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.