Hill Country Christmas (1997)

This 1997 Christmas album opens with “El Nino,” a Willie-penned, flamenco-inflected Christmas tune. The guitar-work and lyrics are equally haunting:

He is born, there’s a reason now to carry on.
Toot your horns, write another song.
Love is here, seated at your table now,
Not living in a stable now,
Love is here.

So let us sing, let us sing.
Love is king, love is king.

The spare accompaniment of Bobbie on piano and Freddy Fletcher on drums succeeds until the horns and back-up vocals kick in. The lyrics have a very gritty, incarnational feel. Love is raw, dirty, present. And love is king. An interesting contrast to so many of Willie’s other songs about love. Willie sings “Away in a Manger” straight up with just guitar and piano. It will be neat to listen to this side-by-side with the version on Pretty Paper. “Joy to the World” is another unremarkable but pleasingly spare version (this one featuring just piano and vocals, no guitar). The vocals are as clear and front and center as you will ever hear on any Willie album. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” adds a little guitar, but generally fits the pattern of the previous two tracks. Listening to Christmas songs the week before Easter is perhaps a bit odd, but I kind of like it. It almost seems fresher when you listen to them out of season without all the other trappings of the season competing for your attention. On “Here Comes Santa Claus,” Willie sings along with an overdubbed track of Gene Autry. It’s a little hokey, but it is interesting to hear Willie’s voice side-by-side with one of his most important mentors. I don’t think this version of “Pretty Paper” holds up to the more famous version, but this one is worth owning. It has its own unique charms. This one has no piano, just solo acoustic. This almost takes you back to the demo sessions. Just Willie and his guitar and a mike. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” features guitar and piano. This version of “Silent Night” is pleasingly stark. Overall, this album is quite refreshingly under-produced. It’s just about as naked as you will get Willie these days. And as with Pretty Paper, Willie sings these songs like he means them. He seems to believe them. “Deck the Halls” is no exception. Willie doesn’t take many risks on these tunes. He’s not trying to sing behind the beat or meander in new and unexpected ways. This is a chance to hear Willie sing as straight up as he ever sings. “White Christmas” may be my favorite track on this album. Maybe it’s just because it’s one of my favorite Christmas songs, but Willie seems to hit this one with a little extra dose of sincerity. “El Nino” is probably my other favorite from this album. Willie ends this album with an instrumental reprise of the haunting opening tune. A nice touch that brings a pleasing sense of closure to the album. This one doesn’t quite make my untenable top ten, but it’s darn close. It gets honorable mention. I’m fond of it and will return to it with pleasure over the years, and not just at Christmas time.

Joy (2001)

Willie states in the liner notes to this 2001 album that his record company has “ten great CDs.” This set includes one song from each of those ten CDs, but he never tells us the names of those ten albums or even the name of the record company, unless it is FFE (Free Falls Entertainment) or Pedernales Records. Willie also states that this compilation features “a combination of jazz, pop, and early cowgirl, laced with country troubadour and rock.” I’m not sure what early cowgirl or country troubadour is, but I’m not surprised Willie is mixed up with them all. Only four tracks feature Willie.

“Sweet Georgia Brown” is an instrumental track that also appears on “Night and Day,” but I prefer the longer version on “Night and Day.” I have not heard the standard “It’s Magic” on any of Willie’s other albums, but Willie appears with Don Cherry on another album. Willie’s vocals are strong, but the syrupy strings don’t do much for me. “The Gypsy” may be the best Willie track on this album, and it also appears on “Night and Day” (but this version contains vocals). This is a “Stardust”-quality vocal performance and worth owning. The spare backing is refreshing. Just piano, light drums, bass, and guitar. The lyrics (written in 1945 by Billy Reid) sum up so many of Willie’s most prominent themes:

In a quaint caravan there's a lady they call the gypsy.

She can look in the future and drive away all your fears.

Everything will go right if you'll only believe the gypsy.

She could tell at a glance that my heart was so full of tears.

She looked in my hand and told me my lover was always true,

And yet in my heart I knew dear somebody else was kissing you.

But I'll go there again cause I want to believe the gypsy

That my lover is true and will come back to me someday.

First, you have the character of the gypsy, nomadic, wandering, always on the road, up to mischief, a troubadour, a bit of an outlaw. Of course Willie would relate to this figure. Of course, he is this figure. We also have the notion of wanting to believe love will last, wanting to believe that lovers don’t lie, wanting to believe that gypsies will not gyp you. It seems utterly foolish on its face, and yet there it is. Willie rejects the notion that you should be careful about your friends (he sings, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”). He rejects the notion that you should be cynical about love and gypsies. As Paul would say, “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” (1 Corinthians 6:7). Tears, of course, are here. But the image of a heart full of tears is an interesting way to put it. Willie manages to be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. He manages to be hopeful and hopeless simultaneously. Faithful and fatalistic. Candide and Martin. Who else can pull this off and still seem to make a kind of sense, a kind of synthesis, a kind of harmony, if you will. “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal,” written by Billy Joe Shaver, hasn’t showed up on any of the 80 or so Willie albums I have collected thus far, so it’s worth having on this compilation till I can track down the original. Sifting through Willie’s CDs is like mining for gold. You never know what you’ll find on an obscure compilation that can’t be found anywhere else. I wouldn’t put it past him to do this on purpose just to make it interesting for his fans. “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal” also combines that confessional, self-deprecating honesty with a gospel kind of optimism and hopefulness: “but I’m gonna be a diamond someday…I’m gonna be the cotton pickin’ rage of the age.” Does he really believe this? Does he really believe it? Or is his tongue in his cheek? You’re never quite sure with Willie.

Songs for Tsunami Relief (2005)

A student gave me a $50 Barnes and Noble gift certificate which I instantly used on-line to pre-order Willie’s latest album which comes out on his birthday this April 20th. I also ordered three other albums I don’t have yet. Do you think I have a Willie problem?

This is a recording of a benefit concert Willie hosted in 2005. Willie sings the last seven songs on the 18-song set. Willie opens with a solo version of “Living in the Promise Land.” He is starting to sing and play guitar like Jerry Garcia, with slow, trippy, meandering solos. Then he goes into a version of “Whiskey River” that won’t crack my top ten probably, but it’s worth owning. It sounds like Mickey Raphael is accompanying on harmonica, but of course the liner notes are no help. Truth be told, my favorite song on this album may be Natalie Maines’ version of “Travelin’ Soldier.” I’m a sucker for her haunting voice. I wish she had a duet with Willie. Then Willie moves into a brisk version of “Still is Still Moving to Me.” More and more Willie seems to be emphasizing his guitar work over his vocals. This version opens with his guitar and Mickey’s harmonica dueling it out. It’s great to hear a recent live version of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” and this one ranks up there as one of the more interesting, with a meandering guitar and a mournful, subdued harmonica. This version of “The Great Divide” starts out as slow as the Grateful Dead’s “China Doll.” Only Willie can play songs this slow, with a little rousing flamenco-inflected guitar run toward the end, to a packed audience. This track is noteworthy mostly for the guitar work and the harmonica. Then comes a ho-hum version of “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” but what version can compare to the Waylon and Willie live version? On my third listen, though, I notice that this version gets kind of funky toward the end, and Willie is clearly having fun playing around with this old standard. Then he invites Patty Griffin on stage to sing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” and after her first note my 13 year-old son says, “If I were Willie Nelson, I would never sing with someone like that because she sounds so much better than he does.” Of course, I disagree; and Willie clearly is a bigger draw and a bigger seller than Patty Griffin, but my son has a point. Willie is fearless about singing with vocalists who can, on some level, blow him vocally out of the water. And yet his voice somehow manages to remain more interesting, it has more character, more subtlety, more nuance, than more powerful and more finely calibrated voices. That’s why I’m blogging about him and not Patty.

Sweet Memories (1979)

In 1979, music critic Chet Flippo had this to say about Willie’s 1979 compilation album “Sweet Memories”:

There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight and Sweet Memories are blatant attempts to cash in on Willie Nelson's present-day popularity by offering generally inferior older material. Both albums are heavily overdubbed with sticky-sweet string sections that make the artist sound like a Hostess Twinkie drowning in maple syrup. United Artists, heir to much of Nelson's best early work on Liberty, and RCA should know better. Especially RCA, for whom the singer recorded a string of brilliant LPs. If that label wants to reissue something, it should re-release Country Music Concert/Live at Panther Hall, Nelson's great performance in Fort Worth.

How ironic that record companies that didn't know what to do with Nelson when they had him, now know even less about what to do with what they've got in the can. I don't understand why they can't at least call up an expert (such as the present writer) and ask: "Hey, we got all this stuff Willie Nelson cut for us a long time ago. Which is the good oranges and which is the bad oranges?

Chet obviously knows more about this than I do, so it appears that this album is merely a compilation of previously-released material. As such, I won’t comment much on the specific versions or songs, since I have covered (or will cover) them in specific blogs about the albums on which these songs were originally recorded. That said, I love the title, and I love the thematic collection. Even though it is only seven songs, and not worth buying really, it does highlight Willie’s Proustian obsession with memory and time. On Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” Willie sings, “All I’m taking is your time…Let the devil take tomorrow ‘cause tonight I need a friend. Yesterday is dead and gone and tomorrow’s out of sight.” This is another version of Willie’s own song “Three Days.” All of his music could be summed up as an attempt to “make it through the night,” to face our finite position in time, in short, our mortality. Chet slams this album for being “heavily over-dubbed with sticky-sweet string sections,” but it actually doesn’t bother me that much. I’d be curious to compare this version to the original releases to see how much they doctored up the tracks. I actually like how the vocals are brought out front and center. So far, I only have a copy of “Buddy” on “Who’ll Buy My Memories,” so this is just one of two versions I’ve heard. Not sure where the song originally appeared, but this is a solid version worth owning till I can find the original. It has Willie cry, cry, crying: “I cry at the least little thing, Buddy.” I already reviewed the song “Sweet Memories” when writing about “One Hell of a Ride,” but that track was taken from this compilation, so I’ll need to track down the original. I have also reviewed it from the “Last of the Breed” album. This is one of the definitive, totemic Willie songs that sums up his entire project. “Swept away from sadness” by “clinging to her memories.” The passage of time makes us sad, and yet we cling to memories to heal and assuage this sadness. Isn’t that a bit like drinking to get over a hangover? This version of “Don’t Wake Me When It’s Over” is funkier than any of the others I have. I have versions from “Milk Cow Blues,” “Who’ll Buy My Memories,” and “The Early Years.” This version ranks right up there with these others. Each version has its unique strengths, but this one is worth owning. I’ll need to track down the source, but it doesn’t appear to be from any of those I just listed. I actually love the drums and bass on this version. I could do without the strings, but the organ and the rhythm section add a little spunk. Again, the contrast here is that Willie wants to cling to memories for healing, and yet here he wants to sleep through the blues, hoping they’ll go away. One of his many methods of dealing with the ravages of time: sleep, drink, memory, and the road. I’ve already reviewed “Little Things,” which also appeared on the compilation “One Hell of a Ride,” but I’m not sure why the compilers of that anthology used this version instead of the original. I’m still at a loss to know where this recording originally appeared. Welcome to the maddening process of trying to track down Willie’s discography. I have versions of “Will You Remember” on “Who’ll Buy My Memories” and “The Ghost” (which I have not reviewed yet). This seems to be a different version. I could do without the strings, but the vocals are different enough to make this worth owning. Memory is clearly the focus here. Again, this collection is interesting because of the way it focuses on Willie’s obsession with time and memory. “Sweet is the song” that is about “love that has stood the test of time.” Now that you have heard all the songs of love, will you remember mine? How will my love stand up against those in Proust, Petrarch, and the Troubadours? “Gone are the times I walked with you and held your hand in mine.” He sits under a tree and “A cool summer breeze blew away the sands of time. And thought of days when you were near. Remembering when you were mine.” So are Willie’s songs about how love can stand the test of time or about how it can’t? I’m confused? It seems that the source of all these songs is love’s inability to stand the test of time, and yet our stubbornly naïve desire that it would.

