twice.”

“If you lose you still win. At least you got the making of a song.” Art can defeat time by turning it into music, the music of time. Art beats time by imposing a beat, by making a rock (a meter) out of a rolling stone.

“I’ve had some bad nights with the best of the blues.”

The harmonica stands out on some of these tracks, but the liner notes are no help in telling me whether it is Mickey Raphael. Only one hour of sleep last night so this is fragmentary and disjointed. The album is a surprising keeper.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow (1985)

This one surprised me. The most purely acoustic album of the twenty I have surveyed so far (except maybe for The IRS Tapes). Not having drums allows the listener to focus exclusively on the strings and the vocal cords. This album may showcase Willie’s vocals better than almost any other. I won’t comment at all about the lyrics, and that may be because the vocals and strings steal the show. I don’t care about the lyrics on any of these songs. The production has such warmth and brightness that I just want to bask in its sonic landscape. I get my Johnny Gimble fix on fiddle, pure and undiluted (especially on track #4). I’ll need to see if Willie ever gathers this same band again. If not, he should have. This type of setting fits Willie’s music better than so many others he has tried.

Pancho and Lefty (1982)

The title song from Towns Van Zandt about a Mexican bandit who “wore his gun outside his pants” fits Willie’s outsider, on-the-road image perfectly. This song tells a gripping tale, but the angelic choir backing vocals break the spell for me. As is often the case, though, Willie and Hag’s vocals make up for it. That and the word “Federales.” I just like the sound of that word.

Chips Moman brings his Muscle Shoals R&B bounce to this album so Willie and Hag can walk down “Memory lane,” as if your mind, as if time, were something you could stroll down, casually, lazily, on your “Lazy Day.” As if they were somehow outside time.

“Half a Man” may make my top ten list of favorite Willie Nelson songs. The bass and drums thump with authority, but Willie and Hag sing so far behind the beat they almost fall over, tripping the song. “If I only had one eye to cry.” “The half a man that you’ve made of me” ranks up there with the all-time best country music turns of phrase. “One less memory to recall” gets at that theme of desiring to erase memories. “Reasons to Quit” right next to “No Reason to Quit” creates a yin-yang, a paradox, a flip-side, an “on the other hand.”

The bass and drums are like the babysitters in this band, the solid dance floor upon which Willie’s vocals can waltz at will.

“Still water runs the deepest,” but Willie and Hag lived fast, more like rocky rapids. Is Willie really criticizing a woman for not being true, peaceful, and dependable? “Still is still moving to me,” I guess.

On one hand, Willie seems reckless, which means he doesn’t think about what he’s doing. But so many of his songs are about thinking. So he doesn’t think, then he thinks about why he didn’t think. He ends up thinking more than people who do think in the first place.

“I still love you as I did in yesterday, many years have gone by though it seems just like a day.” Many years telescope into a day. Concentrated, distilled, strong as whiskey. “There will never be another, it will always be just you.” Always? Is this a joke?

I like the title “All the Soft Places to Fall,” but the logic of the song escapes me. Outlaws grow old and start looking for the comfort of clean sheets and family.

This “Opportunity to Cry” is a jazzy, trippy, almost soul sounding version. Johnny Gimble’s fiddle and mandolin, a sax, and an organ add to the intrigue.

The second “Half a Man” (bonus track 11) gets even slower, and Mickey Raphael makes his harmonica do some things I’ve never heard before. Willie is once again testing the limits of his listeners’ patience.

And just when you think he can’t sing any slower, get any further behind the beat, he almost comes to a complete stop on bonus track #12. Willie sings, “I’ll always love you in my own peculiar way.” Always? Mickey’s peculiar harmonica sounds work on this quirky version that grows on me with each version.

The way Willie keeps recycling songs is almost like reincarnation. His songs never die because he keeps re-doing them, re-making them. Sometimes they are better, sometimes worse. Willie’s relationship to his songs like Dr. Frankenstein’s to his monster? The monster just wanted love, and all he got was an opportunity to cry.

Waylon & Willie (1978)

Not much time to get this one in before midnight.

I don’t know how to take the big #1 hit on this album, “Mamma’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Of course neither of them means it. So why do we love it so much? Something about giving advice we don’t mean, advice we know no one will heed? Or is there an honest trace of regret?

Interesting to be listening to “The Year 2003 Minus 25” (written in 1978) in 2010. “Time slips away till you die.” I remember 1978, and those 25 years plus 7 went by very quickly. Time indeed slips by. It is slippery, sneaky. Why is that? “I don’t give a damn…when I choose to.” That surprising, pleasurable turn of phrase.

