Healing Hands of Time (1994)

After listening yesterday to the oboe and the English horn in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, I am startled to hear them in a Willie Nelson album. And yet, what instrument could be more melancholy than an oboe? I actually liked this more than I expected to. This isn’t Charlie Parker with strings. Willie’s voice is in its prime (if the ageless Willie can be said to have a prime), and even the orchestra and its maestro cannot keep Willie from breaking meter. Hearing him toy with an orchestra is even more fun than listening to him toy with a simple rhythm section. I could do without the cheesy back-up singers, but the strings and horns actually provide an interesting backdrop for his vocal shenanigans. This version of “Crazy” may make my top 3 or 4 (behind the Demo Sessions and Storytellers and perhaps another live version medley like the Texas Opry House in 1974 with Johnny Gimble’s fiddle). The orchestra basically substitutes for the fiddle and the steel and the harmonica, but he keeps the guitar and piano solos. The trumpet on “Night Life” is a sound I haven’t heard on a Willie album before, except, of course, on the Wynton Marsalis album. We also have a flute and an alto flute on some of these tracks. On “How Will I Know” there is a violin solo that seems more like a classical violin solo than a fiddle solo. A subtle distinction, but it makes this album interesting. Call me crazy, but half-way through my second listen today I am putting this in my untenable top ten. Willie’s vocals are as good as they get, and the background is unique, surprising, interesting. It’s not Stardust, but it’s not that far off.

Lyrically and thematically, “There’s Worse Things Than Falling In Love” steals the show. I’m not sure the lyrics even make sense. He compares a lover leaving to “a funeral where nobody dies” or a “full house and nobody home.” The third stanza, though, intrigues me:

I’m well past my half-way in time

But I still have a lot on my mind

And the one thing Willie is most certain about, his golden rule, if you will, is that “there are worse things than being alone.” But what does he mean? That good things come out of loneliness and solitude?

On “If I Had My Way,” Willie asserts that if he had his way, “we would never grow old.” He didn’t write the song, but he may as well have. He chastises a lover for promising him that she would love him forever and then dumping him immediately. He laments that time slips away, and yet he’s a sucker for making this same promise to others. He knows it isn’t possible, but he doesn’t care. If he had his way, it would be possible. We could love each other forever and time would never slip away.

In “I’ll Be Seeing You,” we have a typical Willie twist on a cliché. He doesn’t mean that he’ll actually see you again soon; he means that your memory will be haunting him wherever he goes and wherever he looks. He will be seeing you everywhere forever after your gone. He will see more of you after you leave, which perhaps explains why there are worse things than being alone. After saying “see ya,” ironically, he will see more of you. “See ya” and “see you” become two sides of the same coin. I can see more of you when I can’t see you. I can see you better in hindsight. Is this why absence makes the heart grow fonder? I’m still not sure what’s worse than being alone? Being with people? Being with the real Daisy is worse than dreaming of the perfect Daisy in my mind?

The three pictures on this album speak volumes. On the cover Willie has a carefully groomed ponytail falling over a black tux. His face is serious and contemplative like a serious classical artist. On the inside cover he’s wearing a “Bloody Mary Morning” bandana, and on the back cover he leans against a black Steinway with a black cowboy hat and a crisp black suit. Will the real Willie please stand up? He’s as comfortable in a tux as in a wife-beater. And he sings the same no matter what he’s wearing. It’s just the bands and the genres that change.

The poet Charles Bukowski writes,

"there are worse things

than being alone

but it often takes

decades to realize this

and most often when you do

it's too late

and there's nothing worse

than too late"

I’m not sure what Willie or Bukowski mean, but it’s at the center of everything Willie writes and sings. The paradox of time and love and memory.

Live From Austin, Texas (2006)

On first listen, this concert seems stronger than the Live at Billy Bob’s from 2007. What’s interesting about this set list is that every single song is a huge hit. Willie never has to pad out his set list with filler. He can pack it with wall-to-wall platinum. It is almost too much, though, like eating just icing. Sometimes you need a little cake. You can’t take just pure hits. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica has a pleasingly different sound with the live acoustics. This concert has all the standard Willie runs: “Whiskey River”-“Stay A Little Longer” and the Funny/Crazy/Night Life medley. This one is especially trippy. I’m really looking forward to listening to the dozen or more versions of this medley I can dig up and comparing them head-to-head. This one won’t be the best, but it has some original qualities that make it stand out. The harmonica figures prominently in this recording. We basically have a trio: Willie, Trigger, and Mickey. I had no idea Beth Nielson Chapman wrote “Nothing I Can Do About it Now.” This may be the best song on the album and one of his best versions of this song. Ditto for “Help Me Make it Through the Night.” This “Bloody Mary Morning” runs over 5 minutes and veers into an Allman Brothers kind of jam session toward the end. Then Willie slows “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” way down. Always playing with time and tempo. This “Always on Your Mind” ranks up with the best as well. I’m reminded of Jerry Garcia’s guitar work and vocal pacing on some of Willie’s tunes. His voice surprisingly soars on this one, even at 74. “Still is Still Moving to Me” still hasn’t grown on me, though I like it lyrically and philosophically. Ending with “Milk Cow Blues” is an adventurous choice. Willie seems to be sowing his wild oats on this one. He starts out slowly with this straightforward blues piece, but then he veers off into jam band land. Harmonica, piano, and guitar riffing all over the place. Willie’s vocals are as playful as I have ever heard them. Maybe Shelby Lynne inspired him, or maybe it was the hometown crowd in Austin, but Willie was feeling it. There are some surprising vocal flourishes I have not heard before in almost 60 albums thus far this year.

Songbird (2006)

I’m not crazy about the band on this album, except for Mickey Raphael. I guess I’m just partial to the road band or to Willie solo acoustic. Willie opens with a long blues tune, “Rainy Day Blues,” that clocks in at 5:32. “Songbird” is a bit too poppy and overproduced for my taste. Again, I respect Willie for using so many different producers and bands. You never know what might work, what might be the next Stardust. But this isn’t it. I guess I’m not a Ryan Adams fan. The electric guitar solos in the background seem out of place with Willie’s style. No liner notes to speak of, so I can’t tell who wrote what, but “Blue Hotel” certainly fits thematically into Willie’s repertoire. Not sure I like the chorus either, but it is something different, something I haven’t heard yet. Willie with gospel chorus and organ. It doesn’t work for me, but it was worth a try. Willie’s voice is interesting on this recording, but the production overshadows his voice and forces it into the background. I love the audacity of doing a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue,” but I’m partial to Jerry Garcia’s voice on this one. I wanted to like this more than I did. Maybe it was the electric guitar. Too loud. It drowns out the subtlety of Willie’s voice. He gets more powerful when the music gets softer and slower. I like how Willie works in three of his old standards—“We Don’t Run,” “Sad Songs and Waltzes,” and “Back to Earth.” "Back to Earth" is spare, with just steel and harp. It’s a five star version, as good as or better than any of his versions. Ditto for “Sad Songs and Waltzes.” Not sure how these spare recordings fit with the rest of the album. What kind of album is this anyway? I can’t get the concept, the thread that ties it all together. “Hallelujah” is certainly a trippy, Grateful Dead-like version of a gospel tune. This album baffles. Is it gospel, blues, pop, rock, country, folk? Where else can you find a gospel chorus with a harmonica and a steel guitar. Honky tonk gospel? Most people do one or the other. Willie does both at the same time. Willie sings the way Chinese landscape painters paint, from the angle of totality. He tackles all genres at once rather than doing one at a time. This version of “We Don’t Run” is on speed. It won’t hold up to other versions, but I admire the experiment. It will be fun to listen to this after the one on Spirit. I’ve never heard an “Amazing Grace” like this. No one takes liberties like Willie. The organ and Willie’s haunting phrasing make this more of a dirge. His voice wavers like a distorted guitar. Like a voice with a wah-wah pedal. Add trippy, jam-band gospel to Willie’s mash-up genre repertoire. Overall, this album is not one of my favorites, but I will revisit it because I still don’t know what to make of it, which often is a good sign that it might get better with further listenings. It surprises, which means it might last.

Willie and Ray (2005)

This one surprised me. Ray Price must be 80 or so on this album, but he sounds great. Willie’s vocals are strong as well. This album features Willie, Ray, steel, and fiddle, no harmonica. This allows the listener to focus more on the vocals. I’ve commented on many of these songs in previous blogs, but these versions are as good or better than some of the previous versions. They will stand up well in future head-to-head listens.

I'm so ashamed of my eyes cause they still cry for you

After they both watched my hand wave goodbye to you

And I've told them time and time again that this will never do

And I've told them how you always laughed at teardrops

I'm so ashamed of my arms for missing you

Last night I woke up just in time to see them reach for you

And now my heart confesses it still wants you too

I'm so ashamed of them all for loving you

Willie’s crying again and mad at himself for crying. Tears like memories have a mind and a will of their own. Women laughing at men’s tears goes back to the troubadours, Petrarch, Spencer, Shakespeare, Ovid, and the poets of courtly love.

Ray doesn’t sound too torn up about the fact that he’s “just destroyed the world [he’s] living in.” The bouncy Texas two-step drums and bass make this hard to take too seriously. I guess Willie got this from Ray.

“Something to Think About” shows up on Willie’s reggae album and on Me and the Drummer (and I comment on the lyrics in the blogs on those albums). I don’t think this is the best of the three versions, but I love the lyrics. “Here’s something to think about: I’ll still be thinking of you.”

I comment on “Run That By Me One More Time” in the blog about Live and Kickin’. This studio version may actually be better than the live version because you can hear the excellent lyrics more distinctly.

“Soft Rain” could be taken from Murasaki’s Genji. Perfect love is always destroyed by men. We seek the ideal love, but we never find it. Gatsby, Proust, etc., etc. etc.

“I’ll Keep On Loving You” appears on Last of the Breed and Moonlight Becomes You (and I comment on the lyrics there).