Highwaymen: The Road Goes on Forever (1995)

This is the third and final collection by this country supergroup. I have the 10th anniversary edition (from 2005), which includes six demo-quality acoustic bonus tracks. Don Was produces this album, and Mickey Raphael is on harmonica. In the liner notes, Chet Flippo describes these four legends as the “Mount Rushmore of music” and as “beautifully battered and worn luggage.” In other words, lots of character, lots of hard living, lots of experience, lots of stories, lots of lessons.

The collection starts out with momma’s family values in tension with the devil and the outlaw nature. Steve Earle writes, “Momma said a pistol is the devil’s right hand.”

“Live Forever” could not be more poignant for these four. “I will always be around, just like the songs I leave behind me, I’m gonna live forever now.” Is art the only way to defeat time? Shakespeare thought so in his sonnets, but it flies in the face of “Funny How Time Slips Away.” It’s more in line with “Always Now” and “Moment of Forever.” Kevin Welch’s “Everyone Gets Crazy” contains the line “Time has taught me this for sure, Time is the only cure.” And yet, as I have written before, time is the blues; our mortality, our finiteness, our awareness of our limited time causes the blues. So how can time both cause and cure the blues? Does it heal itself? Does time transcend time? Time makes us crazy, drives us crazy. The interplay of craziness and time and art and love and mind and memory. They seem to be connected. It takes me all the way back to Willie’s early hit for Patsy Cline, “Crazy.” We are fools for love and time, which may be the same thing. “It is What it Is” is one of those standard fun, rowdy, outlaw tunes. “It is what it is, but it ain’t what it used to be.” The passage of time is evident here as well. All four men are looking back at their collective past together. A four-way remembrance of things past. An instance of collective memory distilled into art. Making sense of the past through music. Waylon seems as sincere as I’ve heard him on “I Do Believe.” Another example of how these crusty, grizzled exteriors have gentle, sensitive inner lives. “He keeps talking about tomorrow, while I keep struggling with today.” “The End of Understanding” is as good as Willie’s best early recordings. “Love and understanding go together.” Love and mind. “Ask too much of one and both will die. There must be an end to understanding, and I know someday I’ll reach the end of mine.” Can love be understood intellectually? Thinking about love as opposed to simply loving. Hmmm. God cannot be known, only loved. Then we have the wise, smooth, tender “True Love Travels a Gravel Road.” Not sure you can think too hard while bouncing down the gravel road. Such gravelly voices lend authenticity to this song. Johnny talks through “Death and Hell.” It’s a straight-up Johnny Cash song. “Waiting for a Long Time” features the ever-present theme of time. In “Here Comes That Rainbow Again” Kris tells a tender story of unconditional love and concludes, “Ain’t it just like a human.” “The Road Goes on Forever” is a fitting conclusion to this album, to their collaboration, and to their lives. It builds off the ideas in “Live Forever.” These crotchety, idiosyncratic singers miraculously blend together smoothly singing the choruses, as if their voices have mellowed with age. Not sure why “If He Came Back Again” didn’t make the original cut. Waylon sings with confidence and the others join with him enthusiastically on the chorus. Another gospel story. “He didn’t mean to be a rebel, the real ones never do.” “Would they even recognize him if he came back again.” In other words, those who claim to idolize Jesus wouldn’t even recognize him if he returned. Johnny’s acoustic demo of “Live Forever” is powerful. Just Johnny and his guitar and some coughing and foot tapping. He sure sounds good even in a demo. Kris cracks up at Waylon’s “I Ain’t Song” when Waylon claims “I ain’t old and I ain’t bitter, and I ain’t mad at anyone.” Waylon is clearly the bitter one in the bunch. His grudges probably killed him. Willie’s acoustic demo of “Pick Up the Tempo” is worth the price of the collection. The others join in toward the end informally. Again, it’s funny that these guys who sang in such singular ways that no one could sing harmony with them now manage to sing harmony for each other. Kris’s acoustic demo of “Closer to the Bone” has a gospel feel with Waylon on back up. Kris’s voice sounds better on this than on almost any song of his I’ve heard. Fittingly, the album ends with a 49 second version of Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again,” which these guys will never be again, with Johnny and Waylon having passed away.

Moment of Forever (2008)

Willie’s thinkin’ again. “I started thinking. Thinking about things that might have been.” The most Proustian of country singers. The most cerebral, internal, introspective, and wistful of Texas wordsmiths. “Over You Again” feels a bit like Teatro, but it ends with a trippy, Phishy, jam-band finale. This collection opens with a 5:37 track and closes with a 9:47, so you know something’s up. The title track, “Moment of Forever,” says it all. Kris Kristofferson knows Willie better than he knows himself. Wanting a moment to last forever, or wanting forever to happen all at once, to be condensed into an instant, that is the desire that haunts Willie’s oeuvre. As stark and spare and honest as Willie can be. Not sure what to make of “The Bob Song.” I admire the audacity, but I have no idea what it means or how to classify it. “You swing from your tree and I’ll swing from mine.” Live and let live. Tolerance and acceptance and openness is the word. “Louisiana” has convinced me that Willie should do an entire album of Randy Newman songs. They fit Willie like a glove. I think Willie can sing them better than Randy. He can talk them like Randy does, but he can do more with his voice than Randy can, so he can make them more interesting, more nuanced, more melancholy. Not sure why I don’t like Willie’s version of “Gravedigger” more than I do. I love this Dave Matthews song. I have three versions—one acoustic, one studio, one live. All three are better than this one. And Dave does a great “Funny How Time Slips Away” in concert. Not sure why Willie doesn’t make this work on this album. “Keep Me From Blowin’ Away” is a five for sure. I haven’t heard something this honest and heartfelt since Spirit. Could this be a sign of good things to come? I like this team of Kenny Chesney and Buddy Canon as producers. I hope Willie works with them again soon. Mickey Raphael is the only musician I recognize on this album. “When my mind remembered the days that just crumbled away.” Memory tries to keep the days from crumbling away. This 1971 Paul Craft song fits Willie in 2008. “Takin’ on Water” doesn’t do much for me, but it fits thematically with “Louisiana.” “I gotta get my heart to higher ground.” Love as natural disaster. “Always Now” and “Moment of Forever” may be the best song titles to capture Willie’s obsession with time. Perhaps in 2008 Willie has finally figured out how to stop time from slipping away. If you realize that always is now and now is always, then no time can ever slip away. “Nothing ever goes away/ Everything is here to stay/ And it’s always now.” “It’s more than just a memory.” Really? More than a memory? How can that be? In some ways this song undoes every song Willie ever wrote about time slipping away and memory trying to retrieve it. All this, it seems, was grasping for straws. If it’s always now, then time slipping away is just an illusion. Kenny Chesney wrote, “I’m Alive,” but it fits Willie perfectly. Just thankful to be alive. Thanks to fate, the stars, the present, today, now. In “When I Was Young and Grandma Wasn’t Old,” written by Buddy Cannon, “Memories take [Willie] back again”:

It makes me happy that I can still go back

My memories are so clear

Of how it used to be when I never dreamed

Of ever lookin’ back from here.

That’s pure Willie: dreamin’ of a future when he’ll be reminiscing about the past. Looking forward to look back. Preemptive nostalgia. Missing things before they’re gone. Deja vu in reverse.

“Worry B Gone” is written by a collection of Nashville’s finest: Gary Nicholson, Guy Clark, and Lee Roy Parnell. I used to see Gary Nicholson a good bit at the Bluebird. A regular for their famous “in the round” nights. I love Larry Paxton’s upright bass on this track. Trigger is in fine form as well. A good old fashioned drinking song. Never heard it called Worry B Gone, but the Whiskey River certainly runs through Willie’s repertoire. A way to numb the pain of the past. “Well I can’t suffer fools wastin’ my time.” And yet drinking is somehow making good use of time? I thought Willie wasn’t writing much anymore, but he clearly wrote a few in 2008. In “You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore,” he writes, “I used to fake a heart attack and fall down on the floor, but even I don’t think that’s funny anymore.” The thought of time slipping away like that isn’t funny anymore because you have so little left as it is. When you are young you have time to spare, to kill, and you can laugh as it slips away, but not when you’re 77. It ain’t no joke. And then he ends with Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.” I like the use of horns, a funky rhythm section, and a B-3 organ, but I think Dylan does this 1973 song better. The last 2 minutes of this track is a recording of Willie messing around with Trigger practicing “You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore” in the studio with the crew cracking up in the background.

Born for Trouble (1990)

This album makes my untenable top ten. I like every song. This may say more about me than Willie, but it is just an all-around solid, consistent country album. It may be the only country album Willie has recorded that doesn’t contain a single Willie-penned song. This album reminds me of a Randy Travis or George Strait album, and that’s because he uses all of the same big-name Nashville Songwriters (regulars at Nashville’s Bluebird Café): Troy Seals, Don Schlitz, Beth Nielson Chapman. I wonder if Willie was trying to cash in on the traditional country revival spearheaded by Travis and Strait.

“Born For Trouble” sounds like an outlaw album, and the picture of Willie on a Harley would seem to indicate that this is a rowdy, Waylon Jennings-styled release. And yet, with the exception of a few good-old boy tunes, this is one of Willie’s mellower collections.

“Ain’t Necessarily So” was written by Beth Nielson Chapman, but it may be the best one-song summary of Willie’s philosophy of life.

I laugh when I can

I live with the rest

I learn that holding on means letting go

I try to be a friend

To the person on my left

They say you just can't be too careful who you know

But that ain't necessarily so

In other words, Hakuna matata. Accept whatever comes your way with a smile. And don’t be particular about your friends. Accept outcasts and strangers. Willie never has been careful about who he knows. He remains open and accepting in all areas of his life: to musical genres, to bands, to styles, to fans. Open to a fault. Recklessly open.

And every time I follow what I'm feeling

I end up in the same place my heart would have me go

If there's one rule of life I trust

It's everything outside your gut

Ain't necessarily so

Follow your gut. It’s what Willie does with his vocal phrasing and with his life. For good or ill. Forsake pattern and predictability, and yet this improvised life leads him to long for order in his mind. What he forsakes in life he craves in memory.