I’ve already written about “Pick Up the Tempo” in a previous blog. The desire to manipulate time, to speed it up or to slow it down, seems to be part of the human condition. We balk at the restrictions of time. We resent them. “Some people are sayin’ that time will take care of people like me, that I’m livin’ too fast and they say that I can’t last much longer.” So Waylon and Willie will pick up the tempo and try to outrun time? Live even faster? But this seems to contradict the later line that “time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.” If you pick up the tempo, you are not leaving time alone; you are altering it. In fact, messing with time, worrying about time, worrying it to death, seems to be Willie’s signature move. Ah, the paradox, the enigma, the sphinx that is Willie Nelson. Jefferson-like he rises above the abstractions and reconciles them somehow. “Looking for a Feeling…that I once had with you…that I’d grown accustomed to…that I lost when I lost you” is another Proustian idea. “I said when it was over that I’d Be Over You in Time ‘cause nothing lasts forever, it’s all a state of mind.” Ha! That’s the problem, not the solution. Your state of mind doesn’t help you overcome time, it creates your hang-up with time. In Search of Lost Feelings. Feelings in time. Where do they get lost anyway? They get lost in time. Does time heal or does it lose? What’s the difference? I’m a bit disappointed that, in some cases, they just dubbed Willie’s vocals in 1977 over tracks Waylon recorded in 1973. Waylon’s band provides the backing on this entire album. “I Can Get Off On You” is one of the most playful and addictive songs in Willie’s oeuvre. Waylon’s drummer and bass player clearly give this album a bouncier more playful feel than Paul English lends Willie’s other albums. I won’t comment much on “Gold Dust Woman” because it is all Waylon, but I admire him for covering a Stevie Nicks song, and it actually works. “Don’t ever cuss that fiddle, boy, unless you want that fiddle out of tune.” A Kristofferson song that fits that hippy, Hindu, cosmic cowboy philosophy of Willie’s. “We’re in this gig together so let’s settle down and steal each other’s songs.” What I had called my brother now he had every right to call on me.” It’s the golden rule Willie-style. “If we ever get to heaven, boys, it ain’t because we ain’t done nothing wrong.” The admission of the fallibility of mankind. “That picker there in trouble ain’t nothin’ but another side of you.” The non-judgmental, tolerant, accepting, forgiving Willie who brings rednecks and hippies together in Austin. We have the same mix in Asheville, but no Willie to bring them together.

What does the passage of time do for us, if anything? “I’ve got a couple more years on you, baby, that’s all. I’ve had more chances to fly and more places to fall. It ain’t that I’m wiser, it’s just that I’ve spent more time with my back to the wall.” Shel Silverstein wrote that. Days, years, seasons. What do they do for us? To us?

“I’m not here to forget you…I don’t want to get over you.” Playing music in the Juke Box to “help me remember you.” Somehow music and art helps make time stand still? Helps preserve time? We pay and play to stop time. We outrun it, we slow it down, we make it stand still. I had a good time listening to this album. Probably one of the most consistently enjoyable, upbeat, bouncy albums I’ve reviewed thus far.

Me and Paul (1985)

E.M. Forster distinguishes between pattern and rhythm in prose: “this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.” He prefers Proust’s more organic structure (rhythm) to James’s more fixed structure (pattern). If E.M. Forster listened to country music (a big if, I know), I think he would like Willie’s looser, more flexible rhythm, full of “surprise and freshness and hope.” Willie, like Forster, seems to use rhythm to both create and transcend pattern, form, order.

My favorite songs on this album, interestingly, are two Billy Joe Shaver songs: the driving (of course) “I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train” (even Willie can’t slow down a fast train) and the playful “Black Rose.” The devil made him do it the first time, but the second time he did it on his own. A classic country turn of phrase.

“I Let My Mind Wander” could sum up Willie’s entire career. His music, his vocals, his sense of rhythm all have that Thoreau-like sense of wandering, sauntering. And yet it is a cerebral wandering, a wondering kind of wandering. And then there is the connotation of the word wander which means wander off the paths of righteousness, straying from home, from commitments. Willie has his road band with him (his wandering band): Bobbie, Mickey, Paul, and co. Still, better versions of many of these songs appear on other albums. I would buy the whole album just for “Black Rose.” And the pictures of Paul on the back cover.

Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson (1979)

“All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy.’—John Ruskin (1856)

If Ruskin is right, does that mean all of Willie’s work is a “pathetic fallacy”?

So I’m flying blind on this one. The liner notes give me nothing. No clue who the musicians are. I don’t need notes to tell me that this rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee” has a funky, driving beat, something not often found in country music. Could it be country R & B? Rhythm and Bluegrass? The drums and harmonica work together with the guitar to keep this one jerking along (pleasantly jolting, that is).

Unlike the Paul Simon tunes, these songs really do need to be re-done because Kristofferson is a much better writer than singer. Willie can actually take these songs to another level. The harmonica kills me on “Help Me Make it Through the Night.” I wonder if it’s Mickey Raphael. The guitar sounds a little too much like Easy Listening for this most heartbreaking of songs. The theme fits Willie’s philosophy perfectly. Making it through the night, making it through the viscosity, the gravity, the inertia, the medium of time. As half-spiritual, half-material beings we struggle with the friction between the two. One way to look at Willie’s (and here Kris’s) songs may be as helps to making it through the night, making it through time.

I notice that Willie produced this album himself. He keeps the vocals in the forefront. “Why Me” stands out as a hardcore gospel tune. I haven’t listened to many of these in my first 17 days of my journey through Willie’s complete catalog.

“For the Good Times” reminds me of Willie’s own “Remember the Good Times.” “There’ll be time enough for sadness when you leave me.” Time for sadness. What else is time for? Perhaps time is sadness. Translated, then, this reads: time for time. Time for contemplating the passage of time.