I feel like I have listened to and commented on “I’m Still Not Over You” before, but I can’t find it. He’s still not over her, and he doesn’t want to be. What would he be over anyway? Reminds me of Randy Travis’s “Is it still over, are we still though? Since my phone still ain’t ringin’, I assume it still ain’t you.” Still is still moving; still water runs deepest; but I’m still not over you, no matter what I do. Whether I run or stand still. Whether I hit the road or run home. Whether I drink or cry or try to erase my memories, nothing helps. The paradox of Willie, of course, is that he simultaneously seems to be suggesting that we are never over anything, and yet he always seems to be over everything before it happens with his beatific Buddhist calm.

Live at Billy Bob's Texas (2007)

My kids don’t like Willie Nelson’s music, but they’ve listened to so much of it in the car this year that even they can tell good Willie from bad Willie. My son Jack pointed out on the ride to school today that these were not very good versions of these songs compared to others we have listened to this year. Willie is talking through many of the passages of these standards rather than singing them. He even farms out the vocals for “Workin’ Man” to sideman Jody Payne. The liner notes say he play for 3 hours when he does Billy Bob’s, so I can understand why a 77 year-old man might get weary during such a set. The remarkable thing about this album is that it’s the same band and the same songs from the 1974 Texas Opry concert 33 years ago. I much prefer the 1974 concert, but still. The family is still rockin’ into their 70s. I’m interested to compare this Funny/Crazy/Night Life medley to others I’ve heard this year. This time around I noticed the lyrics to “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Kristofferson seems to be asking, “Help me navigate through time, the viscosity of it, the resistance of it. Help me be finite, limited, mortal, human. Help me make it through the night that is life. Help me make it through life as a human, bound by time. Help me face my own humanity and live it out. Help me be fully human.”

To Lefty From Willie (1977)

What a find! In his liner notes, John Morthland calls it “the Great Lost Willie Nelson album from this era.” Everyone knows Stardust (1978) and Red Headed Stranger (1975), but no one knows this one, which was also recorded in 1975. He didn’t release it till 1977 because Frizzell died shortly after Willie recorded this tribute, and he didn’t want to appear to be trying to exploit Lefty’s death for monetary gain. Willie has the same road band with him that he used on Red Headed Stranger. I need to listen to some of Lefty’s music to see how innovative his vocals were at the time and how he influenced Willie’s own vocal style. Morthland refers to Willie’s “virtually monochromatic timbre and phrasing.” Like Chinese landscape painting, there is a power to the monochromatic palate. Lefty’s “Look What Thoughts Will Do” clearly influenced many of Willie’s songs. “If drinking won’t kill me, her memory will.” Drinking doesn’t kill you; thinking about lost love kills you. “I’ve got a thinking problem.” So did Proust. Thoughts and memories can be just as fatally intoxicating.

Once I thought I loved just you, and I thought you loved me too

But today you say we're through; just look what thoughts will do.

Now another wears the crown, and you think that you have found

Just what makes your world go round; watch those thoughts they'll get you down.

And if within your future years your new love should bring you tears

Then you'll think of me I'm sure, but those thoughts won't help you, dear.

Once I thought I loved just you, and I thought you loved me too,

But today you say we’re through; now just look what thoughts will do.

This song is a precursor to “Funny How Time Slips Away” and other songs about thinking love would last forever, and finding out it won’t. Forget what they say about country music. It is cerebral stuff. If Proust was a neuroscientist, so was Lefty Frizzell. The guy who wrote the Proust book found a novel connection when reading Proust while working in a neuroscience lab. I found an equally novel connection by listening to Willie while reading Proust (and reading the Proust guy’s book).

“Always Late with Your Kisses” the way Willie is late with the meter. Perhaps his behind-the-beat singing is his revenge on those tardy kisses, the way Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s revenge on all those elusive Daisys. The question is, for how long will Willie “Want to Be With You Always.” Put another way, “How Long is Forever This Time.”

Jimmie Rodgers influenced Lefty, so I need to listen to more Jimmie Rodgers. I have checked out a collection of his songs from the library and will pursue that connection. Apparently Lefty had a huge influence on Merle and Randy Travis as well, and I can hear it now. I’m wondering if Mickey Raphael doesn’t play on some of Randy’s early albums, too. I love Merle’s version of “That’s the Way Love Goes,” but now I understand where it came from.

You want me to love just you

While you love your share

Don't you think that's a little unfair

It's me that stays home

While you stay gone

Till you decide to care

Now don't you think that's a little unfair

I can't see how it can be anything for me

What's mine is yours

What's yours is yours

That's how you wanted to be

And you want me to wait for you

Till you decide to care

Don't you think that's a little unfair

You want permanence from me while you seek change. You want to have your fidelity and violate it, too. You want me to care while you are careless. And yet, the phrase “a little unfair” has that wry, casual, quizzical feel that “funny” has in “Funny How Time Slips Away.” It says, “I’m not mad, just chuckling at how absurd your demands are. I’m not outraged and bitter. I’m smiling at how you are doing me wrong.” Maybe this how Willie wished his ex-wives treated his infidelities. Surely they did not display this stoic calm, this Buddhist serenity in the face of faithlessness.

Willie strips down the lyrics to “I Never Go Around Mirrors” and just sings the very essence of the song. He stretches out each word and each line, like a French chef creating a reduction. He distills it and distills it down. In this case, he distills the tears down. Here we see again the love-hate relationship with memories. I want to remember you, I don’t want to remember you. Maybe I can outrun or hide from or numb memories. Maybe if I stay away from mirrors I can deny how these memories are affecting me. Maybe I won’t see my shadow if I cover my eyes. It’s a charming, child-like response because doesn’t heartbreak reduce us to those raw, childlike emotions that adults usually can suppress?

I never go around mirrors

It just tears me up to see a grown man cry

And I never go around mirrors

‘Cause I’ve got a heartache to hide

“Railroad Lady” is a hoot. “She’s a railroad lady, just a little bit shady.”

This unreleased version of “If You’ve Got the Money” doesn’t seem as good as the single version.

It’s good to hear Willie singing straight country with no frills, just his own distinctive phrasing. I’m moving this into my untenable top ten.

Morthland asserts that Willie uses the “up and down volume of his voice” to achieve the effect Lefty gets by “breaking up notes and toying with them.” Willie seems to get more desolation in his voice with fewer theatrics. The genius is how he gets so much out of his voice with seemingly so little. So much suggestiveness with such subtle, such slow, such quiet variations. He makes it seem so easy and so effortless. Effortless desolation, unlike George Jones who is working hard to hit that mournful note. More like Miles Davis. He does more with silence between the notes, like Thelonius. Using the negative space of sound.

Last of the Breed (2007)

A lot of music for your money on this album. Two discs, 22 songs, three classic country singers—Merle, Willie, and Ray. I’m a bit shocked that someone other than Mickey Raphael is on harmonica. On “Back to Earth” Willie’s voice is as good as it ever was, and so is his gut-string guitar. I thought this album would be more of a Texas Swing thing, like Willie and the Wheel, but there are actually quite a few classic Willie country songs. Actually, upon closer examination, “Back to Earth” is the only Willie-penned song, but others sound like standards he has done on other albums. The vocals for Willie, Ray, and Merle are all quite strong. Hearing their voices together is instructive about how Willie’s phrasing evolved out of Price’s. This album has several gospel tunes—“Why Me” and “Sweet Jesus”—and a Leon Payne tune that Hank Williams made famous—“Lost Highway,” with standard honky tonk fiddle, steel, and harmonica.

“I Love You A Thousand Ways,” by Lefty Frizzell, is the precursor to Willie’s “Always on My Mind.” I’ll be true in the future; I’ll do better. I’ve been messing around, but I swear you were always on my mind. Yeah, right, and if you believe that, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona. In Jesse Ashlock’s “Please Don’t Leave Me Any More Darlin’,” he writes, “Love me as you have before.” This lets Willie strike that Proustian pose of idealizing the perfect love from the past, trying to return to it, turning back the hands of time. And then, in Floyd Tillman’s “I Gotta Have My Baby Back,” he’s trying to get that perfect love back again. Odette, Daisy, Beatrice, Laura. Perfect love. Past love. I had to LOL at Cindy Walker’s “Goin’ Away Party” when I realized that the speaker is throwin’ a goin’ away party for “a dream I’m telling goodbye.” It has the same understated humor as “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Willie was clearly influenced by Cindy Walker’s sense of humor. “Nobody’s comin’ but a heartache,

and some tears will drop in now most anytime. Don't worry it won't be a loud party. Dreams don't make noise when they die. And so since it’s a goin' away party go away and let me cry.” Memories are so real they are personified. They come and go, they haunt, they drop in. In this song he tells the memories to leave him alone and let him cry. Always crying. The cryingest Buddhist in the world. Crying Buddha could be the title of this blog. Or Buddha with the Blues. Or Blue Buddha. Or Buddha Blues. Like the Moody Blues. But beatific. Beatific blues. Blue smiles.

At this point, I almost don’t need to comment on “Sweet Memories.” The sweetness, the bittersweetness, of memory is the subject of almost every Willie Nelson song. “She slipped into the silence of my dreams last night, wandering from room to room, turning on each light.” Memories just wander in, hang out, like old friends.

Harlan Howard’s “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down” has that same subtle self-deprecating humor as Cindy Walker. The irony is that Willie is usually the one leaving people, the one moving on. And yet here he sings of waiting at home for his lover to return after a fling. Can we believe that Willie was ever really sitting at home by the phone like the dutiful stand by your man wife? I think not. Still a good song, though.

So how do I connect “Still Water Runs Deepest” to “Still is Still Moving to Me”? Which is sweeter to Willie, Jesus or memories? Willie and Hag sing “Still Water” on Pancho and Lefty (1982). See my commentary on that blog. The irony, of course, is that Willie and Hag are complaining that still water is “So peaceful and dependable,” but they “can’t say the same about you.” Ha! Who could say the same about them? Peaceful and dependable? Outlaws? On the road?

