The Great Divide (2002)

Well, my Untenable Top Ten just reached seventeen. I shouldn’t have liked this album with Kid Rock and cheesy pop tunes like “Don’t Fade Away.” But Willie works his magic on even the cheesiest tunes and makes me believe them. “Mendocino County Line” is the perfect duet song for Willie, just like “Beer For My Horses.” Thematically it fits his personality, and the producers leave room for him to work his voice in and out like an instrument, like a dobro or a mandolin solo. This album makes my list because it consistently surprises. “Won’t Catch Me Cryin’ Over You.” Yeah, right. Willie is always taking every opportunity to cry over everyone, except when he’s insisting you won’t catch him crying over them. So he’s either crying or talking about how he won’t cry. The cheesy back-up vocals have to go, but there is so much else right with this album that I can forgive that. “Pardon me if I love you endlessly.” And yet, it’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Always promising and simultaneously denying that love can or will last forever.

So I have missed several days. My first missed days of this project. I have been listening to The Great Divide each day, but life just got too busy to blog. I think I can make up time (a very Willie thing to do) by listening to these monster collections of his early stuff during my trip to DC. With multiple CDs and 30 tracks per CD, I think some of these discs deserve more than one day. The liner notes are books, too, so it will take time to read and digest. That reminds me that the liner notes were missing from this used CD (I guess I shouldn’t by used). So I don’t have good info on the songs and musicians for this album.

It may be the quirkiest set of duets and genres yet (and that’s saying something). It has some of the flamenco quirkiness of Teatro, the pop treatment of his classic pop albums,

“You asked me if I’d leave

And I said never

And that’s still right.”

How long is forever this time? Still is still moving and promising love will last forever is still crazy as it ever was. Still right in what way? In your mind? In theory? In memory?

“This face is all I have, worn and lived in.” “Worn and lived in through the tides of time.” “I’ll never look like you, cool and…” And yet Willie is cool. “These tears.” The lines and wisdom of age and time, worn like canyons by rivers of tears, pain, suffering. The strings and horns and rousing chorus and electric guitar are a bit much, but the vocals and the honesty of this song may fit Willie better than any of the almost 900 songs I have listened to thus far. The trippy vocals with the drum machine R & B slow jam beat on “Don’t Fade Away” works, even though it shouldn’t. I love the ambition and the courage of trying something this sappy and cliché. And Willie transcends the genre and makes it work. How the heck does a Harmonica get into this song? Is that allowed? A harmonica in a slow jam? A steel in an R & B tune? For that matter, who let Willie into this gospel inflected couples skate ballad? Willie adds authenticity to easy listening, makes it uneasy somehow. He adds an edge to any genre he enters. He roughs it up, scuffs it up. I could do without the Cyndi Lauper re-make of “Time After Time.” This jazz vocalist does this tune in a more interesting way, but her name escapes me (Lucinda, Vanessa?). “Recollection Phoenix” works, too, with the harmonica. Recollecting, memory, time, love. Heck, “Time After Time.” Of course Willie would re-do that. Every song he ever wrote could be called that. “What do you do with the sands of time?” “But I can’t hold back the sands of time.” “What do you do with a memory that just hangs around and just stares at me? I can tear that frame off that wall. But it won’t erase the things I saw.” “Night and day, you remain.” The stubbornness of memories. They won’t fade or go away. Like the strains of steel and harmonica. “What do you do with old regrets? There’s a box full underneath the bed. Just close enough not to forget.” “What do you do after goodbye?” You think about it. You make love to your old memories. They are more real that way. The remains of the day. The remains of time. Its death, and yet, what remains is alive in a way, in song, in art, like the ashes, the remains, in Keats’ urn. Remains are both the dead body and that which lives on. Death and life rolled into one substance. Is that Christ? Is the cross where the death of time and death itself occurs? Donne says death, you will die. “You remain.” Some of these tunes are Willie’s most authentic, most apt, most believable.