“If you’ve got the freedom, then I’ve got the time.” Even in a song as silly-sounding as “You Show Me Yours (And I’ll Show You Mine),” we have the Proustian theme of time. “If you’re feeling salty, I’ll be your Tequila.” I wonder if that line ever worked for Kris or Willie.

“Wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been.” Again, in “Loving Her was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” we find that theme of erasing time, of altering or manipulating memories. The harmonica continues to steal the show on this album. This may be the best harmonica performance on a Willie Nelson album thus far. I would almost call this album a duet between Willie and Mickey Raphael (or whoever is on harmonica). “Believing it was never gonna end.” Believing time isn’t real, that it doesn’t apply to us.

“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” I’ve already commented on this song in my blog about Naked Willie. I need to go back and compare these two versions, and then listen to Kristofferson’s own rendition. This time around I notice the line “Disappearing dreams of yesterday.” The significance of days—Sunday and Saturday especially—and months—December—or seasons—autumn—strikes me in Willie’s songs. These are the hard facts, the certainties of time. The nouns in the grammar of time. The guard rails.

“Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends” continues the theme of denial. In “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” he wishes he was stoned so he wouldn’t have to deal with the reality of time. Here he hopes that if you don’t mention it, you don’t talk about it, somehow it won’t end. Earlier, he sings about “believing it was never gonna end,” but this is hard to do if people are talking about how it will, in fact, end. Is this hopeful optimism or simply ostrich-like sticking of our heads in the sand?

The thing that strikes me most about this album, though, is how slow it is. Even for someone who loves Willie for his slow pacing, I started to grow impatient with how long these nine songs took. Maybe this is Willie’s way of stretching time. Testing our patience. Maybe that’s why Proust wrote 6 volumes and 3,000 pages. In this case, the sound truly suggests the sense.

“Never’s just the echo of forever.” Oh my. What can that mean? “Lonesome as a love that might have been.” “Let me go on loving and believing till it’s over.”

“Never’s just the echo of forever.” I’ll need to return to that one. I can’t get my head around it just yet. I need more time.

Who'll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes (1991)

“Who’ll buy my memories of things that used to be?” Who will believe them? Who will pay for them? Time is money, and Willie has made a living singing about time. The CD case says that these songs were all recorded at Pedernales in Spicewood, Texas with just Willie and his acoustic guitar. This is as naked as Willie gets, and this may be my favorite album. I’ll need to compare it closely with Crazy: The Demo Sessions. This collection has twice as many songs, though, so it has an advantage. I’ll need to do some research to find out when and how all of these were recorded.

“It Should Be Easier Now,” but it isn’t. The healing hands of time don’t always heal. His heart keeps hanging around, like that local memory. Memory could be defined as time in your mind. Time confined in your mind.

“Love that has stood the test of time.” “Gone are the times when I would walk with you and hold your hand.” “Will You Remember when you held mine.” “Now when you kiss another’s lips, will you remember mine?” And why does it matter to me whether you will or you won’t? The memory, the time in my mind, seems more important than the person.

“I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone.” I don’t believe time. I don’t believe you are in the past and not in the present. I can’t, don’t, won’t believe you aren’t in my future. I refuse to accept the limitations of time.

No need to say much about “Yesterday’s Wine” since I already covered it in an early post, but I think this version may be better than the one on the album. “Aging with time.” Isn’t that redundant? Isn’t that what aging is? The passage of time? Willie, like Proust and Stendhal, writes about love as it relates to time and mind. And perhaps love is simply the nexus, the crossroads, of time and mind. Love is what our mind does to time. It tries to defeat time. And poetry and music do the same thing. Every sonnet and every 2 ½-minute song is an attempt to chip away at the edifice of time.

“It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” Again, I commented on this song in an earlier post, but again, this version is superior.

“I pray that you will not forget your country boy.” Willie’s great hope, his greatest desire, like Beowulf’s, is to be remembered. He is greedy for memories.

“I’ve been feelin’ a little bad because I’ve been feelin’ a little better without you.” Feeling bad because you feel better may be the definition of the blues, of honky tonk, and of the artist’s temperament in general. “It’s a little like rain, but a lot like a sunny day.” Feeling happy when it rains. Sweet and sour. Hurts so good. “My love is that sound that you hear in your mind.” Are memories sounds, smells, senses, imprinted, biochemically, in the synaptic web of our brain, the net of our memories, a net designed to capture and store time? A stored vibration? Is that what love is? The word made flesh? Flesh turned into a word, a sound?

“Permanently Lonely” is one of my all-time favorite Willie songs. I prefer the version on Crazy: The Demo Tapes, but this is a close second. Again, the irony of Willie singing about always and permanence, a man on his third or fourth wife, a man always on the road, always on the run. Living in a home motel. A man for whom a motel, a bus, is home. Yet here he states that the woman who left him will be permanently lonely while he will be “alright in a little while.” In just a little bit of time. “The future is not very pretty for your kind. For your kind will always be running.” Hmm. The pot calling the kettle black? This song, written early in his career about someone else, I presume, may be the most ironic of all, as it describes Willie later in life perfectly. And yet he isn’t lonely thinking about all the broken hearts he left behind. It is he who has been alright “in a little while” while they deal with permanent loneliness. It is they who are now singing “Ain’t it funny, how time slips away.”