Floyd Tillman’s “I Love You So Much It Hurts” says it all. Love hurts, but it hurts so good. And “there’s nothing I can do.” Subject to fate, to Cupid’s hot, piercing arrows. A slave to love, to passion. Love’s fool. Would they have it any other way?

Gene Autry puts a different twist on turning “back the pages of time” in “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” He wants to “recall all the heartaches” that he has caused his daddy to bear, and he wants to erase all the lines he has caused on his daddy’s face and return his gray hair to gold. The play on “recall” is significant here. Recall as in remember, or recall, as in take back, which would be, in a sense, to forget, to erase. And yet memories often seem to have that paradoxical feel. You want them to come but you don’t. You want to erase them, but you don’t. You want to keep them around at a safe distance so you can recall them on your own terms, but you never can. They have a mind of their own, or, rather, a will, because they inhabit your mind.

I tackle the paradox of Floyd Tillman’s “I’ll Keep on Loving You” in my blog on Moonlight Becomes You. Cindy Walker’s “Night Watch” is a touching song about God keeping the night watch for you and for me. Songs like this stand out in Willie’s repertoire. What do we make of this gospel/hony tonk connection? At times they seem at odds, at others they seem to be one and the same.

Willie and the Wheel (2009)

I’m at 691 songs and 1 ½ days of Willie’s music on my nano. I’m not a huge fan of Western Swing, but I’m seeing how it has influenced Willie’s style, especially the fiddle playing. It’s slower on Willie’s albums, but the fiddle runs seem like slowed down Western Swing. The music is fun, danceable music. Adding horns on some tracks makes this sound like Preservation Hall New Orleans-style jazz.

“Fan It” and cool it, honey, till the cows come home. Reminds me of some Hank Williams, some blues, some New Orleans jazz (Louis Armstrong’s Hot fives), some Ray Charles. You can’t play a sad song on the banjo, and you can’t be sad listening to Western Swing (or Louis Armstrong, for that matter). You can be sad listening to Miles Davis, but not Louis. I hear George Straight’s roots in this music, especially “Right or Wrong.” Sounds like those early 80s Straight and Travis traditional country albums. Bouncy yet mournful with the fiddle and steel. You are playing upbeat dance music with instruments designed to be sad—steel and fiddle.

One of the few Willie albums without Mickey Raphael.

“Shame on You” may be my favorite track on this album. Willie’s voice sounds stronger on this than on American Classic. Maybe the bounciness of the band gives his voice more pep.

“South” is a fun instrumental with Vince Gill on electric, Paul Shaffer on piano, and Ray Benson introducing the soloists like the host of a square dance.

Thematically, not much in these lyrics relates to Willie’s running themes of love, time, and memory. This is more of a collection of instrumental influences. Also the mood of these songs I think finds its way into Willie’s Buddhist philosophy. He approaches life like one of these songs. These songs move fast, and yet they feel relaxed. It is relaxed speed. Easy speed. Speeding down the road with a smile. Speed without angst. More Taoist than Buddhist. Hurry slowly. Don’t just do something, stand there. Still is still moving to me. Willie seems to be standing still even as he plays such fast Western Swing. Lighthearted, calm, easy in the speed.

Red Headed Stranger (1975)

The only Willie Nelson album my wife likes. Opens with “The Time of the Preacher.” Time is everywhere in Willie’s music. Time and crying about time. “He cried like a baby, he screamed like a panther.” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Crying over lost time. This raises the question again, can Buddha have the blues? Can Buddha cry? And do you want to be Buddha if you can’t ever cry? “My eyes filled with tears…and I couldn’t believe it was true.” For someone who is so happy-go-lucky, he’s crying on every song. For someone who lives so fast and hard, he sings so slow and soft.

Willie had much to cry about. His house burned down in 1970.

He recorded the entire album in a day and half for $20k. On the liner notes, Willie uses the word “sparse” to describe the sound he was trying to create.

“Love is like a dying ember, and only memories remain, and through the ages I’ll remember blue eyes crying in the rain.” Love always dies; only memories remain. And even the memories are of lost love, of dying embers, of tears. Love is death, but mind defeats death, so death be not proud. As Willie tells it, he had nothing for this album and just wrote it with his wife on the car drive back from a ski trip. Willie has his standard road band with him in the studio.

“Can I Sleep in Your Arms?” may be one of my top ten all-time favorite Willie songs (how many times have I said this already?). The chorus harmonizes better than any chorus on a Willie album I can think of. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica sobs like never before on this track.

After listening to Willie’s version of Scott Wiseman’s 1938 song “Remember Me,” it appears that Willie has cribbed many of his lyrics from this song. “Funny How Time Slips Away” is almost identical to this; Willie just adds the clinching twist in the last line.

http://bobdylanroots.com/remember.html

(original Scott Wiseman lyrics)

You told me once that you were mine alone forever

And I was yours till the end of eternity.

But all those vows are broken now, and I will never

Be the same except in memory.

CHORUS:

Remember me when the candle lights are gleamin',

Remember me at the close of a long, long day.

And it would be so sweet when all alone I’m dreamin'

Just to know you still remember me.

A brighter face may take my place when we're apart, dear,

Another love with a heart more bold and free.

But in the end, fair weather friends may break your heart, dear.

And if they do, sweetheart, remember me.

Willie’s countless other songs of memory, time, and love could be traced to this 1938 song.

Later, he sings, “It’s the same old song, and it’s right and it’s wrong.” That’s helpful. Clear as mud. Earthy and ethereal. I especially like the instrumental interludes on this concept album. And how does Willie tell the back story for a song someone else wrote with other songs that other people wrote? He is a master arranger and recycler and transformer of material.

In the bonus material, he sings Hank Williams’ “Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You).” There’s nothing he can do about it now, and he can’t help it. This helplessness, this resignation to fate. And yet a hopeful resignation, a Taoist freeing from worry by accepting. The Tao of “On The Road.”

A little history shows that, in a way, Willie’s music comes out of the Gay Nineties, the late 19th century, the sentimental 1890s. And so much of what I like about literature comes from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“This song was written in 1939 when LuLu Belle and I spent a year at radio station WLW, Cincinnati. In our guest room at home when I was a child there was a fancy old cup and saucer which sat on the dresser. The phrase "Remember Me" was on the cup in fancy gold lettering. We children were not allowed to touch this momento [sic] of the sentimental Gay Nineties, somehow connected with the courtship of Mother and Dad. Feeling a bit homesick and sentimental during the bustle of radio shows and road trips, I "made up" the song while riding in the car to personal appearance jobs. The lyric was not intended to apply to any particular person.”—S. Wiseman

Letters to Dorothy Horstman, Apr 8/Aug 8, 1973; reprinted in Dorothy Horstman, Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy, New York, 1976, p. 191.

Interesting that Chesterton writes about this modern fear of being sentimental. How has Willie escaped irony and cynicism? So few have. Perhaps Bono is right. And Buechner. He transcends the mundane by observing it so carefully. He creates stories, uses narrative, to give shape to the shapelessness and fleetingness of human experience. He tells stories about lost love and somehow regains it by retelling it. Re-membering is re-telling is re-claiming.

The Essential Willie Nelson (2003)

I listened to these two discs and 40 tracks spanning Willie’s entire career on 2/17 and 2/18 while traveling to Concord, New Hampshire to visit St. Paul’s School. I didn’t bring my laptop, so I just took notes so I could write my blog when I returned.

Last night while watching Asheville School’s production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, I heard the line “Love looks not with eyes but with mind.” Or something like that. That’s Willie. Very Puck-ish and Bottom-like. Bottom-less. Bully Bottom. Trippy and confused with love and time and memory. And yet, as with Willie’s music, it is always ultimately a comedy, never a tragedy. Like Gupta-literature. So earnest and yet so hard to take seriously. You know a grin is coming.

The thought also struck me as I was reading the dozens of tributes to Willie written by fellow musicians on the occasion of his 70th birthday (found in the liner notes) that you may not like Willie Nelson, but every musician you like likes Willie Nelson. You like Nora Jones but hate Willie Nelson? Well, Nora Jones loves Willie Nelson. You could play this game with anyone. I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find any musician who doesn’t like Willie Nelson. Dave Matthews. Ray Charles. People you love love Willie, so shouldn’t there be some kind of commutative property of music appreciation whereby you would love what the people you love love?

Most of the songs on both discs I have already listened to on the original albums and commented on them in earlier blogs. A few come from Willie’s early singles and Liberty albums which are very expensive even if you try to get them used on Amazon ($75 and up). These would include albums such as And Then I Wrote; The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs; and Good Times. Much of this early Liberty material appears on a compilation album I just ordered and will comment upon when it arrives. The only other songs I don’t have already are from the Willie and Family Live album (recorded in April 1978), from The Electric Horseman Original Soundtrack (also $75 used on Amazon), from Julio Iglesias’s 1100 Bel Air Place (for “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”), from A Horse Called Music, and duets with Bono and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith.

Thematically, “Good Times” (from 1968) establishes Willie’s lifelong Proustian obsession with time and memory. “Here I sit with a drink and a memory…so classify these as good times.” Doesn’t that define all of Proust and all of Willie? A drink and a memory. And sitting around trying to classify memories? The imposition of the mind upon time. What the mind does to time. Minding time. If you don’t mind, time doesn’t matter. If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the mind. Or, if you’ve got the time, I’ve got the mind.

Today I am listening to Willie’s 1961 version of “Night Life” but also his 2009 album Willie and the Wheel. 1961-2009. That’s almost 50 years. What’s amazing is how consistent his voice and phrasing have been over 50 years.

Ray Charles comments on the liner notes about how Willie is more himself than any other person, more fully himself. And yet he is chameleon-like. How can a chameleon be itself? And yet that is exactly the paradox of Willie.