“(I Don’t Have a Reason) To Go to California Anymore” sounds like a true story. Willie didn’t write it, but it sounds like it could be about the woman who acted in Honeysuckle Rose that Willie had a fling with and then she broke it off. Patoski talks about how Willie was devastated by this. He sings it like he means it.

“Ten with a Two” is a clever, word-play Nashville song. It fits into the “beer goggles” template for up-tempo country songs. “Last night I came in at 2 with a 10 but at 10 I woke up with a 2…I ain’t never gone to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve sure woke up with a few…I’ll bet you 10-1 you have too.” Willie cares, but he’s not careful with friends or women.

“The Piper Came Today” is what happens when you aren’t careful. Karma’s a bummer. “He was hell to pay, ‘cause he took my world away.” So far, Willie has two upbeat songs and too slower sad songs laced with steel. For some reason, I don’t mind the strings and the background singers on this album. Not sure why.

“You Decide” may strike some as too syrupy, but if so, it’s Vermont’s Finest 100% pure maple. It’s another Petrarchan ballad. “Don’t you worry if you see me cry.” I’ll just sit here loving you eternally and waiting. If your fickle ways come to an end, I’ll just be sitting here being true. Another Beth Nielson Chapman song that Willie could have written himself.

“Pieces of Life” brings the album to a 4/6 or 2/3 sad songs to 1/3 up-tempo ratio. It’s so typical of Willie to have a misleading album cover and title. “Always too much whiskey, and women that I never knew too well, all the things I’ve seen and done, most of which I’d be ashamed to tell.” Remembering is regretting things past. “I’m holding onto nothing, trying to forget the rest.” “Looking back on my life, to see if I can find the pieces.” “I found the bad parts, found all the sad parts, but the best part I just threw away…Oh, the pieces of my life…” Wow. This may be one of the most devastatingly sad songs in Willie’s repertoire. Memory is putting the puzzle of the past back together again. Reminds me of “Somebody Pick Up the Pieces” (from Teatro).

And then a driving Don Schlitz/Beth Nielson Chapman song that captures Willie’s philosophy better than he could capture it himself.

It’ll come to me just like a song,

And I’ll make it up as I go along

The push and pull, the give and take

Will even out for goodness sake

The sun might shine and the wind might blow

I can’t say ‘cause I don’t know

Whatever it is that’s meant to be

Sooner or later it’ll come to me

I’ve spent so many yesterdays worried about forever

But no amount of worry made a day go any better

And no amount of planning made a difference worth a dime

Whatever’s gonna happen’s gonna take its own sweet time

No need to comment on this. These lyrics sum up every song Willie has ever written. They sum up his life philosophy, for good or ill.

“This is How Without You Goes” slows it down again with sad steel sentiments. “Watching re-runs of old memory shows.” This brings the album to 5/8 sad songs. “Everything is tear clouds.” “Born for Trouble” bounces with a lighthearted look at the outlaw lifestyle. Sort of an easy-listening outlaw. Hank Cochran, Willie’s old pal, writes songs that fit Willie to a tee. “Little Things Mean A Lot” closes out the set with a sad song (making it 6/10). So it is a balanced album, with a slight tilt toward melancholy. “A line a day when you’re far away.” I can’t picture Willie really following this advice. He doesn’t seem like the type to call to let you know he arrived safely. For a man so obsessed with memory, he seems like the kind who would forget your anniversary. Or worse yet, might be fooling around with someone else on your anniversary. “Always and ever, for now and forever, little things mean a lot.” There’s that word “always” again. The strings might be a bit much on this one. Whether it is sunny or rainy, you can rely on your heart. Love transcends time. Or does it?

Funny coincidence. My I-tunes went straight from this last song to Sonny Rollins’ version of “Without a Song” on “The Bridge.” I just reviewed Willie’s album of the same name a few days ago. And the WSJ has a nice article today about western swing fiddler Johnny Gimble, who is 84.

Six Hours at Pedernales (1994)

“With special guest Curtis Potter” is a bit misleading. Though Willie opens this album singing “Nothing’s Changed, Nothing’s New,” most of these tracks seem to feature Curtis Potter front and center with Willie accompanying. This seems to be another of Willie’s generous outings where he records with an old friend as a kind of thank you. Who else does this? I’ve never heard of Curtis Potter, but I gather he’s a big name in Western Swing, and he certainly sounds like Ray Price. Some would consider his voice to be “better” than Willie’s in a conventional or technical way. And yet, it has none of the qualities that make a voice distinct or intriguing. This gets at the paradox that great artists seem to distinguish themselves by the subtle ways they sing poorly, behind the beat, off key, just enough to create a hiccup, a tension, a crack, and then flirt with perfection. In other words, true perfection, true greatness, seems to be more of a tenuous dance between perfection and imperfection. Pure perfection is too clean and antiseptic.

Buddy Emmons is on steel, but I don’t recognize the other musicians. The lyrics of this first song written by Ray Pennington capture many of Willie’s major themes. “That same old feeling keeps hangin’ on.” Like the local memory, feelings personified haunt Willie palpably. This song has that same wry tone as “Funny How Time Slips Away.” In Willie’s mind, and nowhere else, “Nothings Changed.” Memories embalm love and time.

Willie’s interpretation of “Are You Sure” (and even his attempt at singing harmony with Curtis) make this track worth a second listen. The strings cloy, and the drums create an inappropriately bouncy background for these melancholy songs. Ditto for Willie’s vocals on “The Party’s Over.” Now “Turn Me Loose and Let Me Swing” may be worth the price of this CD. It’s all Willie.

Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” still turns me on

Like Bob Wills and the “Rose of San Antone”

They both played great music,

They just called it different names

But if you put it all together

It would still come out the same.

Willie didn’t write it, but he may as well have. He loves jazz, and who can tell the difference when he sings blues, bluegrass, jazz, pop, country, swing, rock, or gospel?

Willie also takes the lead on Mel Holt’s “Once You’re Past the Blues.” He tells himself he “needed the blues.” He sings, “the blues help me to get over you.” Really? Blues as therapy, as twelve steps. “Sometimes the blues are necessary.” He’s not “recommending the blues,” but, of course, he is. He’s “just saying how they work for me.” In “It Won’t Be Easy,” he sings, “Would you reconsider if you knew I still loved you, if you knew it still mattered?” In other words, if you knew you were always on my mind, if you knew I always loved you in theory, would you love me in practice? Huh? “Stray Cats, Cowboys, and Girls of the Night” gets at the age-old Willie theme of looking for home on the road. “Nowhere is somewhere called home.” The title is the best part of the song. The fiddle is Johnny Gimble-esque. “The Best Worst Thing” is another clever title that the song doesn’t quite live up to. Cleverness isn’t enough. You need credibility.

This collection concludes with two Willie classics: “It Should Be Easier Now” and “My Own Peculiar Way.” Willie’s interpretations are worth checking out for comparison purposes. Willie essentially sings a duet with the steel on “It Should Be Easier Now,” and Curtis and Willie actually sing together better than almost anyone besides Shirley Nelson. Overall, not one of my favorite Willie albums, but worth comparing a few tracks. Willie makes some interesting vocal forays on some of these standards from his repertoire.

Without a Song (1983)

Another Booker T. Jones produced album, this time with Willie’s road band and Booker T. on piano and Julio Iglesias guesting on vocals on one track. This is no Stardust (but then what is?). Willie has to be kicking himself wondering what it was that made Stardust so special. Why couldn’t he easily recapture that sound on another album? “Without a song, the day would never end…the road would never bend…a man ain’t got a friend without a song.” Art, in this case music, alone helps us make it through life. It is our only faithful friend and solace. Why? Because it alone transcends time. It alone gives our lives an arc, a narrative shape, closure. There “Ain’t no love at all without a song.” You can’t even have love without art. Even love needs art to help it escape from the clutches of time.

“Once in a While” suggests the ever-present Willie theme of time. “If love still can remember, the spark may burn again. I know that I’ll be contented with yesterday’s memory knowing you think of me once in a while.” Memories of your love, even fleeting memories, stay me against the ravages of time. My only bulwark.

And then, of course, “Autumn Leaves.” Willie’s always singing of September. Who sings of spring leaves? “I miss you most of all…when autumn leaves start to fall.” Why does autumn stir up memories more than any other season? Why is it the most nostalgic season? Memory and death seem connected. Willie’s vocals are strong, but the London Symphony Orchestra is killing me. “I can’t tell you how happy I would be if I could speak my mind like others do.” It’s the oldest sentiment in the book. “You were always on my mind.” In other words, I loved you perfectly in theory. I loved you perfectly without words, and yet, who wants to be loved this way? What is love without words? Mickey Raphael isn’t listed in the liner notes, but it must be him on harmonica trying to save each song from the strings. “Harbor Lights” get Willie’s tears starting again. “You were on the ship and I was on the shore,” like Gatsby staring at the light on Daisy’s dock. Lights and leaves are just symbols of memory and nostalgia. Willie goes flamenco, as he is wont to do, with “Golden Earrings.” He hopes these magic golden earrings will make his gypsy love eternal. A gypsy is by definition always on the road, fleeting, evanescent, and yet Willie somehow longs for a paradoxically stay-at-home gypsy. A gypsy who will be true, who won’t gyp him the way time does.

“You’ll Never Know” how much Willie loves you because his love is all in his head. You’re always on his mind, but never on his tongue. Funny how writers and singers always sing and write about how they don’t have the words to express their love. They only have the words to express how they don’t have the words. So much time and so many words to say how we can’t find the words. If we could find the words, ironically, we’d have so much less to say. Our speechlessness leads to more speech. I’m actually speechless, for the first time, after listening to “To Each His Own.” Musically and lyrically, it leaves me unresponsive, without a song. “As Time Goes By” we grasp for it like fireflies for our jar, and yet it always slips away. Funny how time slips away, how it goes by. “You must remember this.” Even Julio can’t save this album. I just can’t “climb aboard a butterfly” with Willie on “A Dreamer’s Holiday.” The syrup is a bit too thick on this collection of standards. One of the definitions of sentimentality is emotion that is not warranted, not believable, not earned. I don’t feel like Willie means these songs the way he meant the songs on Stardust. I think those truly were his favorite songs, and he just can’t mean these songs as much as he meant those. “Time there’s plenty of,” but not enough to spend it on this album when Willie has dozens that deserve much more.

One Hell of a Ride (disc 4 of 4)

Disc four of this set opens with “Write Your Own Songs” from the Booker T. Jones-produced 1984 Music From Songwriter album. Willie tells “Mr. music executive” and “Mr. purified country” to “write [their] own song[s]” if they don’t like the ones he’s writing. He warns that listening to his songs “might make you dwell on your feelings a moment too long.” He basically tells the music executives that they can’t understand or appreciate or handle his music, so they should just sit back and get rich off the music without listening to it. It’s a slightly uncomfortable mix of humor and seriousness. He’s not joking, but it’s funny. And Mickey Raphael’s harmonica works its haunting magic in the spaces between the lines.