“Time rolls on like a river, and, oh, there’s just so much to do.” It’s so hard to live within a finite amount of time. So limiting. Like it is so hard to sing within a finite meter.

“I’m a lonely little mansion for sale.” Furnished with everything but love. All he has are torn pictures, faded memories. Love is being in synch with time; loneliness is when it moves on without you. When it gives you the slip. When it slips away.

“A short time is better than no time.” “Summer of Roses” and “December Day” I covered previously. Again, I like these versions better.

“Pretend I never happened, and erase me from your mind.” As if you could wipe the hard drive clean so easily. “All the places must be better than the ones I leave behind.” “If you ever think about me, if I ever cross your mind. Just pretend I never happened. And erase me from your mind. You will not want to remember a love as cold as mine.” Really? That’s exactly what we can’t do. What we must do. “I don’t suppose you’ll be unhappy. You’ll find ways to spend your time.” But that’s exactly it. We can’t. We spend the time we have lamenting the time we’ve lost.

“Slow down old world.” We want to slow time down, but we can’t. “I live too fast.” “I once was a fool for the women, now I’m just a fool, that’s all.” I think these songs work for me, I believe them, because Willie really lived them. These songs were closest to the act of creation. Written in real time as the events were occurring, or shortly thereafter. The spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.

“Opportunity to Cry” is my favorite Willie Nelson song. “Watching the sunrise on the other side of town.” Waiting and being let down. “You gave your word, now I return it to you, with this suggestion as to what you can do. Just exchange the words I love you for goodbye while I take this opportunity to cry.” You said you’d love me forever, you said you’d transcend time, help me transcend my mortal condition, eliminate the possibility of loneliness, and then time slipped away just like that.

I now see “I’m Falling in Love Again” in the larger context of the concept album Phases and Stages. The woman’s point of view on the first side of the LP. The surrounding songs on the album add luster to this gem.

“If You Could Only See what’s going through my mind.” If you could only see time, see transitions, see minds. See the past and future all at once in an eternal present, as God sees it. “And if you could see our love directing time.” Love telescopes time, absorbs it, bends it, like gravity. Loneliness is a type of spiritual gravity that curves time. And in the best of Willie’s songs we do see what is going through his mind, and it helps us understand what’s going through our own.

“You told me you’d love me forever, but the one in your arms is not me.” And if that’s love, “I’d rather you didn’t love me.” It isn’t funny how time slips away in this case. True love wouldn’t let go of time so easily. These 25 little songs, ranging from 1:32-3:51, like the sonnet sequences of Shakespeare, Petrarch, George Meredith,

“What can you do to me now” that I am safely outside of time, immune, numb, safely out of the fray?
Don’t let her get the best of me. Don’t let me start feeling lonely. I need help defending against the ravages of love, time, and mind. These songs are about protecting ourselves, hopping back up and dusting ourselves off after a tumble with time. That didn’t hurt. I can take it.

“Remember the good times. They’re smaller in number and easier to recall. Don’t spend too much time on the bad times. Their staggering number will be heavy as lead on your mind. And don’t waste a moment unhappy, invaluable moments gone with the leakage of time as we leave on our own separate journeys moving west with the sun to a place very deep in our minds.” Time and mind is everywhere in this compact little 1:32 song. So much time folded, layered into this lyric. If Proust was a neuroscientist, so is Willie. The journey deep into our mind as we wrestle with time. It is always a fight, a tussle, with time. But we escape into our mind. We can defeat time by sorting out and filing away and organizing the past, compartmentalizing it, and choosing which parts matter, which parts to recall. In this way we edit our own memoirs and escape from the bad parts by living with the parts in our mind we choose to keep around. We spend time with the times, the local memories, we choose to associate with. We can choose our memories like our friends. We can friend and de-friend them. Or can we? Is it that easy? There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. But is it so?

Just “Wake Me When It’s Over.” I’ll just sleep through the hard parts. Drink through the hard parts, run from the hard parts. Get high through the low parts. Fast forward through the long boring parts which make up most of life. TIVO life. Fastforward through the ravages, the pain, the challenges of time. Is that really what we want? Or do the commercials add something to life?

These songs sure hang together. “Home Motel” says it all. The home motel on lost love avenue. Like the lonely little mansion. A symbol for a mind in shambles.

I was teaching a group of 11th graders about Wordsworth’s 1798 preface to Lyrical Ballads, his revolutionary manifesto about poetry. Like Willie, Wordsworth wrote about outcasts, outlaws, beggars. Like Johnny Cash, the man in black. And he wrote in the vernacular, the common tongue. And he elevated lyric poetry the way Lennon and McCartney elevated the 2 ½-minute song.

If you own only one Willie Nelson album, it should be either Crazy: The Demo Sessions or this one. You get more for your money with this. It’s all here. The Bhagavad-Gita of Willie’s oeuvre. The holy of holies.

It Always Will Be (2004)

Think about it. Time slips away, and yet it “always” will be. “There are some things I think about, and every time I do it breaks my heart.” People don’t break your heart, thinking about people breaks your heart. It’s the thinking that does it. Another example of Willie’s Proustian view of love and time. It lives alone on an island, and he can see it in the distance, in the darkness. Like the light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

“I’m gonna love you till the wheels come off,” but they tend to come off sooner than you think when time slips away. I don’t really understand the Tom Waits’ song “Picture in a Frame.” A very pretty song, but why is the sun blue and gold? I have no clue. I thought it might be something like Dolly’s “the sky is green, the grass is blue, and I never loved you.”