“Funny How Time Slips Away” may be my favorite Willie song, and this early version from And Then I Wrote, despite the cheesy background vocals, has some phrasing that is edgier than his more recent versions. Willie doesn’t record a straight song and then play with it when he gets bored. He is already experimenting with his phrasing on the very first recording. Sometimes later versions become straighter and more predictable. In some ways, I like this version best.

Looking over this survey of 40 songs, I notice that time or mind or love or memory is mentioned in almost every title. I can’t, however, understand the inclusion of “Heartbreak Hotel.” How is that one of his 40 best?

It would be interesting to compare the 1974 Texas Opry House recordings of the family live with these 1978 versions of the same songs. I’m dying to get my hands on a copy of The Electric Horseman soundtrack, but I’ll need to find it cheaper than $75. “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” exemplifies Willie’s Proustian focus on idealized love from the past (also like Dante and Petrarch and Fitzgerald). He loves the girls he loved before more than the ones he’s with now because they are perfect in his memory like the lovers on Keats’ Grecian Urn. “Nothing I Can Do About it Now” strikes the idea of not being able to undo the wrong (if you can’t undo the wrong, undo the right), not being able to change the past. Memories have a mind of their own and they come and go as they please. Not only can’t we control the present and the future, we can’t control the past and how and when it revisits and haunts us. On one hand, there’s nothing Willie can do about it now, but his whole career has been based upon thinking about why he can’t do anything about it, which indicates the one thing you can do about the past is think about it, welcome it into your mind, open the door, have a drink, and bask in it. Invite the memories in, let them sit down, and have a chat, a dialog. Interact and cultivate a relationship with your memories. “Regret is just a memory to me now.” “I could cry for the time I’ve wasted, but that’s a waste of time and tears,” and yet Willie has done just that, spent 50 years crying over lost time.

“One Time Too Many” has obvious connections to this theme of time. “It’s all in the past, and I won’t make the same mistake twice.” Really? “Once is enough, it’s one time too many?” Willie’s career has been about making the same mistakes over and over and over again. “Stay A Little Longer” gives that sense of trying to stretch time to make it last longer. Could you stay up longer than all night? Could you extend these intense moments and make them last? Willie sings of “Old worn out memories” in “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” and their “slow moving dreams.” And then Willie sings (in 1997) on U2’s “Slow Dancing.” Willie’s voice is strong, accompanied by Mickey Raphael. Another classic example of the musicians you like (like U2) liking Willie. Willie has the power to slow down even a super group like U2.

On the liner notes, Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards says Willie represents “the best of what America is all about.” Toby Keith and Bernie Taupin think his face belongs on Mt. Rushmore with the presidents. Rodney Crowell calls him Texas’s answer to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, “earthy and ethereal at the same time.” How can that be, earthy and ethereal at the same time? And yet there it is. “Equal parts Buddha, William Blake, Gene Autry and Billy the Kid.” “Willie is everyone’s brother,” writes Billy Joe Shaver. Willie Nelson “should be a pope,” says B.B. King. Ray Charles calls him authentic, real, genuine, no airs, no put-ons, what you see is what you get. “He’s always the same. He doesn’t change on you.” Maybe Willie has become time itself, eternal. Maybe that’s what Buddha meant. You transcend time and change. He is utterly himself and nobody at the same time. John Fogerty says he “sounds like nobody but himself.” Like Beethoven. Kid Rock says he’s a man with three hands, two playing guitar and one giving the finger to the music establishment (with a smile on his face). Don Was refers to the “Dalai Lama of Texas” image of Willie, but says he’s more like a poker-playing, whiskey drinking, gun-toting Buddha. A combination of John Wayne and Buddha. A Buddhist cowboy. Bono says he transcends the mundane by observing it.

One for the Road (1979)

“Sioux City Sue” makes this whole album worth buying. This album doesn’t sound quite like anything else I have listened to of Willie’s in 2010. There’s a classic gospel tune, “I Saw the Light,” but with a funky harmonica that makes it sound almost like a Preservation Hall New Orleans march. It has a Cajun feel. Just add that to Willie’s repertoire of genres. “Don’t Fence Me In” exemplifies the open road theme of Willie’s career. And, true to form (or lack of form), this album can’t be fenced in by genre. He’s got Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” and then the second half of the album, starting with track 11, moves from the jumping full-band romps to a set of country and pop standards with a spare piano and guitar backing. Willie can’t even be consistent within the confines of his own albums. They feel like ponds with patches of warm and then cold water. You never know what you’ll find as you swim in the midst of them. Full band, solo, country, pop, jazz, gospel, new stuff, old stuff, cover, what kind of album is this anyway? What kind of artist? It isn’t a kind or genre at all. It just is. One year after Stardust, these jazz and pop standards sound almost, but not quite, as good. The second half of One for the Road could be Stardust part II. How the two parts of these album fit together I have no idea, except that Leon Russell joins Willie on both halves. I guess that is enough in Willie’s mind.

Honeysuckle Rose (1980)

So my top ten list has become untenable. Like the amp in Spinal Tap, it has gone up to eleven. How can I keep Honeysuckle Rose out? With 26 live tracks featuring Willie’s road band in 1980, most notably Johnny Gimble on fiddle and Mickey Raphael on harmonica, this album has something for everyone. My wife even conceded that she kind of liked some of the rowdier tunes on this one, especially “Pick Up the Tempo.” If I was ranking Gimble’s and Raphael’s performances on Willie’s albums, this would be one of their best. These live versions of Willie’s classics rival his best earlier versions. The crowd adds a palpable sense of energy to this performance, and the band seems to feed off of this.

I’m noticing some patterns here. My top eleven list includes albums clustering around the late 1970s and the late 1990s. Red-Headed Stranger (1975), The Sound in Your Mind (1976), Stardust (1978), Honeysuckle Rose (1980), and then Spirit (1996), Storytellers (1998), Teatro (1998), Night and Day (1999), and Me and the Drummer (2000). Everything fits except Crazy: the Demo Sessions, Yesterday’s Wine, and Who’ll Buy My Memories. I wonder what it is about those half decades? Willie’s voice? His band? The producers?

Jonny Whiteside has written some of the best liner notes I have encountered thus far. He describes Willie’s “low-key rebellion” and his “benign Outlaw grit.” What kind of oxymorons are these? Paradox, sphinx, idiosyncrasy—these words all describe Willie. It seems fitting that an indiosyncratic musician would play with syncopation and what Whiteside describes as rubato, which the OED defines as tempo rubato, literally “robbed time.” Isn’t that what Willie is always singing about? Not only is he in search of lost time, he steals it when he finds it. It’s a bigger caper than Prometheus stealing fire; Willie tries to steal, rob, and plunder time itself. But he does it in the slyest, smoothtalkingest, roundaboutest way. To steal time you’d have to sneak up on it, which Willie always does. Whiteside claims that Willie’s quirky phrasing was developed to “stave off the boredom engendered by singing the same tunes night after night.” Later he describes Willie’s “benign, shamanistic honky-tonk philosophy.” He calls Willie’s persona a “studied non-image.” Could this be the Buddhist no-mind? Willie simultaneously embodies “corny old-fashioned values” and “starry-eyed cosmic truths.” Why is it that “Flawed beauty can be even more seductive than perfection”? Did Kenko say that or Whiteside about Willie? Who can tell? Whiteside calls Willie’s rubato a “sublime technique.” He defines it as “a fluctuation of speed within a musical phrase typically within a rhythmically steady accompaniment.” The rest of the world (and band) stands still, but still is still moving to Willie, so he keeps moving as he pleases. He “combines Code of the West ethics” (like “Beer for My Horses”) with a “freewheeling celestial spiritualism.” This version of “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” could very well be my favorite. Same with this live version of Kristofferson’s “You Show Me Yours.” All in all, a definite ten (or eleven, as the case may be).

Night and Day (1999)

Willie’s only all-instrumental album. Just when you think he can’t find something new to do, he does. He’s back with his core road band: Johnny Gimble (fiddle), Jody Payne (guitar), Bobbie (piano), Mickey (harmonica), B. Spears (bass), Paul (drums), and Billy English (percussion). Willie produced this album at his Pedernales studio in Austin, Texas.

I’m home with my daughter Vivian playing chickenfoot (a dominos game), and she asks, “What kind of music is this?” I tell her it’s Willie Nelson, but what does that mean? That doesn’t clarify it at all. That could mean reggae, country, pop, rock, jazz, folk, gospel, and now classical. At times, this sounds more like chamber music than jazz or country.

Ray Benson, who writes the brief liner notes for this album, claims to have been listening to Willie for longer than anyone but Willie’s friend and roadie Poodie. Appropriately, there are black and white close-ups of all of the instruments on the inside of the album cover, and on the outside there is a color shot of Willie’s guitar, Trigger. Benson describes Trigger as a “Martin gut string electric acoustic guitar.” He describes the sound of Trigger as a “cross between Django Rhinehardt’s Gypsy jazz and a Mexican guitar sound, like Marty Robbins used in El Paso.” Benson says it sounds like something from a gypsy camp, or is it a Texas campfire?

I have been re-reading excerpts from Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness for my World Studies course, and it occurs to me that Willie and Kenko are kindred spirits. There might be even more to this Buddhist connection than I initially thought. Kenko writes of evanescence, impermanence, mutability, transience, fleetingness. He asks, How should one respond to this aspect of life? With despair, denial, self-indulgence? Willie has tried and sung about all of these approaches. Willie and Kenko are obsessed with the conundrum of time and the longing, the nostalgia, the “acute sense of the incompleteness of human experience” (Norton 2327). In fact, both go even further. They not only identify transience as the “source of beauty and sorrow,” but also as the “defining quality of life.” A few passages from Kenko illustrate this connection to Willie’s life and songs:

If a man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.