Neil Young is an interesting choice for a duet partner on the 1984 album Partners, and “Heart of Gold” is a daring choice for a remake, but as with Paul Simon’s music, I’m not sure Neil Young’s music can or should be re-done. This version seems too cheery and upbeat. Willie usually slows, pares, strips, and breaks down a song into its most basic elements when he redoes it, but in this case he tries to pretty it up. Not sure that’s possible or desirable with Neil Young’s music.

Then Willie sings a tune with Hank Snow from the 1984 album Brand on My Heart. Hank Snow actually sounds like Dylan on this track. I guess that means Hank Snow influenced Dylan. I’ll need to look into that. This is another chance to hear Willie singing side-by-side with one of his Western Swing mentors. The theme of “movin’ on” and hittin’ the road again obviously fits perfectly with Willie’s larger project.

The rest of the songs on this disc I have already reviewed (except for “Rainbow Connection,” which I will save for a separate blog on the album of the same name).

Lastly, the best part of this whole collection is how it begins with a 1954 version of “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song” and then ends with a 2007 version (though “sang” is changed to “sung”; is that intentional? If so, what’s the significance?). I much prefer the 2007 version, which must be a previously unreleased track that Willie recorded in his Pedernales studio, and it may be an indication of the kind of gems that await us when he starts releasing the stuff that is gathering dust in his home studio. Imagine a collection of tracks like this! This track alone is worth the price of the collection. “When I’ve sung my last Hank Williams song, I hope that someday she’ll forgive me and remember.” Forgiveness is a kind of re-writing of history, a kind of re-making and re-doing. A kind of re-incarnation. A kind of re-membering. Memory and redemption are so closely intertwined in Willie’s music. Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe memory is his redemption. Maybe art is memory and art redeems. As much as Willie has changed over these 53 years (from 1954 to 2007), he’s still singing the same songs, still singing the same way, still hitting the same themes. Still is still moving, and he both changes and stays the same simultaneously, like the seasons. This track is Willie at his very best musically, vocally, and emotionally. I can’t get it out of my head and don’t want to.

One Hell of a Ride (disc 3 of 4)

Disc three of this set opens with three songs from the 1978 Willie and Family Live album. This version of “Whiskey River” rivals the 1974 Texas Opry House version, but I’d have to do a head-to-head comparison to say for sure which is stronger. The same goes for “Stay a Little Longer.” “Till I Gain Control” also appears on the album Take it to the Limit, but this live version takes “Take it to the Limit” to the next level. Willie sings (what Rodney Crowell has written):

I have never gone so wrong as for tellin’ lies to you.

What you’ve seen is what I’ve been.

There is nothin’ that I can hide from you.

You see me better than I can.

Out on the road that lies before me now

There are some turns where I will spin.

I only hope that you will hold me now

Till I can gain control again.

In the next verse he refers to her love as like a lighthouse that will guide him home after being lost at sea. He admits that she sees him better than he sees himself, and yet, by admitting this, he shows that he has an even greater awareness of himself, even if it is a Buddhist awareness of his lack of awareness. The tension between motion and stillness, the road and home, lost and found is everywhere in Willie’s music. Here we see it in the spinning out of control on the road, and then the desire for love to hold him in its arms till he can gain control. In a musical sense, we have Willie’s unpredictable vocal lines spinning out of control and then finding their way back to the meter, the lighthouse, home. Sound and sense become one. This song also contains some of Mickey Raphael’s finest work on harmonica. A life and a style of music that always seem on the verge of being out of control, and yet the method in the madness always quietly surfacing to bring it back home to sanity.

Then follows two tracks from One for the Road, which I have already reviewed, and a song from Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson (also already reviewed). Greg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” from the 1979 album Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack The Electric Horseman is new to me. Willie sings, “I ain’t gonna let ‘em catch me, no I ain’t gonna let ‘em catch the midnight rider.” Always outrunning something or someone. “I’ve gone by the point of caring. Some old bed I’ll soon be sharing.” You hit the road because you don’t care about what’s behind you. If you cared, you’d stay. And yet we don’t really believe Willie. He does care. His songs are full of caring and sensitivity and crying. The paradox and riddle continues. Mickey’s harmonica is on fire as “This old road goes on forever.” How long is forever this time; how long is the road that goes on forever? Are the concepts of the road and time merging? The road is both time itself and an attempt to escape the limits of time. How can it be both? And yet it is.

Then follows tunes previously reviewed from San Antonio Rose, Honeysuckle Rose, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. “Old Friends,” from the 1982 album of the same name ( with Roger Taylor and Ray Price), lets you hear Willie’s voice side by side with two of his most important mentors. Then two previously reviewed tunes from Pancho and Lefty. The Jimmie Rodgers tune “In the Jailhouse Now” from the album of the same name (with Webb Pierce), also lets you hear Willie sing with one of his mentors. Again, you hear Willie’s Western Swing background. Then previously reviewed songs from Take it to the Limit, City of New Orleans, and a Julio Iglesias album. This disc ends with two tunes from Willie’s 1984 album with Faron Young, Funny How Time Slips Away. This version of “Three Days” is not one of my favorites, but it does give you another insight into one of Willie’s mentors. You can hear the voice that sang many of Willie’s early songs and made them hits. Faron has an interesting yodel-like hitch to his voice. Sort of a cross between Ray Price and Hank Williams or Jimmie Rodgers. Johnny Gimble steals the show on fiddle. Same goes for this version of “Touch Me.” Buddy Emmons’ steel steals the show on this one.

One Hell of a Ride (disc 2 of 4)

With the addition of this disc I have surpassed the 1,000-song mark and the 2-day mark on my nano. I can now drive to Maine and back (a 48-hour round trip) without repeating a song.

Willie sings on his 1971 RCA album The Willie Way, “Today might be the day that you walk away, but you left me a long, long time ago.” Again, it doesn’t matter what you do physically. What matters is when you left me on the inside. Willie is always giving precedence to internal actions. It’s all in the mind. Very Platonic. And yet, at other times, he revels in the nitty gritty of the concrete here and now. He seems to embody both Plato and Aristotle. The inductive and the deductive. “She’s Not For You,” from the album Willie Before His Time, was recorded in 1965, but all tracks on that album were previously released except for my favorite, “You Ought to Hear Me Cry.” I just received the 1977 LP in the mail, but will review it in its entirety in a future blog. For now, I can just say that this track fits right into Willie’s canon of crying. When he sings, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” he means you haven’t heard anyone cry like this. The crying outlaw. It’s so hard to reconcile all this crying with the John Wayne cowboy tough guy loner persona. And yet there it is. The problem with Willie Before His Time is that the liner notes of the LP don’t tell you where and when these tracks were previously released. I don’t recognize this spare version of “It Should Be Easier Now,” but it may be the best one I’ve heard to date. Just guitar, steel, and drums accompanying Willie’s vocal. Three tunes from Waylon and Willie, which I have already reviewed, follow. “Blackjack County Chain” may be the darkest tune in Willie’s repertoire. Too dark and harsh for the radio. And what can he possibly mean by the title of this album, Minstrel Man? I can see why that didn’t sell big. Sounds more like a Johnny Cash story song. “Johnny One Time” from the album Don’t You Ever Get Tired is another FHTSA (“Funny How Time Slips Away”) song. “Did he tell you that he’s known as Johnny One Time?” Of course not. He told you he’d love you forever. It’s what we all tell each other. And then time slips away. We are a race of Johnny One Times. Or so it would seem from listening to Willie’s early music. This fits with Willie’s obsession with time. We desire to transcend this limited, finite view, but we just can’t escape our mortal coils. And yet, he sings, “Bring Me Sunshine.” He alternates the darkest possible songs with the most Panglossian. He is both Martin and Candide. He is, somehow, Both Sides Now. “I Just Can’t Let You Go” appears to be a live version from 1965. Just guitar and drums with Willie’s voice. A song about strangling a woman so she can’t leave him. Ouch. “Death is a friend to you and I.” And yet the audience is hooting and hollering like it’s “Freebird.” That’s a bit disturbing. Makes you wonder how much people are listening to the lyrics, even though he enunciates them clearly and slowly. In this song, Willie is willing to kill to remember the past, and to maintain it in eternal perfection. Must we kill love to make it permanent? Must we murder to dissect? Is that the only way to make it last? Is what we really yearn for lovers frozen on a cold urn?

Then follows a string of songs from albums I’ve already reviewed. What makes this collection a good one, though, is that it provides one song from most major albums in chronological order, so you get a sense of Willie’s evolution as an artist, and then it gives you 2-3 songs from his greatest albums, like Stardust and Red Headed Stranger. This disc ends with “A Song for You” from Willie and Family Live in NV in 1978. Just guitar and vocals. A 5-star performance.

One Hell of a Ride (disc 1 of 4)

Great liner notes to this set as well. What’s even better, you get a picture of 92 of Willie’s albums. This isn’t all of them, but it gives you the best overview I’ve found to help you track down the obscure ones. In the liner notes, which also contain an interesting collection of pictures, Joe Nick Potoski describes Willie as “beyond prolific.” He is Whitman-esque in this way. He is beyond prolific, and yet he keeps recycling his own material, sort of like bio-diesel, which he is in to promoting these days. And like J.D. Salinger, who recently died, Willie may have a “couple thousand” unreleased tracks sitting around his Pedernales studio along with a couple hundred at his Luck studio. Can you imagine when that stuff starts being released how challenging my job will become?

The first two tracks make this collection worth the investment. “When I’ve Sung My Last Hillbilly Song” from 1954 may be Willie’s earliest recording. He starts out his career asking for forgiveness and asking to be remembered. Willie’s self-produced “No Place for Me” was recorded in Portland, OR in 1957, but his 1959 “Man with the Blues” establishes him as the bluest of the blue:

If you need some advice in being lonely

If you need a little help in feeling blue

If you need some advice on how to cry all night,

Come to me, I’m the man with the blues.

I’m the man with a hundred thousand heartaches,

And I’ve got most any color of the blues.

So if you need a little shove in fouling up in love

Come to me, I’m the man with the blues.

…I’m the man with a hundred thousand tear drops

And I’ve got a good selection old and new.

He’s got a hundred thousand tears and a hundred thousand heartaches at age 26, and he has every shade of the blues. He’s already fouled up in love more times by age 26 than most of us will do in a lifetime. He’s cried more and been lonelier in less time, in a more concentrated way, than most humans can withstand. A budding bodhisattva.

Many of the early tracks in this set can be found on the Complete Liberty Recordings, but these liner notes actually give more information about the musicians. Clearly Joe Allison does a better job of letting Willie do his thing than Chet Atkins does with RCA. But the B.J. Baker Group background singers are the bane of my existence. I notice that Glenn Campbell plays guitar on “Half a Man.” “One in a Row” is off the album “Make Way for Willie Nelson,” which I have not gotten my hands on yet. The background strings, etc. are hideous, but the lyric is powerful. “Why do I keep loving you after all the things you do?” If you tell me the truth once, that will make “one in a row.” We have such low standards for love. Where else is one in a row considered a hot streak? And yet, this is how cloudy our thinking is in love. I like Buddy Emmons’ steel on “The Party’s Over” from the album “The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs.” Is this a compilation album? Can’t tell. I’m skipping songs I’ve already blogged about when covering the original albums.

