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.
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