If time didn’t slip away, always exceeding our grasp, what would we do? What would Willie have to sing about? For Kenko, “Impermanence became something of value. It framed life, and informed it with meaning” (2327). If time didn’t slip away, nothing would be poignant, the word that best describes Kenko’s prose and Willie’s music. We create art and stories to try to keep time from slipping away, to capture it, to give it a body, a shape, a beginning and an end so we can see it between covers or frames. And yet, as with very small particles, the light we shine upon it changes its nature. We think we have captured impermanence itself, but by freezing it, we have altered it. Unlike Beowulf (or Shakespeare, for that matter), Kenko thought living for glory and fame, trying to create art (sonnets) that would outlast time, defeat death (Donne), was foolish. Kenko embraced the transitoriness and made it a positive. Is it just flip-flopping positive and negative space, though? Can a lack of form become a kind of form? Can a lack of meaning become meaningful? How can impermanence become a value, a frame? This seems to suggest that you can play tennis with the net down and up at the same time. How can you have it both ways? Or are freedom and form somehow two sides of the same coin, we just can’t see it?

Elsewhere, Kenko writes:

In all things it is the beginnings and the ends that are interesting. Does love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other’s arms? The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house—such a man knows what love means.

I think Willie may be a reincarnation of Kenko. The above passage describes every one of Willie’s songs. Bewailing empty vows, spending long autumn nights alone, letting his thoughts wander, yearning for the past. Somehow this distance, this separation, brings us closer to love. Absence does, indeed, make the heart grow fonder. But why? Everything Willie ever sings tries to answer this question, or maybe it just asks it in different ways.

Gospel Favorites (1980)

Jumping way back to 1980, we have a gospel album produced by Willie and his sister Bobbie. Bobbie and Willie grew up playing in church, so it is interesting to hear them playing together by themselves, as they must have done as kids. This is the only album I know of where they do this, but it would be neat for him to record another acoustic album with just the two of them. Maybe for his 78th birthday when he is 78 and I’m guessing she would be 80?

I’m looking forward to comparing some of these tunes to versions on Yesterday’s Wine and other early albums. I still have a hard time believing Willie when he sings gospel. I think Johnny Cash really means it when he sings gospel, but I think Willie just lights up a J after the session (and I don’t mean Jesus). And yet, he is as comfortable with this genre as he is with Jazz, folk, pop, rock, reggae, soul, R & B, blues, and country. I haven’t heard a Willie bluegrass album yet, but he needs to do one.

I guess it’s Buddhist gospel music, if that’s possible, which it isn’t, but no one told Willie, so he did it anyway.

Countryman (2005)

Why did it take ten years to release this album? The songs were recorded in 1996 and 1997, but this album didn’t come out till 2005. Don Was produced this reggae album, which the back of the CD claims “merges the gospel and soul spirit found in both reggae and country.”

“Do You Mind Too Much If I Don’t Understand” has that wonderfully wry rhetorical questioning feel. Do you mind too much if I don’t understand why you left me and treated me like trash. The politeness is so surprising.

“How Long is Forever” this time? It’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” all over again. “And you’d be welcome here within my arms forever even if forever ends for me today.” Willie will take one moment of forever, one glimpse, one taste. It could be a heartbreaking song, but even with the twangy steel, the bouncy reggae beat makes it hard to be sad.

Johnny Cash’s “I’m a Worried Man” is better on the live acoustic Storytellers album. How can you be sad or worried while singing or listening to reggae? How can you be worried or sad while smoking dope? Or singing reggae while smoking dope (is there any other way)? These would seem to make you doubly unable to be blue.

“The Harder They Come” was reissued on the 2009 Lost Highway compilation (reviewed in an earlier blog). The driving train whistle harmonica and the female back-up chorus make this one memorable.

Willie’s vocals on “Something to Think About” are as strong and tender as ever, but I’m still not sure how I feel about mixing the bouncy reggae beat with the mournful steel guitar. Seems sacrilegious or disrespectful somehow. Making light of suffering, fiddling while Rome burns or the Titanic sinks.

Okay, so I have to admit my initial judgment was wrong. “Sitting in Limbo” works. I completely dismissed this album out of hand based on my first listen. It helps, though, knowing most of these songs already so I can appreciate the way these reggae versions play with the original. Willie, of course, is sitting in limbo outside of time. In the waiting room of hell. Where would Dante put old Willie?

Willie has done “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” in so many different ways on so many different albums with so many different bands and vocalists that even this reggae version becomes more interesting as it joins the evolving life of this 40 or 50 year-old song.

Producers come and go, but two things are constant: Willie’s vocals and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica.

“One in a Row” gets at the recurring theme of lies. Why do we believe them? Why do we prefer them to the truth? “One in a Row” seems to be the inverse of the forever songs.

The do-wop reggae back-up vocals on “I’ve Just Destroyed the World Today” seem wrong and blasphemous. I’m not sure how he wants us to take this. It is interesting and I respect his willingness to blend genres, but I wonder if it belittles the lyrics, as if they don’t really matter. Sort of like people in church caring more about the quality fo the music than the words.

Time figures prominently in almost all of these tunes. These versions will be especially interesting to hear side-by-side with the Crazy demo sessions and the various other versions.

Can you be disrespectful to your own songs? What other artists have stayed with their own songs so long? Others, like Billy Joel and Miles Davis and Paul Simon, move on and get into other things, and Willie does, too, in his way. But true to his home/road tension he moves on by redoing his original songs. He has it both ways—innovation and tradition.

Live and Kickin' (2003)

A Side: “On the road again, just can’t wait to get on that road again”

B Side: “Homeward bound, I wish I was…”

These are the flip sides of Willie’s life. The twin conflicting desires. The tides, the tugs, the forces pulling him this way and that, emotionally and musically. He seems to desire both the road and home with equal intensity. He seems to vacillate back and forth between these twin poles of longing. At times, he seems to merge the two and possess them simultaneously. Siddhartha-like, he transcends the home-motel distinction and he is on the road at home and at home on the road.

Forty albums in I can already tell that Willie’s complete works resemble Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman essentially wrote one book over and over again. It grew and evolved organically over time, staying the same and yet changing. Willie revisits the same old songs, but as we see on this live album, he can redo them country, folk, blues, jazz, rock, pop, and even reggae; he can redo them with new bands; he can redo them with new duet partners; he can redo them in new studios, with new producers; he can redo them live, or solo, or while eating Green Eggs and Ham. Willie is the Sam I Am of song.

On “Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You)” with Nora Jones Willie asserts, “I don’t want to get over you.” Except, of course, when I do. I do, but I don’t. I do AND I don’t. On one hand, Willie asks, Help me remember (I’m afraid I’ll forget). On the other hand, he asks, Help me forget. His voice sounds as fragile and as falling apart as I have ever heard it. In 2003 his voice may be at its most interesting. You could classify his voice like Bordeaux vintages. 2003 Willie versus 2009. The way his voice ages and mellows as if in oak casks, different features, new complexities, arise.

“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” live, in reggae-rap style, with Wyclef Jean, may be my new favorite Willie song. Number one out of 541 songs loaded onto my 8 gig Nano over the past 40 days. This may be the trippiest, spaciest, edgiest, grooviest thing Willie has done. And it works. It’s fun. Just when you think Willie can’t surprise you with where his voice is going, Thelonious Monk-like, he does. He always has somewhere new and surprising to go. That’s how he makes the same old songs interesting at age 77.

Singing and strumming with Clapton on “Nightlife” makes for a bluesy live version that won’t be my favorite, but one I’ll revisit with pleasure.

“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” with Shania Twain won’t ever displace the definitive version on Red-Headed Stranger, mainly because Shania pretty much sings the whole thing. Willie seems like he doesn’t want to interrupt her. It is sort of hard to cut in on a powerful voice like this, or even sing harmony with it. Not that anything Willie does could be called harmony. Harmony implies smoothness, and everything Willie does has rough edges.

I may have to recant what I wrote in an earlier blog about Willie doing Paul Simon songs. This duet ranks near the top of my all-time favorite Willie duets. Willie sings it straight-up Paul Simon style, but his voice wobbles and meanders in such interesting ways that he makes it new and fresh even as he stays true to the original. Simon seems into, too. He sounds as good as he did in the 1980s concert in Central Park.

“Beer For My Horses” is not as good as the studio version.

Diana Krall and Elvis Costello are interesting choices for “Crazy.” This version shows up on the 2009 compilation Lost Highway (see blog on 2/9). I can’t even guesstimate how many versions of this song Willie has recorded.

Willie closes out the show with ZZ Top (unremarkable), Shelby Lynne (very strong on Willie’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”; she’s got pipes, but I’m not sure Willie’s even on stage for this one; I didn’t hear him at all), Ray Charles and Leon Russell (Russell’s “A Song For You” is the perfect choice for Ray, who’s still got it good, his voice meandering and wobbling like Willie’s), John Mellencamp (weak vocals; no sign of Willie on this one), Kenny Chesney (strong; “Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning” is one of my favorites; Chesney sings too pretty and smooth, but it’s a tasteful and respectful version; he sings nice and slow at Willie pace, which I think is now too slow for country radio; fans today don’t have the patience for Willie’s voice anymore; maybe that’s why I like Willie’s music so much now; in an ever speeding up world, Willie refuses to hurry; you can relax with him and Mr. Rogers, and that’s about it; everything else is just too busy; Pooh-like Willie resists busyness; he’s all slow and spare; slow enough for the steel to work its moody magic between lines), Ray Price (“Run That By Me One More Time” is just another version of “Funny How Time Slips Away”; “tell me how you’ll never cheat on me, tell me that you always will be true, dear”; come again, are you for real? Surely not. But humor me. Reassure me anyway. I’d rather believe a lie than know the truth), and Stephen Tyler (“One Time Too Many” may be just enough for Willie and for Proust; they can never have too much time, for remembering or forgetting). Mickey Raphael is Willie’s only road band member to join him on this live show, but he performs with his usual virtuosity. I liked this one a lot more than I thought I would. It surprises and gives pleasure (which are often the same thing). To do this at age 70 is something. Still trying new things, new combinations. Still open. Still is still moving, and still opening.