Willie dusts off an old Jimmy Day tune from 1963. A classic country music story with that classic lonesome steel guitar. Don’t tell the woman I just broke up with how hard I’m takin’ it. Tell her I’m fine. It’s the biggest lie that makes the best 3 ½ minute sad song. It works almost every time.

Willie’s daughter Paula is trying a bit too hard on her “Be That as it May,” but Willie’s vocals make up for it, almost. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree with this line: “A promise is a lie/ With a prettier disguise/ Like I will love you for the rest of my life.” The old lie of time. Always promising that it won’t fly away. Cheatin’ time. She ends with “I’m running out of time.” If there was a concordance for Willie’s complete lyrics, I bet the words “time” and “mind” would show up with highest frequency.

Luke Nelson seems to have a bit of the old man’s way with words, too. “I once had a heart/ Now I have a song” may be the most concise summation of the suffer-into-truth maxim. Another gem is “You could bring out the worst in everyone you knew/ But no one could ever bring the worst out of you.” That subtle shift in syntax creates the semantic frisson I find irresistible. I get it again on track seven with “I been thrown into better places than this.” The simple yet surprising change of “out of” to “into” gives pleasure.

I dismissed this album out of hand the first time I heard it because of “Big Booty.” It may be my least favorite Willie song thus far. Perhaps the only song I will skip on all future listens.

“I lost my mind so long ago,” and he is stilling losing it in 2004, at age 71. Fall has always been my favorite season, and it seems to be Willie’s, too. “As autumn fills the air,” he realizes his “broken heart belongs to you.” In spring your heart belongs to your beloved, but in autumn, you offer your broken heart.

I don’t care for the lyrics to “Dreams Come True” (too trite, too cliché), but I’m glad he did a duet with Nora Jones. My wife loves her. They blend together nicely in this duet, but I’m more of a sucker for Lucinda Williams on the next track. Of course the title would be “Overtime.” You never get over time. It always gets over on you. “The healing hands of time”? I’m not sure I get the play on words even now. “I’ll get over you/ Overtime.” The preposition expressing a relationship between the speaker and time becomes a noun. But you only know this if you read the lyrics, if you see that what sounds like “over time” is really “overtime.” Maybe she means she will have to work “overtime” to get over him. Workin’ overtime to get over you. That’s another country song waiting to happen. Clocking in. Punching in. Working overtime at the honky tonk to forget you. Working late. The poetics of country music has always fascinated me. The word play, the turns of phrase. Like the turn in the sonnet. The hook, the twist, the surprise. I’m not sure Lucinda Williams can sing a dishonest song. She seems to have more pain and honesty per square inch than most singer/songwriters.

Speaking of honesty, Toby Keith and Chuck Cannon wrote an honest one with “Tired.” A poignant drama in 4:14. It has description, dialog, and a narrative arc. Spare as Cormac McCarthy. It does seem to be a bit of a rip off of James Taylor’s “Millworker,” though. “Millwork ain’t easy, millwork ain’t hard, millwork ain’t nothin’ but an awful boring job.” Compare that to, “This work ain’t hard, it’s only boring as can be.” I used to hear Chuck Cannon sing in the round at The Bluebird Café in Nashville. I still maintain that Gary Burr is the best songwriter in Nashville. And I’m a big Don Henry fan, too.

Loneliness, neediness, wanting, longing. That about sums up country music.
The lyrics to “Texas” seem beneath Willie. Rhyming “night,” “light,” and “might.” All we need is “moon” and “June.” But the music is so trippy and flamenco, and he strings these spare lyrics out to 3:48 with such meandering guitar riffs that I remain intrigued. You’re not sure where it is going. It’s about as uncommercial as you can get. Who would play this on the radio?

The only musician I recognize in the liner notes is Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and he rocks on Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider.” When I see the lengthy list of studios used for this album, it makes me think many of these tracks were laid down and emailed in from hither and yon. I don’t know if I could really tell this in a blind test, but it bothers me nonetheless. I want to know, to believe, that they are in the studio together making music.

Again, I’m amazed at how wrong I was about this album the first time around. I liked “Be That as it May” and that was about it. Now it ranks pretty high up there. Another one that will get better with time. Overtime. Like all great art, it rewards re-reading or re-listening or re-viewing.

So I’m 214 songs and 12 hours into this adventure. A half a day of Willie Nelson on my IPOD at this point. A half nelson. It has been a full 15 days.

One last paradox before I go. For someone who is so restless, so always on the road, so never satisfied, Willie sure sings a lot about "always."

