Partners (1986)

I read recently that Willie has averaged one album per year over the course of his 50+ year career, but it seems like he came out with ten a year in the late 1980’s. Some of these 1980’s releases should come with warning labels like those rap albums with red stickers proclaiming “Explicit Lyrics.” Willie’s would read: “warning, syrupy strings included.” This album features regulars Mickey Raphael and Bobby Emmons, but I just can’t get past the strings. Johnny Gimble saves a few tracks with his fiddle, and the curiosity and audacity of attempting Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” makes this album intriguing. Willie sings about “the night I promised you the moon,” promised you I’d love you forever. But he worries that “Now and then stars are known to fall, and I need to know that we’re still partners after all.” Funny to hear Willie looking for such reassurance of faithfulness. Funny how people make promises. Less funny how they break them. In “When I Dream” Willie laments that he has everything in the world, but when he dreams, he dreams of this woman. He has everything that money can buy, but not that perfectly true relationship. That remains the elusive dream that money cannot buy. He “can be the singer or the clown in every room…[he] can put [his] makeup on and drive the crowds insane…[he] can go to bed alone and never know her name.” But ultimately, it is unsatisfying, and yet his songs of dissatisfaction are satisfying in their way. “Hello, Love Goodbye” makes a third song I have never heard Willie sing before, which makes this album interesting, if nothing else, for the opportunity it gives you to hear Willie sing something different. Johnny Gimble’s fiddle adds some gravitas to this recording. Willie famously proclaims, “I won’t hurt and I won’t cry no more.” But the cosmic cowboy doth protest too much, me thinks. I’ve already reviewed Willie’s rendition of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” (I think as it appeared on the duet compilation “Half-Nelson”). Willie keeps searching for a heart of gold, a miner, if you will. A roving miner, always looking for new ore. Hard to dig deep, though, when you are always moving. This restless search for the Platonic ideal of love, through marriages and divorces. What are we to make of it. Is it admirable? He wants to live and give, but “these expressions that he wants to give” somehow keep him searching, prevent him from ever finding. But why? Willie tackles a traditional ballad in “Kathleen.” “The roses all have left your cheek. I’ve watched them fade away and die. Your voice is weak when’er you speak. And tears bedim your loving eyes…But I will take you home, Kathleen, to where you will feel no pain.” Does this mean he will bury her, or that he will offer her perfect love? This may be the sparest, starkest (not to mention the longest, at 5:18), most haunting tune on the album. Willie should do an album of Irish ballads. That would be something new (and old at the same time). And then Willie surprises with George Harrison’s “Something” in the way she moves me. These settings are just too sweet. I want just Willie, Trigger, Johnny Gimble, and Mickey Raphael. The song selection is actually quite interesting here, but the settings cloy. Too saccharine to do the songs (and Willie’s vocals) justice. I don’t quite believe he means them. I just got off the phone with my dad, so “So Much Like My Dad” has a special poignancy at this moment. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but the line of the son to his mother, asking her advice about how to keep his woman from leaving--“Tell me word for word what he said that always made you stay”—gave me the chills. It’s touching, but of course, the problem is it wasn’t words, but actions, that made her stay. Willie, of course, is obsessed with the Platonic form of love found in words and songs, when real love is far messier because it lives in the world of actions. Promises and good intentions and a winsome personality are not enough to sustain love. Willie wants the magic bullet, the easy way to “always.” This version of “My Own Peculiar Way” ranks up there with the best. In an album of syrupy pop standards he dusts off a Willie standard and goes spare. This may be the best track on the album. I can’t get enough of Johnny Gimble’s fiddle. “Remember Me” fits with Willie’s obsession with time and memory and his tradition of “you’ll be sorry when I’m gone” songs. His trove of “I’ll be hear waiting for you, ever true, ever faithful, just waiting in the wings when you come to your senses” songs. “I’ll never change.” Ha! Lightening will strike Willie if he ever sings this song live. More likely he will never do anything but change. The one constant is that he will keep moving. And still may be still moving to him, but the rest of the world gets left behind all the same, exiled from the inner sanctum of his Buddhist calm. “Home Away from Home” is just another way of saying “still is still moving.” Willie finds his home on the road. Home motel. Honky Tonk home. And yet no one really wants a honky tonk to be their home if they have tasted what a real home can be. Willie’s outfit on the cover of this album may be worth the price, though. I don’t even know how to describe it except to say that no one else could pull it off (or would want to). But it’s endearingly unique all the same.