Milk Cow Blues (2000)

Kokomo Arnold steals the show on “Milk Cow Blues.” “Sail on, pretty gal, sail on…You gonna keep right on sailin’ till you lose your happy home.” Willie should know. If you stay on the road, or the ocean, you can’t simultaneously stay home. Speaking of home, Mickey Raphael is obviously at home with the blues, which the harp was designed to play. The harmonica is the blues. It can’t not play the blues. The harmonica, the steel, is your home when you have the blues, which is a music that compensates for a lack of home, an absence of connection. The reason you have the blues is because you don’t feel at home.

Willie is not at home with the blues, but Dr. John is. “Black Night” is a hard core blues tune. The organ and guitar have a blues dialog in the middle of this song.

Francine Reed turns “Funny How Time Slips Away” into a gospel tune. I’m not sure if that makes any kind of sense, but I love her voice.

Not sure what “Nowhere’s a fool like me” means, but I like that Willie-penned lyric in “Rainy Day Blues.” The blues follows you around, like rainy weather, and you can’t out run it, so why try? He knows it’s as foolish to try to outrun the blues as it is to try to outrun time, but he keeps trying. Willie is both Buddha and the anti-Buddha. He knows he can’t escape the wheel of suffering, but he keeps trying anyway. Maybe he’s a bodhisattva, hanging around to show the rest of us the way. What the blues does is open up spaces, loneliness itself, for guitars and harmonicas and vocals to fill with moans and cries. It gives us the best opportunity to cry. The best medium for tears.

I’m becoming a connoisseur of “Crazy.” Versions of Willie’s “Crazy,” that is. Susan Tedeschi puts her mark on the song. I’m looking forward to listening to every known version of this song side by side. This one won’t be in my top three, but it bears further listening nonetheless. Willie’s voice is strong in 2000. I don’t know how because it seems like he recorded an album a week in 2000.

B.B. and Willie join forces on “The Thrill is Gone.” This lyric sound slike so many Willie has written. You left me and you’ll be sorry some day. The thrill is gone, the excitement of the past is fading. Fading further into the past each day. Fading with time. Time is slipping away, The thrill of life slips away in the wake of time. Do we try to maintain the thrill in our memories? I prefer this song straight up with B.B.

“Wake Me When It’s Over” is another example of Willie wanting to avoid the pain of loss by running, or numbing, or forgetting. Here he tries to sleep through the pain. But of course we can never sleep long enough to escape the blues. They will be there waiting for us when we wake up. Fat chance they would leave. Fat chance we could wait them out. Time and love and loss are not things we can sleep off like a hangover. The hang over of time is the human condition itself. As if you could sleep off original sin, sleep off the fall. This 1962 Willie-penned blues number may be my favorite so far on this album.

“I often think of the life I live.” There Willie goes thinkin’ again. A life of the mind. The unexamined life is not worth living. And yet a fool, by definition, examines life, and still refuses to change. In some way’s, “Fool’s Paradise” could be the title of every Willie Nelson song. Is it just denial? Is it Buddhism? To deny that suffering will always be with us and we cannot escape it, or cheat it, or out run it, or drown it, or numb it, or forget it? Is ignorance bliss? Or will fate catch us in the end? Karma?

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business” from 1922. A smooth, slow blues.

The “Night Life” ain’t no good life, but it sure sounds good with B.B. helping Willie “dreamin’ of old used to be’s.” Once again, Willie reworks his songs in another genre. He’s done traditional country, pop, Jazz, orchestra, and now blues. How many other ways can he do them?

Then he’s “just stealin’ back to old used to be’s” in “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” What a nice touch to have this line refer back to “dreamin’ of old used to be’s” in the previous song. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica works the blues with the piano and the guitar on this one. And the notion of trying to play it off like you’re “Sittin on top of the world” when you are really down in the dumps. Trying to keep up appearances, save face. It’s another saving face song. Savinbg face with a wry sense of humor. Chuckling at how time and love slip away. How fate and love laugh at us, mock us, wink at us.

Willie’s weeping again in “Lonely Street.” “Where broken dreams and memories meet.” He wants to “bury broken dreams” and find “forgetfulness,” like Keats. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica is the nightingale.

Great band, great duets, great songs. An album worth returning to often. Another album with a wholeness, a completeness, an aptness, a coherence, a concept, a mood, a theme of floods, tears, craziness, darkness, loneliness, and weeping harps, organs, guitars, pianos, and men.

Lost Highway (2009)

At first I was disappointed to discover this was a compilation and not an album of new material. And then I was doubly disappointed because I couldn’t even tell what kind of compilation it was. It isn’t all duets, it isn’t all new tunes or old tunes. What ties these together? But then it hit me. For Willie, a new compilation, a new arrangement of tunes, can be just as original, just as surprising, just as pleasing as an album of new material. Why? Because Willie’s music is so diverse, so expansive, with genres, band members, instruments, and duet partners, that, to use a wine analogy, the pairings become as important as the songs themselves. Just as the quality of wine changes depending on the food it is paired with, so, too, apt pairings of Willie’s songs can bring out qualities in an entire album that are greater than the individual parts.

“Back To Earth” is new to me, and this is a powerful version.

“The Harder They Come” has a gospel back-up chorus unlike anything I’ve heard accompanying Willie before. I thought I didn’t like the reggae Countryman album, but if there are more songs like this, I’ll need to reassess my earlier judgment.

If Jefferson is the American Sphinx in politics, Willie is a musical sphinx. He rises like Jefferson, like Buddha, like Emerson, like genius, above contradiction. He seems to strike a tolerant pose in “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” which would likely upset Toby Keith and the “Beer For My Horses” crew (unless this song is tongue in cheek). And yet, he follows that song immediately with “Ain’t Goin’ Down on Brokeback Mountain,” which seems to strike a more homophobic stance toward queers (unless this song is tongue in cheek). How can you tell? What you can tell for certain, though, is that he Willie is delighting in deliberately baffling us with paradoxes when he boldly places them right next to each other.

The duets with Ray Price showcase Price’s vocals and make clear his influence on Willie’s own vocal style. It seems to be a collection of songs from the last ten years, mostly duets, mostly traditional country. The harmonica (must be Raphael), steel (Jimmy Day?), and fiddle (Johnny Gimble?) feature prominently on most tracks.

“Both Sides of Goodbye” from the Chip Moman Sessions (need to find this album) is one of Willie’s more credible heartbreak songs. “I’ve loved and been loved but not at the same time.” Ha! Gets at that sphinx-like, transcendental, paradoxical being two things simultaneously (on the road and home) that seems to sum up Willie’s shtick. The live version of “Crazy” with Diana Krall and Elvis Costello is not my favorite, but it is interesting and bears further listening.

All in all, this pairing of songs intrigued me and exceeded my expectations. I will return to it often. There are no duds. And though I will appreciate these songs further when I listen to them on their original albums (If I haven’t already), the combinations here release unique sparks that justify the compilation.

Me and the Drummer (2000)

I have also seen a version of this album called Tales Out of Luck. ITUNES lists the date of these songs as 1998, but the CD I have says 2000. A reviewer from Amazon writes:

After his minimalist experimentation with Canadian producer Daniel Lanois on Teatro and the somber and introspective Spirit, Willie and company are back to basics…Willie's strength has always been…his ability to seamlessly fuse his jazz oriented vocal styling with simple, understated country sensibilities. His unique phrasing and the way his vocals lag behind the beat provide the listener with the perspective that he is singing to you and you alone.

I thought that was well put. Spirit and Teatro are two of my top ten albums, and now I am prepared to add this to that list as well, which makes 1996-2000 a sweet spot in Willie’s career when his voice has that aged character but has not started to lose some of its oomph (as seen on Two Men With The Blues and American Classic, both recorded eight to nine years later). The adjectives somber, introspective, and wistful seem apt, and “jazz-oriented vocal styling” fused with “understated country sensibilities” strikes me as a compact way of describing Willie’s distinctive sound.

It took me awhile to realize why Jimmy Day’s steel sounded so good on this album. The Offenders must be the name of Willie’s pre-Raphael band (like pre-Raphaelite); that is, his pre-Mickey Raphael band. The lack of that prominent harmonica voice allows the steel to take center stage. This may be Willie’s best pure country album. With Jimmy Day’s steel and Johnny Gimble’s fiddle, and Willie’s voice still strong, this set of Willie’s classic early tunes makes my top ten. Almost every song relates to his themes of time, love, memory, and mind. I have written about many of these same songs in earlier blogs, but “I Let My Mind Wander” and “No Tomorrow in Sight” each could make a case for his definitive philosophical statement.

The dice in the hollow spine of the CD case adds a nice touch to these Tales Out of Luck, recorded at Willie’s Pedernales studio.

Marcel Proust could have written these lines, or written every song Willie ever wrote:

I let my mind wander

And what did it do?

It just kept right on goin'

Until it got back to you…

Can't trust it one minute

It's worse than a child

Disobeys without conscience

It's drivin' me wild…

Try to keep my mind busy

On thoughts of today

But invariably memories

Seem to lure it away

My lonely heart wonders

If there'll ever come a day

When I can be happy

But I can't see no way

'Cause I let my mind wander

Willie wonders about love, but his mind wanders while he is wondering. He can’t control his own mind any more than he can control time or love. Even if mind and memory can control time and love, it is to no avail because we can’t control our own minds; they wander like disobedient children. This version of “I Let My Mind Wander” may make my top ten WN songs if I ever create such a list.

The lyrics to “Something to Think About” plumb the depths of Willie’s meta-obsession with thinking about thinking:

You’re wondering just what I’ll do

Now that it’s over and done

Well that’s something to think about

And I’ve already begun

Willie lets his mind wander, but his lover is wondering, too. He’s thinking about what she’s wondering about.

In “No Tomorrow in Sight” Willie sings:

I hope we can salvage a few memories

To carry us through the long nights

The clock’s striking midnight, yesterday’s gone

And there’s no tomorrow in sight

It’s like “Yesterday’s Wine.” Memories are our salvation. We are somehow estranged from both yesterday and tomorrow, so we must live in the eternal present of our own memories.