Now “Good Times” may be one of my favorites of Willie’s early RCA albums. Can’t find it even used or on LP on Amazon. The song “Good Times” has just Willie’s voice and guitar and bass with no background vocals or strings. Chet Atkins and Grady Martin help out on guitar. I must get my hands on this LP. Willie is classifying his memories already in 1968, at age 35. He collects and sorts and organizes his memories like an art collector. In essence, he collects time and stores it and uses it for his purposes. “Here I sit with a drink and a memory.” What else do you need? “Little Things” may be my favorite new find in Willie’s canon. He has Grady, Chet, Jimmy Day, and no listing for the harmonica player, but he’s good. Much of the same can be said of the song “Sweet Memories.” Chet works in some cheesy strings at the end, but the vocals, guitar work, and lyrics make up for this. Shirley co-wrote “Little Things.” He’s classifying memories here again. This may the sparest studio vocal I’ve heard yet. It’s as close to a demo as any of his other tracks. This could be on Crazy: The Demo Sessions. “Any Old Arms Won’t Do” is from “My Own Peculiar Way,” an early RCA album I haven’t found yet. The violin, trumpet, and angelic choir are too much, but the lyric gets at Willie’s yearning for true love. No substitute will do. In fact, as we shall see, no heart will ever do, even you. Even Daisy. Our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee, as Augustine wrote. Another album I realize I need to get is “Both Sides Now,” from 1969, the year I was born. “Everybody’s Talkin’,” produced by Felton Jarvis, is smooth as a fine pale ale. I prefer Jarvis to Atkins. Hints of Yesterday’s Wine here. “I won’t let you leave my love behind.” The beauty of remembrance of things past is that you can control love. Your lover can leave you physically, but they can’t leave your mind if you don’t let them. You hold them captive in your memories. The way the Grecian urn holds the lovers frozen in time in Keats’ ode, doubly frozen in the urn and the poem. The cryogenics of love. Willie seems to want to freeze the good times, the perfect loves, and re-heat them when it’s convenient like a TV dinner. Unfortunately, real love is never convenient like that.

“Pins and Needles in My Heart” almost sounds like James Taylor with a little more country edge. Not quite Jim Croce, but almost. Very 1969. “Once More with Feeling” was co-written with Shel Silverstein. Reminds me of “One in a Row.” “Don’t let this feeling go away.” I want to bottle it up and save it forever. “I just can’t tell me what to do.” I just can’t let it go and I can’t hold onto it forever. It’s a Catch-22. You either want to forget it forever or hold onto it forever, but you end up with a half-baked mess that is the worst of both worlds. Partial memories that leave room for loneliness. The response, of course, is “I gotta get drunk.” “There’s more old drunks than there are old doctors,” so Willie starts self-prescribing, and we know how that turns out, but marijuana turns out to be better for medicinal purposes. Jimmy Day works magic on the steel. “Laying My Burdens Down” gets 5 stars. Reminds me of “I Can Get Off on You.” A fun, funky, upbeat tune. I have the LP on vinyl now but haven’t listened to it yet. Great bass riff backing up a vocal that starts out quiet and then cranks it up, and the background vocals are appropriate on a gospel tune. I’d love to hear this instead of “I Saw the Light” as an encore in concert. Willie could do what James Taylor does with a full gospel choir in concert. Next comes three from the album Willie Nelson and Family, which I don’t have yet. It’s produced by Felton Jarvis, so it’s less produced than Atkins, but the flute grates. “What Can You Do To Me Now.” I’m invincible. Untouchable in my own mind. These tracks cry out to be un-produced as well because Willie’s vocals are so strong. “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus,” from the 1970 Willie Nelson and Family album, has a funky gospel feel similar to “Laying My Burdens Down.” Here, again, the chorus is appropriate. I wish Willie would do more of these rousing, funky gospel tunes in his concerts these days. In “I’m a Memory,” from the same album, Willie becomes what he has always been singing about: a memory. He is memory itself. Ironically, when you are forgotten by someone, when they leave you, you actually become something, a new thing—a memory! And that’s not such a bad fate. Willie sings, “I’m a tear that falls out of sight.” He has become a tear. Then follows four excellent tracks from Yesterday’s Wine, but I have written about them already, and they are best heard in the larger context of the original concept album. The last tune from this disc, “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture,” is from the 1971 Felton Jarvis produced RCA album of the same name. The harmonica figures prominently, and the setting is closer to Yesterday’s Wine than his earlier work.

The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More (part IV)

Just got my first Willie Nelson LPs in the mail: Before His Time and Laying My Burdens Down. Can’t wait to listen to them on my friend’s turntable. They appear to be in great condition. At age forty, I’m starting to feel nostalgic for platinum. Not for the sound, but for the physicality of the album covers. The smell. The whole experience of buying and owning records seemed somehow more concrete and relational. I love the ease and speed of downloading music, but I miss owning something physical that I can take off the shelf and hold and look at.

The angelic choir and cherubic strings mar track 16 (version 2 of “You Took My Happy Away”). The piano and Willie’s vocal remain interesting.

“I Hope So” was written by Shirley Nelson. “You say your heart will never break. Well, I hope so for your sake.” Willie is obsessed with the words never and always, as all finite creatures are. But the “hope so” seems half-hearted and insincere, or archly wry. “You say he’ll always be with you. I hope so, for your sake. But should he find someone new, what would you do?” If he does leave you, if time slips away, if forever doesn’t last too long this time, I think “You would act the same as I and cry, cry, cry.” Tears in the face of our finiteness. The strings and choir try to ruin this song, but the vocals overcome their syrupy surroundings and make this one of the best tracks in the collection.

“River Boy” is another old song Willie never does anymore. I’d love to see this in a dream set of old songs like “Roly Poly” and “Columbia Stockade Blues.” With the hip, retro, alt-newgrass movement, you’d think Willie could pull off an album of classic tunes like these. Just acoustic guitar and bass and a confident conversational vocal.

“At the Bottom” will make the roof leak like a George Jones weeper. The choir and strings are absent, but a horn seems out of place in the background (or is it a flute?). Vocals, bass, and piano get to shine for the most part. The familiar river that surrounds Willie is, of course, from his tears. But he’s “alright now” at the bottom. I’m reminded of the rivers of boiling and frozen tears in Dante’s Inferno. The sense of justice and karma they imply. Willie thinks his friends might give him a medal for being “quite a guy” and for “the way I didn’t cry.” All this pretending to be alright when you aren’t. If only singing would make it so. And yet, there is truth that going to the dogs, hitting rock bottom, has its own sort of comfort. It can’t get any worse. Reading last night about Willie’s life I learned that his mother would visit when he was seven years old and then leave him again and again. These, it seems, were the original tears that started the rivers that run through these songs.

In “Cold War with You,” he asks, “Why should love ever come to couples like you and me whose cold wars are never won and whose hearts just can’t be free?” Again, the point is, what’s the point? Why do we bother? Why do we keep trying in the face of so much evidence to the contrary? I love the slow tempo of this traditional honky-tonk tune. If we could just edit out the choir. The lyric, the vocal, the bass, the piano are all exquisite.

Ugh! The horns have to go. Willie claims there are no “Season’s of My Heart”; his love “will bloom eternally.” There we go again with the “always.” He admits that “by experience we should know” that when winter comes, spring is close behind. And yet, we stubbornly refuse to remember this fact. He sings, “As it is in nature’s plan, no season gets the upper hand. How I’ve tried to keep this fact in mind. The trees go bare, the cold wind blows, and by experience we should know…Your leaving will bring autumn sorrow, and my tears like withered leaves will fall, but spring could bring some glad tomorrow, and darling we could be happy after all.” Does he really think so? On one hand, he wants to transcend seasons and remain in a Garden of Eden of perpetual spring, and yet autumn and fall, September, October, and December, are the seasons and months he always sings about. It is the changing seasons that add spice to life, that “season” it with variety. So why does he keep claiming to want to transcend them? Seasons are the best example of how nature maintains order and predictability while still allowing for surprise and unpredictability. You know spring will always come eventually, but you never know exactly when or how. There is order within chaos and chaos within order, sort of like Willie’s voice, utterly unpredictable, and yet you know it will always find its way back to the meter and the beat eventually. Call it stochasticity if you must. Better yet, stoic stochasticity. Stoicism in the face of stochasticity.

It occurs to me that Willie may be the only artist who covers his own songs. He is somehow able to sing his own songs as if he has never seen them before, as if someone else had written them. He has this detachment, this objectivity. He writes his own standards and sings them new each morning.

“Blue Must Be the Color of the Blues” seems to be a tautology. Willie personifies the blues: water, sky, bird, paper. The mariachi horns in the background seem to be the only un-blue aspect of this song.

“Am I Blue?” anticipates Stardust. Take out the choir and leave the piano and drums in and you have a track worthy of Stardust. Less is always more with Willie. He needs drums, bass, guitar, piano, and his voice and nothing else (except harmonica, of course). And even these should stay in the background and simply fill the spaces he leaves between syllables. This song is perfect for Willie because of its questioning nature. He doesn’t even know how or why he’s blue, which makes it more winsome. The self-effacing uncertainty of the lyrics matches the seemingly uncertain vocals. I say seemingly because Willie, like Hamlet, knows exactly what he’s doing, and though he maintains “Seems, Madame, nay, it is. I know not seems.” He clearly makes his voice seem uncertain, but it is a carefully honed and practiced and disciplined art.

“There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight.” Really? “I’ll pretend that I’m free from sorrow. And I’ll make believe that wrong is right.” I’m not gonna cry and you can’t make me. This half-hearted, foolish optimism in the face of the cold hard reality of the fickleness of love makes up a good bit of Willie’s music.

That’s it. I’m calling on Mickey Raphael to un-produce these songs and release “Naked Liberty,” the complete liberty recordings sans back-up vocals and strings. Everything else can stay.

“Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)” builds on that “Just As I Am” theme. There’s no way to change, so why bother. A prodigal son kind of sentiment here, but is it hopeful for redemption, or resigned in a Buddhist or stoic way?

“Tomorrow Night” you’ll have another sweetheart. “I’m a fool to think that your indiscreet heart could ever learn to love with love that’s true. You love me in your mind but not your heart. And you’ll change your mind tomorrow night. Loving me was just a passing fancy.” Wow. Willie’s whole project is right there. It’s all in your mind, and yet here he seems to be saying that’s a bad thing. What about “You Were Always On My Mind”? Reminds me also of “Three Days.” Raises the question, why do we hope against hope that indiscreet hearts will be true (including our own)?