Across the Borderline (1993)

The liner notes on this cd are not helpful at all. Don Was, who I believe helped jumpstart Peter Gabriel’s career (hence the cover of “Don’t Give Up”), produces this album. He does a nice job of keeping the vocals prominent and the instruments in the background. In so many previous albums, the song selection and lyrics were excellent, but the production was flawed. In this case, though, the production is excellent, but the song selection is questionable. They are all great songs, but they just don’t seem to fit Willie. I don’t believe him when he sings them. No one should sing Paul Simon songs. No one can do them better. No one can do them justice. I do like the Dylan duet. “My American dream, comin’ apart at the seams, tell me what it means.” Bonnie Raitt steals the show on “Getting Over You.” “Valentine” works. Very pretty. Marc O’Connor plays fiddle on parts of this album, but I still prefer Johnny Gimble. “Most Unoriginal Sin” ranks up there with the cleverest of Willie’s lyrics (though John Hiatt wrote them). I love the rhyme of “apple” and “Sistine Chapel.” “If I Were the Man You Wanted, I Wouldn’t Be the Man I Am” fits Willie and his life. Lyle Lovett wrote it, but it could have come straight from Willie’s epic life by Joe Nick Patoski. “She’s Not For You” seemed out of place. Not sure why it’s here. I didn’t like the music to “Still is Still Moving to Me,” though I like the paradoxical lyrics. Willie’s always behind the beat yet always off to the next town. His voice is so slow it almost stops, and yet the wheels on the tour bus barely slow down from town to town.

Hmmm. After a second full listen, this time on my IPOD, I’m reconsidering. The duet with Dylan, “Heartland,” which the two also co-wrote, will age well with further listening. My son Jack (13) insists Willie should not do that “la, la, la, la” thing on “Still is Still Moving to Me.” I tend to agree. I still don’t think the Paul Simon songs are a good fit with Willie, but it is impressive the variety of folks he is working with on this album: Raitt, Dylan, Simon. Some call him a duet whore; I call him fearless. Unafraid of risking sentimentality, unafraid of failure. A courageous if, at times, flawed album. I predict it will grow on me.

Yesterday's Wine (1971)

“These are Difficult Times.” “Remember the Good Times.” I think you know where I’m going with this. Time is always on Willie’s mind, and always has been. “Aging with time, like Yesterday’s Wine.” “We’re yesterday’s wine,” on one hand; but on the other hand, yesterday is our wine. We get drunk on yesterday. Yesterday can be intoxicating. Memories can be richer and more meaningful than our present reality. Why is that? The version of “Me and Paul” on this album may be Willie’s best. I may be alone in thinking this, but I prefer Yesterday’s Wine to both Phases and Stages and Shotgun Willie. I love how Willie was restricted to ten tracks on this album so he made tracks 1 and 5 into two-song medleys. “Goin’ Home” is as tender and spare as can be. Willie doesn’t play guitar on this album, and he has a host of studio musicians backing him up, but they are turned down so low you can barely hear them on most of the tracks, especially this last one. I prefer Johnny Gimble on fiddle to the guy on this album. The background to “Summer of Roses” is a bit cloying, but it may be one of Willie’s prettiest vocal performances. Same with “December Day.” In some ways, Willie’s voice may be peaking in 1971. The background just sounds like tracks laid down by studio musicians without much invested in the performance. I wish Willie could have had his road band backing him up on this, or nothing at all. As always, not naked enough. Still, it’s more naked than Phases and Stages and Shotgun Willie. On a totally unrelated note, apparently trumpeter Lester Young recorded a version of “Crazy” on his album Avant Pop. “Rock of ages cleft for me.” A rock’s relationship to time. This whole album is the arc of a man’s life, so time itself becomes the protagonist. “A short time to be with you is better than no time.” “I bring you one springtime with robins.” “I bring you one summer of roses.” “I bring you one autumn of dry leaves.” Willie is bringing her the seasons. Bringing her time itself, or more precisely, the passage of time. “September wine numbed a measure of time.” Numbing time. Anesthetizing time. Sounds like Walker Percy. “As my memories raced back to love’s eager beginning.” Drag racing time. Trying to gun it and outrun time at the next stoplight. A “December Day” is a frozen, distilled moment in time. This album makes the top ten, and I can’t see it being dislodged.

Country Favorites: Willie Nelson Style (1966)

This may be Willie’s fastest album. “Columbus Stockade Blues” almost sounds like the turntable has been speeded up. Of course, Willie manages to seem relaxed even as he is speed singing like an auctioneer. “I’d Trade All of My Tomorrows (For Just One Yesterday)” further confirms my Willie-Nelson-is-the-reincarnation-of-Marcel-Proust theory. The fact that he is willing to trade, to bargain, to gamble with time. The fact that he prefers the past. In “Go On Home,” he sings, “You’re watchin’ your watch, and I know what’s on your mind.” Watching time. Time on your mind. Thinking about time. Time and Mind. These are the two big ideas in Willie’s music. I still can’t believe Willie’s sad songs. “Don’t You Ever Get Tired (Of Hurting Me)” just doesn’t work because I can’t imagine Willie staying hurt very long. It’s the same reason Hindu literature cannot be truly tragic. Reincarnation does not allow it. And how can the same guy who sings the dainty “Fraulein” be one of the Outlaws, the Highwaymen? Yet this album somehow works. I actually really like it. Willie’s voice is front and center. His voice is so young and full and gentle. Maybe I just like it because it is from 1966 and is so different from his modern stuff. The cookie cutter background music doesn’t bother me as much as the strings on Shotgun Willie for some reason. No information on this repackaged version of this album. No idea about musicians, recording dates, composers. I’ll need to research this further and report back on this album at a later date.