In “A Moment Isn’t Very Long” he sings:

For a moment I almost forgot you

But a moment isn’t very long.

So he wants to extend the amount of time that he can forget. He wants to expand his forgetfulness. But his moment of forgetfulness doesn’t last long, and then he remembers. Time either moves too fast or too slow, but never just right, never just as we would want it to. Do we even know how we would want time to flow? Could we ever be at home in time at any speed? 78, 33, 45? 4-4? As Dylan says, Time Out of Mind.

Forgiving you was easy

But forgetting seems to take the longest time

I just keep thinking and your memory is forever on my mind

You were always on my mind (though you thought I had forgotten about you). And yet forgetting you has taken me so long. I keep thinking about you; your memory is always on my mind. I am so thoughtless, when I forget you, and yet you fill my thoughts.

In “What a Way to Live” Willie sings:

A lonely man with lonely time to kill…

The paths my memory takes

Just make my poor heart ache

I think of her, I guess I always will

On one hand, I’m trying to remember better so she’ll know she is always on my mind (so I won’t hurt her). On the other hand, I’m trying to forget her faster so she won’t know I ever cared about her (and she won’t be able to hurt me any more). We simply desire to control time, to speed over the bad parts and slow down for the good parts. And yet we can’t control the tempo, we can’t TIVO life. We must dance to whatever tempo time sets for us.

Two Men With the Blues (2008)

Fast forward thirty years from Stardust (1978) to Two Men with the Blues (2008), and it becomes apparent that Willie’s voice is not what it once was. Vocal-wise, these versions of “Stardust,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Nightlife” pale in comparison to numerous earlier versions. But Willie continues to impress with his audacity and openness to playing Hank Williams’ “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” live with Wynton Marsalis. Mickey Raphael goes toe to toe with Wynton on this one: horn versus harmonica. It’s hard for me to take Willie seriously singing the blues. Buddha doesn’t do the blues. Buddha escapes suffering and transcends it. Blues singers embrace it, wallow in it, glory in it, revel in it. Buddhism and the blues. That sounds like a book that needs to be written. It reminds me of the Gupta era literature and how there isn’t a Hindu tradition of tragedy. With reincarnation nothing can be tragic because nothing is irrevocable.

All of this reminds me of Lord Byron’s poem “They Say That Hope is Happiness”:

They say that Hope is happiness;

But genuine Love must prize the past,

And Memory wakes the thoughts that bless:

They rose the first - they set the last;

And all that Memory loves the most

Was once our only Hope to be,

And all that Hope adored and lost

Hath melted into Memory.

Alas it is delusion all:

The future cheats us from afar,

Nor can we be what we recall,

Nor dare we think on what we are.

So much of Willie’s music is melting into memory. The melancholy notion “Nor can we be what we recall.” But perhaps these lines capture Willie’s music best:

They say that Hope is happiness;

But genuine Love must prize the past

Genuine, ideal love can only be in the past, like Gatsby’s Daisy. Vocals aside, this album will bear many future listenings because of the instrumental work of the harmonica, trumpet, piano, and guitar.

Heidegger, in his 1924 lecture “The Concept of Time,” said that “time has no body but is merely a medium in which events take place” (paraphrased by David Denby in The New Yorker 2/1/2010, page 83). A Romanian director plays with time the way Willie does.

I’m on my third or fourth listen today, and I’m still enjoying it. I think it gets better with each listen.

Stardust (1978)

I’ve been putting this one off for awhile, but I just can’t hold out any longer. I think it is a lock for my top ten, but now is the time to see if it lives up to my own hype. Willie has his standard road band with him (Bobbie, Paul, Mickey, Bee, and Jody). What’s different is the producer: Booker T. Jones. The liner notes are revealing. How could Booker T. and Willie possibly have these same songs in common? How could these songs be Willie’s “favorite all-time songs”? Really? But that says it all. A mix of pop, jazz, and country. Willie has always been open to them all. In fact, in the liner notes Willlie claims that “Moonlight in Vermont” is his “favorite song of all time.” Hyperbole? Perhaps, but still. What kind of outlaw says this? This album may feature Mickey Raphael’s harmonica more prominently than any other of Willie’s albums. Booker T. somehow showcases the harmonica and brings it out as prominently as the vocals.

It’s as slow as any of Willie’s albums, but Booker T’s organ and the R&B drums and bass give this album a bouncier rhythmic feel than Willie’s other albums. In 1978, too, Willie’s voice seems to be in its prime. Willie’s guitar picking is so clean and precise. Even the strings don’t seem out of place on this album. I think it’s the harmonica, though. This has to be the highlight of Mickey Raphael’s career. This album is perfect like Gatsby, like a sonnet. Every word, every line, every rhyme fits just so. How would you begin to compare or rank songs on this album? They are all of a piece. This album has a sense of wholeness and completeness. Maybe it’s because Willie loves these songs so much, because he believes them so much, because he respects them so much, because he has known them so well and for so long. Georgia’s on his mind, but so is Vermont. Willie reconciles Texas and New England just as he reconciles jazz, pop, blues, country, and R & B. In “Unchained Melody,” Willie returns to his Proustian theme: “Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much.” Willie sings so slowly, and sings so slowly about the slowness of time. Unchained from the beat, breaking meter. Unchained from home, on the road. “September Song” is another one of Willie’s seasonal songs. Perhaps the most melancholy on this melancholy album. For a hakuna matata philosopher, Willie surprisingly likes autumn best. He may be the happiest melancholic to ever live. A true nightingale. The drums flutter like the wings of a bird. This song feels so delicate, so fragile, it could almost break. “The days dwindle down to a precious few” as the Harmonica flutters on the edge of dissolving, gasping for life. “And these few precious days I’ll spend with you.” These Precious Days could be the title of Willie’s biography. So precious he tries to savor them, make them last longer, like notes, like the beat. “On the Sunny Side of the Street” skips and flits along, and yet it maintains an undercurrent of nostalgia. The harmonica makes sure of that. You can’t play a sad song on a banjo, but you can’t play a purely happy song on the harmonica, either. A harmonica cries no matter what you do. You can try to cry happy tears, but it cries nonetheless. Willie says he loves “Moonlight in Vermont” because it is all prose and doesn’t rhyme. He calls it “the prettiest melody I’ve ever heard.” Willie warbles along with the harmonica on this song. I’m studying the romantic era in European Studies right now with juniors at Asheville School—Beethoven, Keats, Turner, Shelley (Frankenstein). This album has that sublime romantic quality. “My mind’s more at ease…but why stir up memories.” On one hand, Willie has made a career of stirring up memories. Worrying them, disturbing them, like a sleeping dog that should be let alone. On the other hand, he wants to keep his mind at ease, and running and drinking are good ways to keep memories at bay. To numb them or outrun them. Willie’s sort of like the girls who play hard to get and run away from the boys, but they are looking over their shoulders secretly hoping they’ll get caught. Willie tries to numb and/or outrun his memories, but he secretly hopes they’ll catch up with him in his home motel. The fact that Willie has always loved reggae kills me. As much as I dislike his reggae album, Countryman, I respect his total openness to genres. “I Can See Clearly Now” works. I think it is worthy of the other ten that made the cut in 1978. The reference to blue skies would have been a neat connection to “Blue Skies.” Mickey Raphael goes to town on this track. The drums and bass bounce. It may be a bit too trippy and meandering. It might have broken the consistency of the mood of the original album. Probably a smart move to leave it out, but I’m glad they re-discovered it. It has a “Freebird”-esque rocking finale. “Scarlet Ribbon,” from the bonus tracks, clearly is not up to the level of the perfect ten that made the final cut for the album. Nevertheless, I feel very confident in saying now, just a little over a month into my year-long journey, that no album will bump Stardust from Willie’s top ten. No way.

Country Willie: His Own Songs (1965)

Willie kick’s off his Proustian ramblings with “I live ‘One Day at a Time,’ I dream one dream at a time. Yesterday’s dead and tomorrow is blind.” But is it true? Isn’t Willie constantly thinking about the past and lost time? Doesn’t he dwell on the past? “Don’t ask me how long I plan to stay. It never crossed my mind.” Really? Doesn’t it cross his mind all the time? Isn’t every one of his songs about how often and how intensely it crosses his mind? “[A sparrow] searching for a patch of sunlight, so am I. I wish I didn’t have to follow. And perhaps I won’t in time.” Willie is that sparrow searching for a patch of sunlight, and in time he continues to follow it. Like Gatsby, Willie “beat[s] on, [like] boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Fighting the current of time, kayaking upstream at times, at other times drifting, giving in.

Willie’s love is indeed peculiar:

It would be a comfort just to know that you never doubt me

Even though I give you cause most every day.

He wants a love that can never be doubted. An unconditional love that will never falter or fade even if he forsakes it or runs away “most every day.” Who besides God can offer this kind of Agape love? And then he asks his lover:

Don't doubt my love if sometimes my mind should wander

To a suddenly remembered yesterday

Willie’s mind wanders from his present love to a more perfect, platonic ideal of love in the past. He assures his lover that

my mind could never stay too long away from you.

Love is all in the mind. “You were always on my mind.” Except when you weren’t. Except when I was in love with my own mind.

In 1965, Willie lays out the paradoxical problem of love that will occupy him for the next 45 years. We want love to be perfect and frozen like the lovers on Keats’ Grecian urn, but we don’t want it at the same time. We both desire and fear unconditional love (see C.S. Lewis on this).

Chet Atkins’ “Nashville Sound” has been much maligned, but this album seems tasteful and understated without syrupy strings or cheesy background choruses.

“Night Life” may be the slowest, sparest recording I have ever heard. Willie sings like Cormac McCarthy writes. I could do without the snaps in the background. The guitar work in the background is virtuosic.