“I’ll Walk Alone” stands alone with its simple guitar, drums, piano, and vocals sans choir. The horn or flute intrudes, but I try to ignore it. “I’ll walk alone where once we wandered. Till you return, I’ll stay the same, dear. But while you’re gone, I’ll walk alone…By stars above I’ll swear to love you with all the love that I’ve ever known. No matter where you are out yonder, I’ll still be true.” Always, always, always, without change of heart or season. Perfect love. Yeah, right.

A lesser version of “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street.” Even if you won’t cross the street to say goodbye, I’ll walk alone and be true forevermore. Really? Why? Is this touching or foolish optimism? Candide? Pangloss?

This set concludes with three “overdubbed” versions of songs listed earlier on the disc. Not sure what the exact differences are, but these seem somewhat denuded and less potent.

A quick review of info from the excellent liner notes reveals that Willie picked cotton as a kid and his “desire to escape from manual labor” was a huge motivation for his music career. His grandfather was a blacksmith. He clearly got his 10,000 hours at a young age with both songwriting and performing. Started out playing Polkas and Western swing, so it all started with dancing. Also, the distinctions between genres, pop, jazz, and country, were not clear to folks where he grew up, so it made it easier for him to think of music outside of genres. This collection features multiple versions of the same songs with varying degrees of production. A more careful study and listen would offer a clear picture of the different treatments his songs received.

The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More (part III)

“There are no bad shows at the John T. Floore Country Store, and there’s no bad place in all the world to see Willie Nelson.”

So says John Spong in the March 2010 issue of Texas Monthly. He goes on to recommend that we hear Willie play at the old dance patio at Floore’s (which he still plays once a year). Willie started playing there in the sixties, and Spong still considers it Willie’s “home court.”

The first track on disc two, a second version of “How Long is Forever,” may be even slower than the first version. He pauses again for what feels like forever between “how long is forever” and “this time.” The angelic choir is toned down a bit but still grates. The delicate quietness of this track is Morton Feldman-esque.

Willie’s “lonely just won’t go away” and his “sorry gets bigger each day” on “You Took My Happy Away.” The strings and back-up vocals take my happy away. The vocals, steel, and piano deserve better support.

“Roly Poly” is new to me. It’s another old song I’d like to hear Willie do live today. From the album Here’s Willie Nelson, it’s fast and furious like “Stockade Blues.” The fiddle, piano, drums, and guitar keep this playful tune motoring along.

The next track is one of my least favorite versions of one of my most favorite songs, “Half a Man.” This could start an interesting list: least favorite versions of favorite songs. And then I could list favorite versions of least favorite songs. Strings and back-up vocals taint this otherwise strong vocal and piano performance.

“The Last Letter” is another FHTSA song (my new acronym for “Funny How Time Slips Away”). “I think of the past and of the promises that you have broken so free.” In song after song, Willie asks, “Why, oh why, can’t you (or I) be true?” In Graeme Thomson’s book Outlaw, he writes about Willie’s more recent song “It Always Will Be,” which now that I think about it is a fittingly ironic twist on “Always.” “Crazy” and “Always” could be the twin poles pulling the tides of the tension in Willie’s music. It is “crazy” to maintain that we will love each other “always,” and yet we keep wanting it. Like the lady who just wrote a book about her 47 affairs with men, but then she was devastated when her husband cheated on her. How can we be so hypocritical? It seems that what “always” will be is not love, but our inability to sustain love. That is the universal constant that will “always” be with us. Willie writes, “Sometimes I think that love/Is somewhere living on an island all alone.” Does he mean Love personified, like cupid, lives somewhere we can never reach him, like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock? Or does he mean true love can only be had in your own mind, in some hermetically sealed platonic ideal form, where it can’t be tainted by other people?

Willie is crying on the inside in “Second Fiddle.” This may be my favorite song on this disc. The fiddle shines appropriately. “Must I play second fiddle while you’re dancing with them?” “Is it me, Joe, or Jim?” In other words, “Do you love me? Why do you hurt me? How long will you love me? How long will you hurt me? How long will I put up with this? Why? How long till I’m over you? Why can’t you be true? Why do I still love you?” These are the questions Willie asks again and again and again.

Then he asks, “Could it be that I’m just imagining things?” Could it all be in his head? In this song, he’s even crying in his mind. He even has to imagine his tears. Does crying imaginary tears count? This stark, spare music is so interior. So much happens on the inside.

“Take My Word” picks up the tempo. This may be the most overproduced track in this set. Sounds like a movie score. Ironically, in love, you can never take anyone’s word. That’s the whole problem and puzzle. Time slips away with these words that must be taken with a grain of salt. “Take my word…with a grain of salt” is the implied sense.

In “Right or Wrong” Willie claims he’ll always love you, even though he knows you won’t be true and he’ll lose you. Again, a glutton for punishment in love. He “can’t forget” and he’ll “keep on dreamin’.” It’s all about memory and mind. Mind over matter in love. Still he prays that she’ll be true. I think George Straight covers this tune, or Randy Travis. Willie does some uncharacteristic yodeling toward the end of this track. “Right or Wrong” captures Willie’s Gatsby-like ideal of perfect love, which he pursues though he knows it doesn’t exist. Not only doe she know no Daisy can live up to it, he knows he can’t live up to it either. He casts no blame, but he paddles on against the current, toward the elusive, ever-receding green light.

“Feed it a Memory” may be the most concrete personification in Willie’s repertoire on this subject. “They said my heart wouldn’t have long to live.” So “I just feed it a memory to keep it alive. A taste of the love that we once knew.” Dare I say a “Madeline”? The taste of memory that tastes better than the real thing (richer, fuller, more alive)? We just keep feeding our mind memories the way we feed a jukebox quarters (see Wurlitzer Prize).

Musically, “Let Me Talk to You” may be the best song on the album. So slow with just steel and piano laying low. “Don’t live too fast. Forget the past.” As if Willie could. As if Willie really wanted to. Willie stretches time further on this song than any others in this set, in seeming opposition to his stated desire to forget the past. If you really wanted to forget the past, outrun it, leave it behind, why would you sing so slowly? Strings and back-up vocals are mercifully absent on this track.

Actually, I lied. “The Way You See Me” takes the prize. That same spare treatment with just fiddle, piano, and the faintest hint of drums. “Don’t tell my darlin’ that you saw me lookin’ the way you see me now.” “Tell her I’m happy alone.” Basically, lie for me. Fight lies with lies. Ironically, Willie seems to do better singing other people’s songs on these early tracks. His own songs need the treatment he gets on Red Headed Stranger, but he seems to be able to do other people’s songs okay in this format.

In “The Things I Might have Been,” Willie speculates about the ideal past and future. Another keeper from Here’s Willie Nelson, an album I must get my hands on. These tracks are as good as or better than any on Stardust.

This version of “Home Motel” is growing on me despite the cheesy strings. Willie somehow makes even the strings and the back-up singers swing on this one.

This version of “Opportunity to Cry” pales in comparison to the earlier demo version. It reminds me of strawberry-rhubarb pie. People like the strawberry because it cuts the overpowering tartness of the rhubarb, but if tartness is what you want, then the strawberry has to go. Or when people praise a Margarita because “you can’t taste the alcohol at all.” But this only holds true for bad Tequilla. If tartness or tequila is what you need, then you want to taste the full force of it without strawberry or mixer masking it. The strings are like a packaged Maragarita mixer on this song. I want to taste more Tequila and rhubarb.

The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More (part II)

Today I’ll tackle the second half of disc one of this set. That’s tracks 16-30. And first, I need to state that these are by far the best liner notes I have encountered in 60 or so albums. Incredible detail as to recording and release dates. In fact, the detail is almost overwhelming. Many of these songs come from an album called “Country Willie,” which I gather was released in 1975 but was made up of songs originally recorded in 1961. And this 1975 “Country Willie” should not be confused with “Country Favorites Willie Nelson Style” or “Country Willie His Own Songs.” What’s so confusing about all of this is that often Willie records something and then releases it after other works, so you think it is newer, when in fact it is older. It will obviously take me at least a year to untangle the rubato of his recording career. It makes perfect, sense, though, when you think about his views toward time. He records and releases material the way he holds and releases notes and beats. Completely idiosyncratically and unpredictably.

In track 16, “Country Willie,” he sings, “Every day I pray that you will not forget your country boy.” And asks, “Do you sometimes miss your country boy.” Again, he’s hoping to stay alive in her memory, alive in her mind. His “heart [is] so filled with love that it could die.” Can we die of too much love? Or is he talking about unrequited love, which is a kind of love that becomes its opposite. When you are full of love for someone who doesn’t love you back, you are actually full of an emptiness that weighs more than any other substance. You have too much not enough. Too much absence. You have your fill of emptiness. Once again, Willie plays Jay Gatz to some unnamed Daisy. The vocals are strong, and the piano and drums drive this lonesome song along.

On track 17, he sings, “Go away, can’t you see I’m crying…Let me cry alone…I feel better when you’re gone.” Willie knows he’d “be crazy if [he] took [her] back again,” but craziness and foolishness define his heart throughout his career. He’s a glutton for heartache, a loneliness junkie.

In track 18, “The Waiting Time,” he says he’ll wait “While [she] make[s] up [her] mind.” In fact, “[He’ll] wait forever more.” She decides about love in her mind, and he will outwait time. The battleground of time and mind. That’s Willie’s music in a nutshell. First, he describes a “hurting time” when “I hurt you so.” Then came the “parting time. I watched you go.” Then, she says, “Perhaps in time our love might still be.” So he waits, and writes, and sings. Might this be the source of all great art? Emptiness and loss? Out of emptiness, artists create form and beauty and meaning to compensate for the loss, to fill the void. Willie has more of a Hank William’s vocal style in this tune, and the drums and piano are less intrusive. The back-up vocals still grate.

Track 19 is another FHTSA song (“Funny How Time Slips Away”). “Once you said you’d crawl on hands and knees to be with me,” but now you won’t even cross the street to say goodbye. Funny how time slips away. Funny how fickle and shortsighted and naïve and foolish and hypocritical we are. Funny how we lack integrity. Not ha ha funny, but puzzling funny.

Add “There’s Gonna Be Love in My House Tonight” to Willie’s house songs. He personifies the shingles, which “snuggle closer to each other.” Love animates the inanimate world. Willie is a master of the pathetic fallacy. The piano shines, but the back-up vocals demean.

“Take My Word” picks up the tempo, but can’t outrun the lies lovers tell. Humans, especially lovers, seem incapable of telling the truth. And the question Willie asks again and again is why can’t you (or I) be true? Except in our mind. So much of love is about lies and deception and broken promises. We want too much.

Willie does something new in “There Goes a Man.” He actually feels sorry for the guy his lover left for him. Who does that? Willie realizes it could have been him, and it often has been him, and it will be him again. Only Willie, like Walt Whitman, is large enough to be in both shoes at the same time. He is able to win and lose the girl at the same time. He is able to feel both emotions simultaneously. Willie realizes that “the other other guy is me.” That could be the title for Willie’s biography: The Other Other Guy.

