A Horse Called Music (1989)

This album features two Beth Nielson Chapman-penned songs. The big hit is obviously her “There’s Nothing I Can Do About it Now.” I reviewed that song on my blog about The Essential Willie Nelson collection. It also appears on the 2006 Live From Austin Texas. Amazing that out of 85 albums I own so far, I only have two versions of this song. Here’s another song written by someone else which sounds like it could be autobiographical for Willie’s life. It combines Willie’s twin obsessions with the road and with time. “The highway’s come full circle to a place I scarce recall.” I could do without the strings (I always can), but Willie’s vocals are clear, nuanced, and credible. He seems to believe this song. Willie has his family band along with some additional studio help. The line “The highway never ends” could be a motto for Willie’s life. The speaker in this song takes a walk down memory lane and feels the full weight of nostalgia and regret. Right up Willie’s alley. “I Never Cared for You” is one of only three Willie-penned tunes on this album. This one has a flamenco tinge, and it would be interesting to compare this version to the two other versions I have (on Teatro and Me and Paul). Of the three, I much prefer the version on Teatro. I’m struck by the contrast between “You Were Always on My Mind” and “I Never Cared for You.” Which is it? How can both be true? How can we ever believe either? He tells both lies to himself so often. The strings in Skip Ewing’s “If I Were a Painting” are just too much to bear. But the lyrics resonate. They transcend their syrupy setting. “Don’t paint the tears, just let me remember me without you in my eyes.” “It’s only the frame that holds me together, or else I’d be falling apart.” “If I were a painting I wouldn’t feel, and you wouldn’t be breaking my heart.” Again, the themes of memory and lost love and wanting art to somehow transcend both. [The desire to be a stoic, a Buddhist, who doesn’t let feelings, desires, get to him.] It is only the frame, the limit, the structure, the meter, that holds Willie together, and yet he’s always hitting the road, the highway, and breaking meter, singing behind the beat, so he can fall apart beautifully outside the frame, the family, home. His art is the record of that beautiful failure to hold it all together. This confirms my theory that people only have the energy to “hold it all together” in life or art, not both. There isn’t enough time to hold both together. Both require so much time and care and maintenance. It seems you have to sacrifice one for the other. “Spirit” is another song that anticipates the albums Teatro and Spirit. The strings cloy, but Willie’s vocals stay front and center. It’s interesting that this late in his career Willie is still allowing producers to add syrupy strings to his tracks. The lonely speaker of this lyric “rides the horizon” like so many outcasts and outlaws in Willie’s songs. I swear I have heard and reviewed “There You Are” on one of the 85 albums I own, but I can’t find it in a previous blog or in my ITUNES. Maybe I just know it from the radio. I had just started listening to country radio right around 1989, so I may have it ingrained in my mind from then. Some might find this to be a cheesy pop tune, but I’m a sucker for this. It reminds me of “You Were Always on My Mind.” As always, I could do without the strings, but the steel guitar and Willie’s vocals are as good as they get. “Your memory is the only thing that hasn’t changed.” Willie returns to his tried and true formula. “I close my eyes and there you are…here I go back into those memories, where you are still in love with me.” If this isn’t Proust, I don’t know what is. Or Gatsby. The desire to control the fickleness and fleetingness of time and love by closing one’s eyes and using memory and art to freeze perfect love in the Grecian Urn of our minds. “Mr. Record Man” is another example of Willie re-doing older material on new albums. The lonely man in this lyric (and Mickey’s weeping harmonica) follows nicely after the previous song. Willie shows such thoughtfulness in his choice and sequence of songs. This gives his albums a wonderfully recursive feel. He’s always circling back through time, through styles, through songs, through mentors, through influences, through producers. Just like nature and waves and seasons. Always the same and yet always new. I love Beth Nielson Chapman, and her second song on this album is as good as the first. This is the first time I’ve heard Willie sing “If My World Didn’t Have You.” “It all has a balance like sunshine and rain. You share with me the blues and the breaks.” Willie couldn’t make it without her, and yet he’s leaving her all the time. What he means is, I need the idea of you, the memory, to keep me going. I need Daisy or Odette. A real person won’t do. No real person could sustain me. In “A Horse Called Music,” Willie sings, “I guess it’s all better that we just let it slide.” Hakuna matata. Let it be. And yet he rides away with a “tear in his eye.” Another crying cowboy. There’s a John Wayne, Lone Ranger theme to this album. Willie’s spare vocals at the end of the song are as good as he gets, and his voice is still young and strong in 1989. This is my first listen to Willie’s “Is the Better Part Over.” It opens like a movie score with strings galore. Then it cuts to solo acoustic. What a song to end an album with. “After thinking it over, wouldn’t you rather have the ending nice and clean, where love remains in all the closing scenes?” “Why hang around for an ending that’s laden with sorrow? We’ve both been around, we’ve both seen that movie before. And as much as I love you, I can’t love while fearing tomorrow. If the better part’s over, why should we try anymore?” “Are we down to not quite saying what we mean?” Willie hates singing on the beat, he bristles at restrictions and laws and family ties. And yet he likes form and structure and closure when it comes to endings. Again, why can’t we freeze life at the better parts, skip the annoying commercials, fast forward, TIVO the great love scenes. Wouldn’t it be nice? And yet we wouldn’t be human. Think what we’d lose? There’s a pathetic quitting, giving up, avoiding hardship element to songs like this. Is this the price of Buddhism and stoicism? It’s fine if you’re the stoic, but God help the stoic’s wife or child. Willie seems to what love with no strings, with no risk, and yet that’s no love at all. That’s like gambling without betting real money? No risk of losing money, but no chance of winning big either. Nothing ventured nothing gained. This album is very close to making my Untenable Top Ten, but I think it just barely falls short. It’s honorable mention. I will revisit it often with pleasure and may change my mind with further listenings. There are certainly some gems here you won’t find anywhere else.