Shotgun Willie (1973)

I want Willie as naked as I can get him, and on this disc, he is most naked on “My Cricket and Me,” “A Song for You,” and “Save Your Tears” (both versions, but the alternate version on track 22 is even more naked than track 12). I actually prefer the studio version of “Shotgun Willie” to the live version, but the studio version of “Whiskey River” is too slow; even my son Jack commented on that as we were listening to it on the way to his guitar lesson. Turns out this disc was not recorded at Muscle Shoals (as Phases and Stages was), but the funky beat on “Devil in a Sleeping Bag” is about as R&B as Willie gets. The second alternate version of “Whiskey River” (on track 23) is so slow it actually becomes more interesting. It is another one of Willie’s limbo moves where he seems to be daring his band to see how slow they can go. He seems to be stretching the beat like silly putty. Willie plays his vocals like a steel guitar, stretching certain notes till they cry uncle. Overall, I didn’t like this album as much as I wanted to (again, because of the strings), but there are 4 or 5 songs that are among his best, his saddest, his rockin’-est, his nakedest. And when he sings, “each night the local memory comes around,” I can’t help thinking of Proust and how he was haunted by memories. How he courted them. Courted his own haunting. Willie and Proust might come to blows over who had the “hardest workin’ memory in this town.” Hardworking memories. That sounds like the title of a book about what Marcel Proust and Willie Nelson have in common. Someone should write that. Maybe someone already has. Maybe someone already is.

Phases and Stages (1974)

This album was recorded at Muscle Shoals, famous for its R & B sound. Even as slow as some of the songs are on this concept album, you can still hear more of a funky beat than you get on Willie’s other albums. “The jeans fit a little bit tighter than they did before” is one of my all-time favorite lines, ranking right up there with “Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear.” Having recently turned 40 myself, I can sympathize with the woman in this song trying to go out honky-tonking and acting like a single person at 40. Johnny Gimble on fiddle continues to impress me. Noticeably absent are Willie’s road band members: Bobbie Nelson, Paul English, Mickey Raphael, and Bee Spears. Funny how the studio musicians and the road musicians are so different. Imagine U2 doing that. Touring without the Edge. “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling In Love Again” with Gimble’s haunting fiddle in the background may be as pretty a song as Willie has in his oeuvre. Not sure why he has all the cheesy Nashville Sound strings in “I Still Can’t Believe Your Gone.” That’s probably the most disappointing version of an otherwise good song that I can think of. There is some fine guitar picking toward the end of the song, but the strings just drown everything out. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” is one of my favorite songs, lyric-wise. “Be careful what you’re dreaming, soon your dreams will be dreamin’ you.” Again, though, the strings ruin an otherwise great song. You need to look elsewhere for better versions of this song without strings. It’s like Charlie Parker with strings. Just wrong. A friend of mine said the album Charlie Parker with Strings killed him. That’s how bad and wrong it was.

Wow. This is really interesting. Tracks 12-21 were recorded in Nashville with Willie’s road band (mentioned above). The “Bloody Mary Morning” version on track 15 is smoking. I like the way the back-up singers kick in during the chorus. It sounds like a live performance. It captures the band’s live sound. I think I like this group’s version of “No Love Around” on track #16 better, too. Still have the syrupy strings on “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone.” Overall, I think I like Shotgun Willie better, but the previously unreleased tracks 12-21 with the road band are worth re-visiting.

Live at the Texas Opry House (1974)

Recorded on June 29th and June 30th of 1974, this disc combines songs from both sets from the Saturday and Sunday concerts. Tracks 1-11 originally appeared on The Classic, Unreleased Collection (1993). It is one of three from The Complete Atlantic Recordings, which also includes Phases and Stages and Shotgun Willie. Interestingly, Willie turns 40 years old while working on this music, which is the age I have just reached myself. This concert may contain the best version of “Whiskey River,” the Johnny Bush song that Willie has made his signature song. This album also has the distinction of being one of two (the other is Red-Headed Stranger) that my wife will willingly listen to. “Whiskey River, take my mind” reinforces the introspective, contemplative theme I keep hearing in Willie’s music. Even in this most upbeat and dance-like of his tunes, he is talking about his mind. His mind, it seems, is always on his mind. Thinking about thinking. The cosmic cowboy was meta before meta was cool. The band is on fire in this concert, especially on “Truck Drivin’ Man.” Willie’s version of “She Thinks I Still Care” cannot compete with George Jones’s, but it’s better than James Taylor’s. Willie just can’t ever be as sad as George Jones. And when he tries to be sad, it isn’t believable because you know Willie can’t be that sad. He’s too Hakuna Matata. Johnny Gimble on fiddle plays my favorite solo on the Funny/Crazy/Night Life medley from set 1 of the Sunday show. After the solo, Willie says, “That’s just how I wrote it.” And that’s how perfect it sounds. Like a sonnet snapping shut. I will also be paying attention to Jimmy Day on steel guitar.