I’m liking “Columbus Stockade Blues” more and more, but track 23 is not my favorite version. I love the piano and guitar solos, and Shirley Collins is without a doubt the best duet partner for Willie. Who else can follow him? She’s better than Emmylou Harris on Teatro. She actually sings with him. No one else does that. They try to sing behind or in front of or next to Willie, but no one gets in the grove with him like Shirley.

“Chain of Love” reinforces the idea, ironically, that there is no lasting chain of love. Love is fleeting, ephemeral, in short, unchained.

In “Willingly,” the lovers know it’s wrong, but they do it any way, which contradicts the sentiment of “There Goes a Man.” In this song, they don’t care about the other guy. I give this 5 stars because it is so different from any other Willie song, and Willie and Shirley actually harmonize, which I’m not sure ever happens again in his career.

This second version of “Columbus Stockade Blues” leaves the first one in the dust. The fiddle is smokin’. So is the piano. It feels like Charlie Parker meets Charlie Pride. Bop meets bluegrass. I’d love to hear Willie do a modern version of this, but I don’t know if he can sing this fast anymore.

In “You Dream About Me,” the lovers close their eyes and are able to be together when they are miles apart. They look forward to the night so they can dream about each other. It’s almost better than actually being together. Making love in their minds. This is a theme Willie returns to again and again. Shirley, again, harmonizes like no other. Why didn’t they record more together? Is she still alive?

“Is This My Destiny?” may be the saddest Willie song yet. “At night I toss and wonder why I must live while others die. The grave would be escape for me, from this my destiny.” Like Buddha, he longs to escape this wheel of suffering. And the haunting steel and harmony actually seem appropriately somber on this one.

“Together” could be a theme song for Barney or a show tune for a cheesy musical, and yet I like it. The tinkling vibraphone is a bit much, but the vocal duet is so Bing Crosby beautiful that I have to give it at least 4 stars. Unlike anything Willie will ever do again.

This last version of “Columbus Stockade Blues” may be even funkier than version two. It’s a close call, but I’ll go with version two. Both are good, but I think version two is faster with more flaming fiddle and piano solos.

Tomorrow, I’ll tackle disc 2 in this set. I’ll say now, though, that you get more music for your money in this set than anywhere else. 30 songs per disc with great liner notes is hard to beat.

The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More

Pardon the aside, but…

An article by Byron Janis in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal states that “rubato” is a central element of Chopin’s music. The article says that rubato

“comes from the Italian word robare, to rob, but in music it means ‘give and take.’ If you steal a little time here, you’ve got to give it back. For example, in playing a melodic phrase, if you go forward in the first two bars, you must pull back in the next two so that the freedom you took does not break the rhythmical pulse.”

So it’s a way of stealing time, if you will. Chopin required the right hand to maintain a steady, classical feel, which allowed the right hand to “have its romance and play as freely as the left hand [would] allow.” Thus Chopin maintains the paradox of “disciplined freedom” in his music. Chopin used the Polish word “zal”—meaning “bittersweet melancholy”—to describe his music. Schumann described Chopin’s music as “cannons buried in flowers.” What a description! The author recommends Chopin’s Ballade in G-Minor and his Scherzo in C-sharp minor. Willie and Chopin might be kindred spirits with their melancholy rubato. Except that Chopin, like Keats, died young from TB. Like Willie, though, he invented, combined, and transformed musical genres.

Now back to the album of the day: disc 1 of The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings Plus More. I have already written extensively in previous blogs about the lyrics to many of these songs, so I will focus more on the style of these early recordings.

Willie opens with a bluesy 1959 version of “Night Life.” The understated backing of steel, piano, guitar, drums, and bass allows the vocals to stay front and center, though the musicians take turns filling all of Willie’s extended pauses with riffs of their own.

Willie follows this with another 1959 blues number: “Rainy Day Blues.” So the elder statesman of country music starts his career as a bluesman. And how common was it for country singers at this time to feature saxophones as prominently as he does in this track? Willie sounds more like Frank Sinatra or Ray Charles in this tune than Lefty Frizzell. And notice that he begins with “night” and “rain.” That melancholy blues sentiment will run through his music regardless of the genre or the band.

“Touch Me” from 1961 was a #7 country hit. “Touch me, so you’ll know how it feels when you lose.” So much of Willie’s music is about loss. Willie claims to be the “world’s bluest man.” “Someone who’s lost everything he can lose.” “Touch me, then you’ll know how you’d feel with the blues.” Is that why we listen to Willie? “Don’t forget me.” He has the blues, he’s lost everything, but he still wants to remain alive in her memory. Even being a figment in someone’s memory seems to mean something to Willie. It’s all about memories. What is most touching, the way we touch best, is in our minds, in our memories, according to Willie’s lyrics.

On track 4 Willie sings, “I want to be like I was before.” Don’t we all. We want to make time do our bidding. Willie pleads, “Don’t wake me till it’s over, when I won’t want you anymore.” He’s hoping to sleep through the blues. Hoping he can sleep “Till the blues get up and leave my bed.” Of course it won’t work, but still he sings. Some cheesy back-up vocals taint this track, but for the most part, these early Liberty recordings are much better than Chet Atkins’ Nashville Sound recordings that will follow (though not as good as the pre-Liberty demo sessions).

The back-up vocals kill me on this one. In general, though, these tracks from Willie’s first Liberty album, And Then I Wrote, are understated, spare, and closer to the real Willie than what follows. Notice Willie doesn’t have a regular set of back-up singers in his road band. It’s got to be so hard to sing back-up to such an unpredictable vocalist.

The back-up vocals kill this version of “Funny How Time Slips Away.” We need naked versions of all these songs, with the back-up vocals removed. The rest of the musicians are fine. The piano is especially tasteful in the spaces between words. I seem to be complaining, but I’d still love to get my hands on a copy of And Then I Wrote, which used on Amazon is running $100. I may need to look for vinyl. Or wait till someone has the sense to re-issue all of these early recordings in their complete original album format.

Again, the piano almost makes up for the back-up vocals on this version of “Crazy.” I’m noticing that Willie has a catch, a calculated country hiccup in his voice on some of these tracks. I haven’t heard that from him before or since. Maybe he outgrew it. Maybe it wasn’t him. But he tries it out at times on these recordings. The kind of vocal tricks George Jones does with his voice. Even at this early stage, Willie is stretching out the spaces between notes the way Clint Eastwood and Akira Kurisowa do with pauses in film.

Hunting for the lyrics to “The Part Where I Cry” on the internet, I find a video of Priscilla Ahn singing “Opportunity to Cry” live in Japan (or is it Seoul?). I prefer Willie’s version, but it is interesting to hear how she interprets his lyrics.

http://www.getalyric.com/mp3/lyrics/songs/willie_nelson-540/and_then_i_wrote-1750/the_part_where_i_cry-9915/

I have to quote these next lyrics in their entirety because this is another of Willie’s touchstone songs:

Life is a picture and I play the lead

But my biggest line was goodbye

Now my leading lady has walked out on me

And this is the part where I cry

I was great in the scene where she found someone new

You should have seen my look of surprise

And if you have just walked into the picture

This is the part where I cry

And after the picture is over

And it's judged for the part where she lied

The award of achievement that's given

Will be mine for the part where I cried

Of course, it is all about crying, but this song also has that Shakespearean notion that “all the world’s a stage,” and Willie is just playing a part, a tragic party. As with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, though, sometimes it is hard to tell whether Willie is a tragedian or a comedian. How should we take him? Does he know (or care)? How can we ever know? Do we laugh or cry? Sometimes, it seems, he deliberately misleads. He tells us to cry with his words, but the tone of his voice or the tempo of his band makes us laugh or dance. It’s as if he creates semantic spaces within his content and his tone the same way he does with his tempo, if that is even possible. This and “Wake When It’s Over” are my favorites so far on this disc. That wry sense of humor is so Willie. “You should have seen my look of surprise.” As if he were really acting. He’s trying to play it off. He tries to laugh, but we know the emotion was real. This tension between comedy and tragedy is everywhere in Willie’s music, on both the mundane and the cosmic level, in every particular incident and in the largest universal ideas. The question remains: can we take his tears seriously? Can we believe them? Or are they crocodile tears?

Lonely, lonely, lonely on “Mr. Record Man,” and yet the do-wop back-up vocals, the playful piano, and the sis-boom-ba drums make me want to two-step to his tears. Two-Stepping to My Tears could be the title of many of Willie’s songs.

On “Three Days” Willie yodels like Hank and Jimmie. Time→Memory/Mind→Tears, and the cycle of life starts over again like Groundhog Day. I’ll stop complaining about the back-up vocals, but how can I take these Buddhist sentiments seriously with this choir of angels in the background?

“One Step Beyond” is new to me. “I’m just one step before losing you, and I’m just one step ahead of the blues.” “It will hurt me so much to see you go…And though I still love you as before, I’m just one step beyond caring any more.” “Your surprised that I can feel this way.” Willie seems to singing from the point of view of the faithful, stand-by-your-man wife who has had enough and won’t stand for it any more. Willie’s a ventriloquist for loneliness; he can throw his voice into the mouth of either party, as he does later on Phases and Stages (one side is from the husband’s point of view; the other is from the wife’s). He claims he’s outrun the blues, but we don’t believe him. He isn’t safe in the past or the future. Neither gives true respite from the present, as much as we want them to. Gatsby and Marcel learn this the hard way.

Willie’s vocals are as good as they get on “Undo the Right.” If we could just remove the drums and back-up vocals. I don’t care, though, I’m giving this 5 stars for his vocals and the guitar work.

It just struck me that one of the reasons I like Willie’s music so much is that the vocals and the lyrics are always primary and clear. He articulates and enunciates so carefully and deliberately. Each note, each syllable gets its due (and then some). It reminds me of the Council of Trent and how the Catholic Church worried that the words of scripture were being lost in the homophony, the harmony, and the instrumental ornamentation. Willie never lets that happen. He treats his lyrics like scripture. The words always matter. I like that. So much of rock and pop is throwaway lyrics. No one knows what they’re saying and no one cares. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a mood and something to dance to. The lyrics are often laughable if read on their own. Willie’s stand up to further scrutiny, I believe.

“Darkness on the Face of the Earth” may be the most egregious example of devastatingly sad lyrics accompanied by a two-stepping choir of angels. Willie’s vocals save the day, but the cognitive dissonance in my head remains. How are we to make emotional sense of this?

“Where My House Lives” is another one of Willie’s personified house songs. It goes with “Home Motel, “Lonely Little Mansion,” and “On the Road.” It begs the question, though, how can a house live alone? Home, by definition, is the opposite of alone. Yet Willie’s house “holds too many memories since she’s gone.” But how can a house hold any memories until someone leaves? Memories can’t exist when you have the real thing. And yet Willie seems to struggle with which he values more: the memories or the people themselves.

“How long is forever…this time” may be the most brilliant blending of sound and sense I have yet to encounter in Willie’s music. It ranks up there with the best of Alexander Pope’s poetic pyro-technics. He pauses so long between “forever” and “this time” that the listener has to ask themselves, “How long can he possibly pause in a 2:28 song?” The answer is, an almost unbearably long time. Willie fits forever into 2:28. That’s hard to do. I think I’ll stop half-way through and finish tomorrow.