“Funny How Time Slips Away” tops my list of Willie-penned songs, and this ranks as one of the top versions. I’ve been singing this song all day today, but I’ve been singing it like Dave Matthews on his live solo acoustic version I found on-line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzQYNT19hkw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7th5Tm5-64

“Healing Hands of Time” I need to quote in its entirety:

They're working while I'm missing you those healing hands of time

And soon they'll be dismissing you from this heart of mine

They'll lead me safely through the night and I'll follow as though blind

My future tightly clutched within those healing hands of time

They let me close my eyes just then those healing hands of time

And soon they'll let me sleep again those healing hands of time

So already I've reached mountain peaks and I've just begun to climb

I'll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time

Willie is in love with time. Love causes pain, but time heals (or does it?).

I prefer the version of “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” on Teatro to this one.

Talking to walls, windows, ceilings, and crickets. Some call it the pathetic fallacy, but it works for Willie in this song. Love does seem to imbue our inanimate surroundings, as if they were complicit, in on our heartbreak. The Japanese capture this in their courtly love poetry as well. Murasaki, in her Tale of Genji, would have loved Willie’s music. As would the Tang dynasty poets in China.

“Are You Sure” may be the most credible song on this album. “Please don’t let my tears persuade you. I had hoped I wouldn’t cry. But lately teardrops seem a part of me.” Neither Petrarch nor the courtliest of courtly lovers could cry more than this guy. He is a teardrop. He has taken so many opportunities to cry that he has become a human teardrop. Pure love, pure pain, pure anguish. Teardrops are so often distilled pain from the past, memory concentrated into physical form through pain.

“Could there somewhere be a lonely man like me?” Art and songs on the radio remind us that other people are as lonely as we are. This may be as good an explanation for the purpose and existence of art as any.

“It Should Be Easier Now,” but it isn’t. The healing hands of time don’t heal. This reminds me of the current New Yorker article about facing death, grieving, and mourning. The rivers of his tears have carved canyons in his heart. In her essay, “Good Grief,” Meghan O’Rourke surveys the literature on grief. She focuses on Elisabeth Kuber-Ross and her 1969 classic, On Death and Dying. Kuber-Ross outlines the five stages of grieving. You could read her book, or listen to Willie’s album, recorded four years earlier. The poets and artists are always there first, before the scientists. Freud said that everywhere he went, the poets had always been there first. Robert Burton got there in 1676 with his Anatomy of Melancholy, which I need to read. It probably covers the same ground as Willie’s oeuvre. The stages, according to Kuber-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Don’t all country songs fit into those five categories. Five different ways to deal with loss (in love or death).

“Too much to do all alone.” This album may be the most concentrated and consistent collection of songs focused purely on loneliness, heartache, time, memory, and love. Time contracts and expands with our emotions. Emotions like gravity bend time. A honky tonk e=mc squared.

Rich Kienzle writes a lot of the liner notes for Willie’s albums. I couldn’t find any of his music criticism or a book about Willie online. Still looking for a definitive critic of Willie’s music.

“Although I stand outside, my heart’s within your crowd.” Like Beethoven, Dante, Fitzgerald, and Petrarch, so many artists have been driven to create great art to compensate for the inability to obtain unobtainable, inaccessible women (Beatrice, Daisy/Zelda). Like the mechanical rabbit luring the greyhounds around the racetrack.

This album was completed in a mere three days. Rich Kienzle calls these songs “melancholy, anguished originals.” Jerry Reed and Ray Edenton shine on guitar, as does Pete Drake on pedal steel. Henry Strzelecki (bass) and Buddy Harman (drums) are steady and unobtrusive. “Night Life” was first recorded in 1959 (I guess as a demo or single), but this is Willie’s first LP. Atkins produced over 44 RCA sessions from ‘64 to ‘72 before they finally found any real success.

Moonlight Becomes You (1993)

Not sure why it isn’t as good as Stardust, but what album is? Jacques Barzun defines sentimentality as emotion that doesn’t lead to action, which would seem to describe Hamlet and Willie Nelson perfectly. “Sentimental Journey” could be the title of Willie’s musical career. It is, by definition, a journey in the mind. Like the lovers frozen in time on the Grecian Urn in Keats’ poem, in that ecstatic moment just before the kiss. This is where Willie’s music tries to take you and keep you for as long as you will listen. He seems to be suggesting, you can always go there in your mind, in his music. Songs can take you there.

Willie opens and closes this album with two of his own tunes, but the rest are jazz and pop standards. The harmonica is noticeably absent, but the piano makes this album distinctive. I prefer the version of “December Day” on Yesterday’s Wine. “Moonlight Becomes You” is pleasant and well executed, but I can’t put my finger on why it doesn’t move me the way Stardust does. The snare and bass provide a pleasing platform for the piano and Willie’s vocal. I’m struck again by how Willie transitions from a pop or jazz standard to a more traditional country song like “Afraid.” He seems unafraid of switching genres mid album using the same instruments. “A heart gets careless/When vows are made,” and the just time slips away. Vows of eternity disappear in a moment. We desire and fear eternity. Willie claims that if he had “The Heart of a Clown” he’d “laugh every time you made me blue” and “you wouldn’t see me cry the way you do.” So once again Willie is talking about crying, Petrarch style, but he has lived his life, hakuna matata, by laughing to avoid the blues. Later he claims you can’t play a sad song on a banjo, and it would seem equally true that you can’t sing a sad song if you are Willie Nelson. He is a human banjo. Incapable of being sad for long. There is never any danger that he will be “Permanently Lonely.” This takes something from the credibility of the song, as Chesterton maintains that a thing must be irrevocable, permanent, for it to be truly romantic, truly risky. Otherwise it is just sentimentality. Nothing is at stake but the collapsing of my platonic ideals, my dreams, my memories. Unless of course the memories are as real as reality, or realer. Some have claimed so (Lewis and others).

Again, this album is so smooth, competent, relaxing, and pleasant, but somehow not moving. I guess I just want more heartache, more fiddle. Johnny Gimble’s on this album, but not enough. This album “puts the blues on the run,” but that’s the problem. I like the blues, and I think Willie, like Keats, is also “half in love with easeful death.” Maybe this album succumbs too much to the temptation of sleep, of Lethe, the loss of memory, the opium-like numbing of pain. Ignorance is bliss, but there may be too much bliss on this album. “I’ll Keep On Loving You” is a perfect book end to songs like “The Grass is Blue.” One type of song asserts “I’m not sad you left me; I’m just fine” (and if you believe that, “I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona”). The other type asserts that “I will always love you,” as long as the sun keeps shining (which of course it will). How can you sing and mean both kinds of songs?

“I never thought my heart could be so yearnin’/ Why did I decide to roam?” That’s the $64,000 question. Yearnin’ and roamin’? Why do we do it? Why is the grass always greener? Road/home, road/home, road/home? Or home motel. Still is still moving and moving is stillness.

Willie writes and sings on the last track, “Never think evil thoughts of anyone/ It’s just as wrong to think as to say.” Very sermon-on-the-mount-like sentiments. The spirit over the letter of the law. Lusting in your heart as bad as adultery. And yet, the converse is not true, that therefore it is the thought that counts. It is in the negative, but not in the affirmative. That “You were always on my mind” means nothing if you never call or write. Words and thoughts without actions are meaningless. And yet there is something to this god-like perspective. The view that transcends time, which Willie and Proust and all great artists aspire to, and sometimes even seem to achieve briefly, when they are at the height of their art, they give us a glimpse of this all-encompassing Walt Whitman-esque prospect. I still like the version of “In God’s Eyes” on Yesterday’s Wine better, but I admire how Willie keeps returning to his old songs and using them in unique, structural ways to frame his new material. This recursiveness of his career keeps him forever young. Spiraling back through old material even as he propels forward to new material.

Take it to the Limit (1983)

Chips Moman and Willie clearly spent a lot of time together in the 1980s. The background on “No Love At All” is over the top. Horns, tambourines, and the kitchen sink. I have no idea what this is.

And then, this is so Willie, he transitions directly into a pure country tune. “Why Do I Have to Choose.” A horn weaving in and out of the guitar and harmonica makes this a bit trippy (or could that be my 8th grade son practicing clarinet in the basement; I can hear him squeaking through the floor and through the earphones of my I-Pod).

Why, Baby, why, did Willie record “Why Baby Why”? I don’t have any info on musicians (the problem with re-issues is they tell you next to nothing about the recordings).

The Big Chill organ on “We Had It All” gives this the nostalgic feel popular in the early 80s. “I can hear the wind blowing in my mind.” That’s Willie. Hearing winds in his mind. The wind of memory and love and time. “I know that we can never live those times again, so I let these dreams take me back to where we’ve been.” But we can live those times again in art, in song. Strings, harmonica, guitar, piano, and Willie’s vocals working together polyphonically to take us back in time.

Willie actually makes “Take It To The Limit” new for me. A song that has become so cliché and worn out can be reinvigorated by Willie’s unpredictable phrasing and timing.

“You can spend all your time makin’ love. You can spend all your love makin’ time.” Seems like Willie does both. He makes love out of time, makes love to time.

Ditto for “Homeward Bound.” I have to retract a statement I made in an earlier blog that no one should re-make Paul Simon tunes. I love this tune so much, but I love how Willie makes it new. And being homeward bound is like being in search of lost time. He wishes he was homeward bound, and yet he’s always on the road running away from home. Staying in his home motel. At home on the road yet longing for home? The Jerry Garcia type guitar riffs on this album transcend the cheaper pop trappings of the production.

“Blackjack County Chains” tells a great story.

“Till I Gain Control Again.” Can you gain control when you are taking it to the limit? Isn’t going home the opposite of taking it to the limit? And why do we have to choose between the road and home? Between going home or going to the outer limits?

“Old Friends” is not the Paul Simon song, but it fits the theme of this album, or the opposite of the theme. Old friends, like homes, provide limits, people and places to return to. They are, by definition, limiting.

“Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone).” Solid, but unremarkable.