It occurs to me, listening to “Walkin’,” and it’s opening line—“After carefully considering…”—that one way to define Willie’s music is recklessness recollected in tranquility (with apologies to William Wordsworth). Who else can rebel by walking? It almost has a Gandhi-like quality to it. Thoreau, Tolstoy, Ruskin. With the exception of Ruskin, these were some rough characters, outlaws and rebels in their way, extremists, and yet they preached “civil” disobedience. Non-violent resistance. Willie does the same thing when he “breaks meter” by singing behind the beat, instead of racing ahead of it.

This collection is also notable for having alternate takes of several songs. It offers the listener the opportunity to compare multiple versions of the same songs (in some cases, three versions): one studio, one live, and one alternate take.

Willie sings, “After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind still fairly sound” (in “Me and Paul”). The sound in his mind is sound? And then later, “After carefully considering…” Isn’t the definition of a free spirit, an outlaw, a rebel, someone who doesn’t carefully consider, someone who doesn’t carefully weigh the pros and cons, someone who doesn’t take several readings to find out which way the wind is blowing? And here we are with that paradox again. Willie clearly does both. He carefully considers and he is inconsiderate at the same time. How did art ever get associated with freedom? Any great artist is careful in that they care about words, or notes, or details. How can you take care and take risks at the same time? In the latest New Yorker Gilbert writes about her latest book about marriage. She says she is like an infant who can only sleep in a moving car. This reminded me of Willie hating Branson (“he now sings “Branson was the roughest” instead of “Nashville”) because he missed the bus. He missed being able to drive off every day and leave whatever messes you created behind and start anew. And yet, isn’t this the definition of infantile? The reasons infants can only sleep in moving cars or while being rocked or while sucking a pacifier is because they are not mature enough to calm themselves. Isn’t the definition of an adult one who can calm themselves? Although one might argue that adults simply replace their pacifiers with more sophisticated crutches or idols. Ariel Levy blasts Gilbert for wanting to have it both ways: freedom and commitment. And maybe that’s the defining paradox of Willie’s life and music, too. Can home really be on the road? Can we really escape the inertia of commitment or the gravity of time by always moving? I’m looking forward to Phases and Stages tomorrow, and missing the vinyl because with vinyl the woman’s view is on side A and the man’s perspective is on side B. With a CD or an MP3 you lose this nice physical distinction. Interestingly, sales of vinyl records are up. They are old enough that they are becoming hip again. People are starting to miss the physicality, I think, of the albums in sleeves with liner notes you can actually read without glasses. I wonder if it will happen to newspapers after they die, too. They will return as novelty items? Maybe it takes time for us to realize what we lost when we switched to the new technology.

The Sound in Your Mind (1976)

So I have a new candidate for my top ten. I can’t imagine a more consistently good WN album than this one. Mind and time continue to dominate his songs. “The Healing Hands of Time” and “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time” fit into Willie’s Proustian focus on time. “The Sound in Your Mind” and “A Penny For Your Thoughts” are examples of Willie’s focus on thinking, reflection, contemplation. And when Willie gets contemplating, it’s as if he can’t play slow enough. I have heard that Morton Feldman couldn’t get his orchestras to play soft enough, and I can imagine Willie fussing at his band to play slower. Has there ever been a more soft-spoken, slow-singing outlaw? Craziness remains a theme as well, as seen in “I’d Have to Be Crazy” (does thinking too much about time make you crazy?). This may be the most surprising WN song I have encountered on 30 or so albums. There appears to be some backwoods preacher chanting faintly in the background at one point. It startles me every time. It’s almost as if some random sound just wandered into his song like a daydream drifting in and out of his mind. I’ve listened to it half a dozen times today, and I still never know where the lyrics or the tune is going. It never loses its ability to surprise. Like Monk, Willie resists predictability in his phrasing, but this may be his most unpredictable of all. It deals with the same idea as “Crazy,” but it’s more trippy and less lonesome. Almost a wry version of “Crazy.” This album features the standard band: Rex (percussion), Bobbie (piano), Paul (drums), Mickey (harmonica), Bee (bass), Jody (electric guitar), and Willie on acoustic. This, to me, is pure Willie Nelson. The vocals are front and center, there is a full band, but each instrument is clear and distinct. It reminds me of polyphonic music where the different voices interweave but do not blend (as in homophonic music). Maybe I like this because I like keeping my food separate on the plate. I like to be able to see and taste each item individually. My wife likes the live version of the Funny/Crazy/Night Life medley from the 1974 Texas Opry House concert better than the slowed down version on this album, but I disagree. I like both. I marvel at Willie’s boldness in opening the album with the plaintive “That Lucky Old Sun.” And think of what I just wrote there. He makes a bold statement by opening in such a mellow manner. It’s a kind of musical martial arts, juke box judo. Willie has the beatific, beatnik, Buddha smile on this album cover. The cosmic cowboy, the honky-tonk hippie. The music is contemplative in both the intellectual and the spiritual sense. And what is the sound in your mind anyway? Normally we have thoughts and ideas in our minds. But sounds? What does a mind sound like? Sounding the depths. And to my mind, The Sound in Your Mind, at this point, makes my evolving top ten list of WN albums. Here are six I can’t see being dethroned, but we’ll see:

Crazy: The Demo Sessions
Stardust (1978)
Storytellers (1998)
Spirit (1996)
Who’ll Buy My Memories (released in 1991, but recorded earlier)
The Sound in Your Mind (1976)

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.