Crazy: The Demo Sessions (1994)

Well, my trip to DC with the Asheville School senior class derailed my blog, but it gave me time to read lengthy liner notes to this album and to The Early Years and One Hell of Ride (both of which had lengthy books included with the multiple CDs). I didn’t have time to get to the liner notes for the three-cd “The Ghost” set, but in the next few days I will digest and process these three sets of early recordings. So, in one sense, I took a week off from blogging, but I listened to Willie, read the liner notes, and took notes, which I will now begin to transcribe. I have also decided to spend one day on each CD (maybe two days for the 30-song cds in the Early Years set) from these early recordings sets. I want to do them justice.

The first set of songs on Crazy: The Demo Sessions are recorded solo with Willie’s voice and guitar. “Opportunity to Cry” makes my untenable top ten list of Willie recordings. Sounds like it was recorded in a closet, which it was. In 1961, Willie has established the theme of crying, and he will, from here on out, take every opportunity he can to cry. “Three Days” was released on my birthday, September 4th. These lyrics could be Buddhist scripture. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all contain sorrow, suffering, and tears. Time itself makes us blue. In fact, time is the blues, time is the fall. Willie yodels like Hank Williams, like Jimmie Rodgers, on this recording. The theme of time is prominent here. No matter how you look at time—past, present, future—it frustrates and beguiles. And yet, what frustrates us about time, its elusiveness, is what creates suspense, seduction. Without meter, there is no free verse, no syncopation, no swing. How can you swing if you have nothing to swing from? Time is a tease, a flirt, but we want to be teased and flirted with. Must listen to the 1989 KD Lang version of this song on her album Absolute Torch and Twang. In fact, I just previewed it on Amazon. I now remember listening to this album in college. I like Willie’s version better, but hers is worth checking out.

I love Jimmy Day’s bluesy steel on “Undo the Right.” Not sure what this song means. Is he saying that if you can’t apologize for what you’ve done wrong, then please erase my memory of the good times we had together? That is, undo all the good things you did so the good memories won’t haunt me (good memories can hurt worse than bad ones). I can hear Marcel saying this to Odette. Or David Wilcox. Why’d you have to do it so slowly, why’d you have to do it that way. Again, our desire to re-write history, 1984-style. Control memories.

Hank Cochran, on “What Do You Think of Her Now,” sings better harmony with Willie than almost anyone else I can think of. Why do we cheat? Why do we believe love will last forever? That people won’t change? Why do we believe lies? Why do we cheat and then get mad when someone cheats on us? What did we expect? I’m thinking of Travis’s “Reasons I Cheat.” This song gets at the theme of thinking in Willie’s songs. I could group his songs in these three categories: mind, time, and tears. Or, to make them all Ts, thinking, time, and tears.

The earliest known version of “I’ve Just Destroyed the World” I’m living in. I need to compare it to the one I love on Teatro. “Schools of love are taught by fate; we never learn till it’s too late.” These raw one-minute versions are so much better than the souped-up syrupy studio releases.

This version of “Permanently Lonely” ranks up there with “Opportunity to Cry,” and these may be the best versions of either song (perhaps because they are closest to the source, the conception of the emotion). “It’s time I learned that those who play with fire get burned.” But “schools of love are taught by fate” and “we never learn till it’s too late.” Don’t feel sorry for me. You’ll be sorry soon, you’ll see. “The future is not very pretty for your kind.” “We’ll be alright in a little while…but you’ll be permanently lonely.” Crying, time and crying about time. The liner notes say that this song showcases a chordal structure that is more complex than the traditional 3-chord song (whatever that means). But can you be permanently lonely any more than you can be permanently free, which would imply that you were never bound, which would mean you weren’t really free from anything, and to be free, you have to be free from something, you have to be running away from something. How can you be free at home? Both love and loneliness, by definition, cannot last forever, cannot be permanent, that’s the thing.

Willie is supposedly singing about a drunk at a bar, but he seems to be singing about himself in the third person. “Please don’t let my tears persuade you, I had hoped I wouldn’t cry, but lately teardrops seem to be a part of me.” Willie is a human teardrop, and yet Buddha never cries or gets the blues; it isn’t possible in Gupta literature either. Beatific tears. Paradoxes. Crying all the time about time.

“Darkness on the face of the Earth.” This may be Willie’s saddest album. He sounds like he means these sad songs. He has not reached his bodhisattva state of transcendence.

With track nine, “Things to Remember,” Willie shifts to a studio band. Like Proust, Willie keeps a list of things to remember and things to forget. As if we could choose. Memory has a mind of its own, and we often remember the things we don’t want to remember and forget the things we want to remember. “Why won’t my heart let me do it this way?” That may be the best question Willie ever asked or ever will ask? Why can’t we order and control time and compartmentalize love so it will be convenient, on our own terms, like surfing channels, yet we aren’t happy doing that either. There is never anything on, and even people like Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton with unlimited access to beautiful women end up with trashy strippers and interns. Total freedom is totally unsatisfying. We don’t want what we want.

“A moment isn’t very long.” Yet we stretch it like taffy in our mind and replay it and make it last forever, like TIVO. “I forgot to remember that you’d gone.” But memory is forever. Except when it isn’t. “Maybe for a moment I could forget you.”

This version of “Crazy” is good, but not my favorite. I think the one on Storytellers is better, and some of the live versions in the crazy/funny/nightlife medleys are better.

This earliest version of “Local Memory” describes the “hardest working memory” in show business. Willie is the James Brown of memory. Willie could give Proust a run for his memory’s money. “Crazy for cryin’.” We are crazy and foolish to love at all, to believe love will last, and yet we keep doing it. In fact, we are crazy to live at all, to sing, to make art, to strive for order and form and permanence in a fleeting and fallen and suffering and transient world, and yet we do. We don’t seek to transcend and escape this world of suffering, we just keep on keeping on. And that’s crazy. Like the notion of pathologizing depression and melancholy. Maybe it is a sane response to a crazy world. Maybe the world is crazy, not us, and we’d be crazy to be okay and normal in a crazy world. It’s a Catch-22. What’s even crazier, though, is if we wouldn’t want it any other way. Do we really want the world not to be crazy? Is the craziness and chaos and randomness of the world actually more meaningful and purposeful and ordered than one we might construct along other lines that seem more ideal and rational but would actually be much worse (ala Brave New World)? “Piles up blues against the door to make sure sleep will come no more…turns out happiness again, then let’s loneliness back in.” Willie again personifies memory and loneliness and time. He makes it concrete. This “fateful memory” controls him, though “I pretend I’m happy and never even frown.”

“I Gotta Get Drunk” is an attempt to pretend he’s happy, and it is a happy, bouncy tune, but can we believe this attempt to anesthetize the failure of the festival (Walker Percy) will really work. Running and drinking and sleeping don’t work. You can’t escape the local memory.

“Something to Think About.” The drums and the steel on this song stand out. “Consider the dawn.” “Here’s something to think about: I’ll still be thinking of you.” Like “Permanently Lonely,” but this time he’s saying I’ll always love you, no matter what you do. In that one he concluded that she’d be sorry. In both cases, though, the idea is that she’ll come to her senses in time. The irony, of course, is that Willie never comes to his. He never takes his own advice. He thinks about it, it gives him pause, but then he hits the road again. The liner notes refer to Willie’s “live-in-the-studio vocal.” Willie always sounds live even when he’s canned. One-take authenticity like Japanese zen calligraphers or Charlie Parker solos.

“I’m Still There” to “cry again another night.” The “Memories keep comin’.” “This stubborn heart of mine keeps comin’ back for more.” Willie’s heart is the Rocky Balboa of hearts. A glutton for abuse. Memory beats him up relentlessly, but he won’t go down. Is this masochistic? I’ll still be thinking of you (forever) and still is still moving, even if time slips away, even if your love won’t last forever, even if it’s crazy and I’m foolish. Willie is the ultimate fool for love. He lives to cry. He lives to “cry again another night.” Don’t we all.

Funny, I rank “Save Your Tears” up with “Permanently Lonely” and “Opportunity to Cry” because they have equally spare backgrounds. I clearly have a bias toward stark, spare, raw recordings. I guess I want pure, raw, distilled vocals. “Save Your Tears” isn’t listed on the liner notes or on the CD. Tears, tears, tears. Could be the saddest song in Willie’s oeuvre. Save your tears for those who are living, implying that he has died because she left, so no use crying for him. Ouch. You killed me, that’s all. No use crying. The understatement makes it even more over the top.

And then a bonus version of one of my favorite Willie songs, “Half a Man.” Could be the best version of this song. Steel, drum, piano, and bass compliment tastefully. I wish I had only half a heart, one eye, one arm, one leg so I would have less heartache, fewer tears. “You’ve made a man of me” becomes “the half a man that you’ve made of me.” The bonus version of “In Your Crowd” has great steel. “Though I stand outside, my heart’s within your crowd.” Jay Gatsby could be saying this about Daisy and Tom. And Willie has some of that new money, rural angst.

And now some notes from the liner notes. Notes on the liner notes. Liner notes notes. Footnotes within footnotes. “My demos were always better, I thought, than the records that came out,” Willie said.

These live, one-take studio tracks were found in 1994 on some tape that was just lying around. What a find! The liner notes writer describes Willie’s style as one part Sinatra, two parts Bob Wills, and three parts all Willie. Had no idea Sinatra was an influence, but it makes sense now. Along with Frizzell, Hank, Ernest Tubb, and Floyd. Willie grew up in the golden age of pop hits—1940s with Gershwin, Carmichael, and Mercer. He heard all the future standards before they were standards, when they were just normal current pop. They were in his musical DNA. Shotgun Willie was the first album to feature Willie’s standard road band. In 1954 he recorded “Lumberjack” and “No Place for Me” (need to find these). These were his first recordings. Sold them himself on the radio. “Crazy” is the most played song on juke boxes in history (patsy Cline’s version, of course). These demos give us a glimpse of Willie just before he hits Nashville and gets all gussied up with strings and back-up vocals and Chet Atkins’ Nashville sound. The Nashville Sound drowns out Willie’s soul. These 1961 versions are more like what emerges in 1975, 14 years later, on Red Headed Stranger. Willie never really changed; his producers and back ground changed. Steve Fishell writes the liner notes.

One last observation. Willie is Montaigne. Montaigne talks about his subject being himself, and himself naked, warts and all. And that’s what Willie’s songs give us. They hide nothing. Montaigne quotes Cicero in maintaining that “to philosophize is to learn to die.” He asserts that we must think about death all the time, face it daily, keep it ever before us. That “something to think about” is death, our finiteness, our limitedness, our inherent fallenness, our mortality, our distance from God. Are Willie’s songs not meditations on these ideas as well? Does Willie not also have the skeptical, binocular vision of Montaigne. And yet can Buddha be a skeptic? Can a skeptic smile beatifically? Aren’t skeptics inherently restless?